BBC and Public Service Broadcasting

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the Labour Party for securing this debate and the noble Lord, Lord Young, for the ringing conclusion to his introduction.

In a world of floods of dodgy or fake information, where commercial imperatives push broadcasters and publishers, driven by the profit motive, to even further extremes, where the nation needs reliable sources of information that bring together common understandings of the condition of itself, we need public service broadcasting, particularly the BBC. As the Green Party’s long-term vision for the UK’s future puts it, we need

“a shared space for all citizens”

in which

“information and education are given equal precedence to entertainment.”

When there is a massive, pressing issue of coronavirus or flooding, the BBC should be there, providing immediate, authoritative, often local information that serves its communities and the national interest. When the topic is contentious and contested, immigration or economics, it should provide thoughtful, accessible information able to support informed, careful debate.

As many noble Lords have said, visible pressure is put daily on the BBC by the right-wing commercial media, which has a clear interest in knocking down a competitor, and by the right-wing politicians who support it. The Green Party has many criticisms of the BBC’s approach but, rather than using that as an argument for allowing decline, let us make it an argument for improvement. The principle of a public sector broadcaster is sound and must be defended. We have heard many noble Lords doing that already today, but there is a problem with the approach that many are taking. Defence of the BBC has been equated with defending the licence fee, and that means defending the undefendable, the already damaged and the outdated.

Why is the licence fee undefendable? It is now officially classified as a tax, and it operates as a deeply regressive, flat poll tax, one that falls at exactly the same level on the poorest bedsit in Wigan and the largest mansion in Chelsea. It has ludicrous anomalies, so that, depending on the tenancy agreement, one five-bedroom house in multiple occupancy can pay £154.50, while its identical neighbour can pay £772.50. It will now also fall on the over-75s who are not in receipt of pension tax credit. This is a situation for which the Government should be squarely blamed, not the BBC. We know that many pensioners who are eligible for the credit—about 1.3 million households—do not claim it. They will be forced to pay what they cannot afford.

Why is the licence fee damaged? It is politically damaged. Non-payment can result in individuals being sent to jail. Certainly, that is rare, because the courts try to avoid it, but some individuals are jailed and a much larger number live in fear of jail as a result—and that for non-payment of a sum that many of them simply cannot afford. I think that is impossible for those concerned about the vulnerable to defend.

Finally, the licence fee is outdated. As the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, said, the whole media landscape is changing. Almost half of UK households now subscribe to a subscription video-on-demand service—Netflix, Amazon TV or similar—and the very idea of the TV as a box in the corner or a screen on the wall that collects signals is going fast. By the time the current BBC charter ends, in December 2027, we will certainly be much further down this road. This is not the way forward. We have to maintain funding for the BBC, but instead of the poll-tax funding model, we need a secure, hypothecated slice of general taxation for the BBC in the future, perhaps established by the mechanism of a funding commission, as your Lordships’ Select Committee recommended.