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has been equated with defending the licence fee, and that means defending the undefendable, the already damaged and the outdated.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.

Cairncross Review

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for securing this debate. I guess I could say that I have fought in both camps. Until 2012, I was editor of the Guardian Weekly, in some ways a very traditional media publication, but I also hand-coded my first website in 1999, so I have always been on both sides.

I want to focus on a couple of points that other noble Lords have not covered in the short time available. I welcome particularly the Government’s commitment in their response to a White Paper on media literacy by the summer. I know that many government schedules are very pressed at the moment, so I hope the Minister can reassure us that that will be stuck to. The review says that media literacy programmes have often focused on young people. Will this strategy cover people of all ages and not just young people? The Cairncross report said that the institute for public interest news—I share the regret expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, that the Government have dismissed that as a possibility —should be doing the work on adult media literacy, so where are we going to do it if not through that mechanism? I spend a lot of time in schools, universities and colleges, and young people are considerably more media literate than many of their elders. They are very aware of politics. The young climate strikers and the young trade union activists I meet are very politically engaged—a huge argument for votes at 16—and they can certainly teach many of us a thing or two about media literacy. Some of them were teaching me the other day about TikTok.

Media ownership reform comes up a number of times in the report, but, so far as I could find, it is not mentioned in the government response. The Media Reform Coalition in 2014 described this as the “elephant in the room”, and the Cairncross report engages with it in a number of places. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, referred to the local media concentration, but in national media we have three companies controlling at least 70% of the national print market, with Rupert Murdoch’s News UK holding a third of the entire market share. These are deeply concerning issues for our democracy and will continue to be so. A quarter of local government areas are not served by a local newspaper, while 35% are covered by a single local news outlet. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, referred to the Yorkshire Evening Post and its recent achievement; I would refer also to its sister paper, the Yorkshire Post, which did enormous work in uncovering the great scandal of the felling of street trees in Sheffield. Without that, we might have lost even more trees and might still be in a disastrous situation. Media is crucial to our democracy, as is local media.