Media Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I offer Green support for Amendment 9, which I think has already been very powerfully argued for. I also note the degree of lobbying, from the Citizens’ PSM Forum, already referred to, but also a number of other groups and individuals who have contacted me about this, indicating that they regard this as terribly important.

I will focus on science, because I think that science broadcasting, in terms of socially valued public service genres, really deserves to be stressed. This picks up points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, on the first group, in the context of our climate emergency and all the other exceeding of planetary boundaries threats that we face. I am speaking in the context where today’s Guardian reports that a survey of IPCC scientists notes that the majority view is that we are heading towards 2.5 degrees of global heating. I remain an optimist and I do not necessarily agree with that—it is a question of social innovation and change—but what is clearly crucial is that the public sector broadcasters provide the scientific information and context that the public need to understand the debates and the issues.

I declare my position here as a science graduate from 1987. Much of what I was taught in my science degree I now know to be utterly out of date. One thing that may not apply to the other aspects of this—certainly to the first point here—is that science changes with lightning speed. Most of what I was taught in soil science I can now regard only as absolute junk. Much of what I was taught in genetics has been utterly overturned. If we are to have a public who are informed about these really crucial issues, science programming can be difficult, controversial and very expensive but it is crucial that there is a remit in the Bill that we need this from our public sector broadcasters.

Personally, I try to keep up to date with a whole range of podcasts. I can recommend to noble Lords “Big Biology” or the New Books Network “Systems and Cybernetics” channel, but they are not necessarily terribly accessible and it is really important that we have public sector broadcasters providing the content that informs the public on scientific issues.

[Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury (LD)]

My Lords, I too have added my name to Amendment 9. As the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser, said, a clear definition of the genres, rather than the vague “appropriate”, is necessary to ensure commissioning from the PSBs across a full range of programmes and proper oversight from Ofcom. As my noble friend Lord Foster mentioned, the Minister said earlier that the Bill has not removed Section 358 of the Communications Act, which requires Ofcom to collect information on principal genres, but it does not define what these genres are, so we return to the essential fact that, if not specified, Ofcom will not be required to monitor this crucial content in quantitative terms.

Specifying genres provides guarantees for a future we cannot predict. It does not take a lot of imagination to envisage the slippery slope. With the genres gone, there are two likely consequences. First, the commercial PSBs will seek to diminish their commitment and will lobby accordingly, exactly as ITV did with regional current affairs programmes. Secondly, Ofcom will have less discretion to hold them to account if it is under no obligation to monitor individual genres.

I return to the pre-legislative DCMS Committee report and to what the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, said so forcefully, that removing the requirement on commercial PSBs to provide specific genres for UK children’s content

“led to significant reductions in the production of original children’s TV, and we are concerned that the draft Media Bill’s removal of the specific reference to other genres will lead to similar reductions in content, particularly in the less commercially successful areas”.

That is from the committee’s report, but we all agree on it, I think.

I have one rather off-the-wall question, having listened to the very interesting debate about language: can we please find another word instead of “genre”? Maybe there is a Welsh, Gaelic or Cornish word that we could use instead.

News Broadcasting: Regulation

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury

Thursday 14th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, and to sincerely thank him for the work that he does in attempting to provide some clarity and oversight, which is very obviously and urgently needed, coming from a civil society perspective. To reflect on the noble Lord’s speech, the rate of change and the difficulty of regulation highlights the need for us to have education on media literacy and critical thinking. The public need to have the tools; young people going through our education system need to look at something and see where it is coming from and understand it from a critical perspective. It is important that we stress that.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord McNally, for securing this debate on such an important subject. I declare my position as a former newspaper editor with the Guardian Weekly; I also worked for the Times, the Independent and the Telegraph. I just want to mention that, unfortunately, I was not able to take part in the Second Reading of the Media Bill, but I plan to take part in the further stages. To respond to the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, I have also taken part in Times Radio’s “Political Frenemies”, along with the noble Lord, Randall of Uxbridge, and the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter. That is the kind of case where you can get politicians talking with a neutral adjudicator in the middle, which is very different to politicians talking to each other. I mention to the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, that there are more than two parties around if he wants to invite more parties on to his show.

[Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury (LD)]

I am a third party.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

Okay—the noble Baroness is a third party.

In preparing for today’s topic of debate, I looked back at a press release that I put out in 2012—a dozen years ago now—in immediate response to the Leveson report. Boy, there has been a lot of water under the bridge in our media since then. I said then that I welcomed what Leveson offered—most of it has not subsequently been delivered—and I criticised the report for its lack of tackling the issue of media ownership. We do not have the kind of plurality that we need—the kind of issues I addressed yesterday around overseas ownership, and in particular the ownership of the Telegraph. An issue there is whether and how mergers and acquisitions are referred, and that has not been dealt with.

I also want to come back to the rather fraught point of the potential for Leveson 2. My understanding is that in December, the Observer reported that Sir Keir Starmer was not intending to revive the second stage of the Leveson inquiry into press standards should he form the next Government—it was abandoned by the Conservative Party in 2018—nor would Labour oppose the plans to weaken the press regulation regime in the Media Bill. It is worth noting that under previous leaders, Labour was in favour of reviving the Leveson process. In May 2018, the former party leader, Ed Miliband, said that axing the second stage was “contemptible” and

“a matter of honour, of a promise we made”—[Official Report, Commons, 9/5/2018; col. 724.]

to the victims of phone hacking. I know that a lot of things have happened, and a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. However, that scandal is still very much alive and present, as we saw recently in a court case.

It was suggested to me that this debate would be all about GB News; I will just take a minute on that. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that civil society campaigns, taking a stand, doing politics, HOPE not hate saying it thought that what GB News is doing was unacceptable and that brands might not want to be associated with it, are all part of the right of a free society for people to campaign and call for boycotts—that is another issue that we are tackling the Government on in another Bill. However, there are some serious questions that the Government must provide guidance to Ofcom on. Will Ofcom allow senior party officials to present election programmes as long as they are not candidates? Can a channel host party loyalists from only one side who deliver nightly polemics and try to direct the results of election campaigns? As a professional journalist myself, I can see that GB News has taken a pattern where, in the daytime it tends to be relatively straight and have ex-BBC presenters, but in the evening, when it is likely to have more impact, there is a very different tone. Therefore, when we are thinking about balance, surely Ofcom needs to look at the impact as well as just the content that is spread over 24 hours.