BBC World Service and British Council

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Thursday 10th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, whether the BBC World Service can fulfil its role is dependent on where it is broadcast. The BBC charter states that it should deliver news to,

“audiences with the least access to high quality impartial news”.

Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel and Aung San Suu Kyi are just a few of the notable modern heroes who testify to the importance of impartiality and accuracy of the BBC World Service when information is scarce. However, at a time when promoting British values is a role for our schools, the role of the BBC World Service in that task should not be underestimated. There are more than 2 million listeners here in the UK, but when I checked the annunciator in my office this morning I noticed that the World Service is not broadcast through our channels here. Perhaps that is something that we may look at remedying in the light of today’s debate.

I join the noble Lord, Lord Williams, in congratulating the BBC today. In light of the military coup in Thailand and its effect on free information, today marks the start of a digital news stream in Thai and English. I also commend the BBC for finding funds at such short notice for that service. The UK’s contribution to aid in Syria for the refugees is a stunning £600 million. Has DfID made sure that the many people residing in refugee camps who have access to television and radio have access to the BBC World Service? That is not conditionality, it is merely common sense.

Two vital countries, North Korea and South Korea, enjoy no radio broadcasts in either English or Korean by the BBC World Service. South Korea, a G20 country, the 15th largest economy in the world, with bilateral trade with the UK of £500 million a year, has no broadcast. Surely BBC broadcasts to that peninsula, promoting our interests and values, would increase that.

North Korea has a Cold War information embargo and is ranked 178th out of 179 countries for freedom of access to information. Why, then, is the BBC World Service not there? The BBC cites two main reasons. First, do North Korean people have a means to listen? That is, of course, hard to establish in a closed country but a 2010 survey of defectors found that 27% listened to foreign radio before escaping. Surely there were similar issues during the Cold War when the BBC broadcast. Of course, the Chinese might jam the signal to their 2 million ethnic Korean population, and perhaps only a small percentage of the North Korean population would be reached. However, the BBC funds minute services: in the Uzbek language to 400,000 listeners, and in Tamil to an audience of 200,000. The second reason given is that it would cost about £1 million to launch the service. However, surely the option of funding this from top-up advertising, as happens in Berlin, could be considered. The radio service would cover Seoul, which is a huge market, and advertising on the Korean-language website would surely be an avenue to explore.

The BBC is innovating technologically at break-neck speed, but is there such innovation around funding? Could it not even attempt to crowd-fund this? Perhaps more conventionally, can my noble friend the Minister outline whether DfID funding could be made available to fund such a service?

The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on North Korea by Justice Michael Kirby claimed that the practices of the North Korean Government were so appalling that they conjured up,

“images of the Holocaust and the great suffering of the Jewish people and other minority groups in Nazi Germany”.

Yet despite these violent barriers that prevent ordinary North Koreans from receiving information from the outside world, many still do. I grew up during the deep recession of the 1980s, and we saw the importance then of broadcasting to closed, mainly communist, countries. If the North Korean people are brave enough to try and listen, we should broadcast.