Public Service Broadcasting: BBC Centenary

Baroness D'Souza Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness D'Souza (CB)]

My Lords, public service broadcasting works in the UK within a wide framework of duties and responsibilities. These include strict rules on content, range, outreach, implementation and funding. The BBC is also bound by the royal charter, which sets out its objectives, mission and purposes. While we have a free broadcast media, it is monitored and regulated by Ofcom.

The House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s 2021 report The Future of Public Service Broadcasting identified three core principles within public service broadcasting: universality of access, accuracy and impartiality, and freedom from government interference or political pressure. In a subsequent report in 2021, the same committee considered that the Communications Act 2003 had been overtaken by huge changes in online digital broadcasting and should no longer be considered fit for purpose. There is a dilemma: how best to amend legislation which pre-dates the rise of streaming platforms and is therefore outdated, and how new funding models might enable relevant and accessible public service broadcasting to compete effectively with the giant online platforms that remain as yet largely unregulated.

The overall consensus is that new primary legislation is now required to replace the 2003 Act, if only to keep pace with broader industry and economic trends and hundreds of other competing channels and online services. However, all the existing safeguards must be retained and perhaps even strengthened. A media Bill, announced in the Queen’s Speech in May 2022 and foreshadowed in the Government’s White Paper, is likely to encompass the core principles of public service broadcasting—to be renamed public service media—through new regulatory powers to enforce codes for on-demand videos and stricter rules on potentially harmful material. When the Bill arrives, I am sure it will be much debated.

Meanwhile, the BBC is the only major provider that relies entirely on the annual licence fee, which makes it uniquely vulnerable to political pressure. As we have heard, the BBC licence fee is currently frozen and remains under review, but it is 30% lower in real terms than it was a decade ago. The BBC has found savings approaching £1 billion over the past five years, but it will need to reduce its budget further, by approximately £300 million, before the end of this decade. However, reorganising and recreating models that satisfactorily relay public service broadcasting on both linear and online services will be very expensive.

While acknowledging the fall in listener and viewer numbers in the past five years, the BBC remains a key public service broadcasting provider around the world and the BBC director-general has announced plans to deal with competition and reduced budgets, staff and broadcasting hours while maintaining its crucial public service broadcasting role. These plans, which anticipate the closure of the BBC News channel and BBC World News, the latter funded by subscription and advertising, in favour of a rolling news service, will be fiercely resisted—not least because the new service will be a commercial venture and potentially therefore precluded from licence fee funding.

Colleagues in this Chamber have spoken, and no doubt will speak, with warmth and affection about the BBC World Service and its immense soft power. This is not, I would say, sentimentality; it is a hard, factual appreciation of the gem we have. I remember being extremely moved many years ago in Khartoum when that city simply went silent in order to listen to the 1 pm news, and not much has changed; I think that still happens the world over. In more recent times, the figures for listeners have shot up during world crises such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The reasons for this are obvious but worth restating: in an environment of disinformation, misinformation, half-truths and fantasy, the BBC is trusted.

The world’s most respected broadcaster and one of the UK’s key democratic institutions faces a bleak future in the absence of realistic funding. If public service broadcasting is to be given the importance to our democracy and to our culture that it deserves, together with the cost of maintaining linear broadcasting and expanding online on-demand services, it is vital that the Government provide sufficient funds. It is astonishing to me that the Government would even think of limiting or undermining such a powerful channel of UK influence. Instead, they should be ensuring its long-term security, to enable the BBC, including the World Service, to streamline its public service broadcasting for future decades.