King’s Speech

Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie (Con)]

It is 65 years since the first Baroness and the first life Peer, Baroness Elliot of Harwood, made her maiden speech in this House—also on the fourth day of the debate on the gracious Speech. It is therefore a very auspicious day and my pleasure to congratulate the newest noble Baroness, Lady Owen, on her excellent maiden speech. Like those pioneering Baronesses 65 years ago, as my noble friend has just illustrated, she brings a fresh voice, new skills and energy that those who remember thinking dial-up internet and the Spice Girls were cutting edge are going to need as we navigate the future for science, technology, media and culture. I am sure that my noble friend has many years ahead of her in this House, but whether, like Baroness Elliot of Harwood, she votes against the Government and becomes known as “the despair of the Whips”, only time will tell. We welcome those who work hard and who show commitment. My noble friend does both. I therefore warmly welcome her today and look forward to her contributions in the years ahead.

In looking to the future, one of the challenges that we need to address with some urgency is the future of broadcasting, as we move into a multimedia, fragmented landscape. I too was delighted to find the long-awaited Media Bill in the gracious Speech. I draw your Lordships’ attention to my interests as set out in the register, for I am a board member of Creative Scotland, which includes Screen Scotland in its remit. Screen Scotland is a Scottish success story. In 2021, the screen sector contributed £627 million to Scotland’s economy and provided over 10,000 jobs. Scotland’s annual level of inward investment for film and high-end tv production doubled between 2012 and 2019, with nearly three times the growth rate experienced by the UK as a whole. But we have a finely balanced infrastructure in Scotland that has invested in development, production and skills. While the Media Bill is warmly welcomed, there are a few points that I want to highlight today that I trust we will clarify as the legislation progresses and which are important to get right so that we ensure that this finely balanced and successful industry continues to grow and thrive.

Our public sector broadcasters have successful homes in Scotland—Channel 4 and the BBC both operate from Glasgow, alongside the strongly performing STV, the main channel of which reaches 80% of Scots every month. Channel 4’s publisher-broadcaster model allows it to harness the power of the market to deliver a public service both on and off screen. This effective model has played a key role in supporting a large supply chain of UK production companies, many of them SMEs, most of them outside London and a great deal of them in Scotland. Channel 4’s role and economic importance to the production sector was the key defence against plans for its privatisation. However, by giving Channel 4 the power to produce without applying a cap on the amount of in-house content, the Government risks undermining the independent production and distribution sector at a time of very difficult market conditions.

We need to ensure that all our public sector broadcasters, including STV in Scotland, are given significant prominence—rather than just appropriate prominence—on internet-enabled TVs, smart TVs and streaming sticks. We cannot risk public service content becoming more difficult to access in the shift away from traditional linear TV broadcasting. It is with concern that I hear that public broadcasters such as STV are being asked to pay for prominence by big global networks such as Amazon. Figures of up to 30% of revenue have been quoted, which would wipe out the viability of PSBs in general but would be particularly crippling for smaller, regional companies such as STV.

Finally, the draft Bill stipulates that PSBs must make available a broad range of content which is

“likely to meet the needs and interests of as many different audiences as practicable”.

This is not just about journalism, yet other than news and current affairs the Bill makes reference only to provision of

“an appropriate range of genres”.

Removing existing specifications is of concern to providers of socially valuable but perhaps not so commercially valuable content—for example, science and technology, and, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle highlighted in her excellent maiden speech, religious broadcasters, and also those for minority languages such as Gaelic. At present, Gaelic is notable in the draft Bill entirely by the absence of any reference to it, unlike the Welsh language and S4C—something which MG Alba is extremely vexed about.

I trust that we will be able to address some of these issues as the Media Bill progresses. The Minister will not be at all surprised to hear that I will be looking to scrutinise it closely from a Scottish perspective, to ensure that public service content is easily accessible for all our nations’ communities and that we enable the Scottish screen industries to continue to thrive in a digital age.

Beyond Digital (COVID-19 Committee Report)

Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie Excerpts

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie (Con)]

My Lords, the Covid committee was the first committee that I sat on after entering your Lordships’ House. I have to note that I joined after this particular report was published, but I was involved with all the other reports that our wonderful chairman, the noble Baroness, has just referred to.

I commend this report to the Committee. It marks a very first step for me in learning lessons from the pandemic. I went on to serve on the Adult Social Care Committee and am now on the Communications and Digital Committee. Our report on digital exclusion, published in June, builds hugely on the work of this report. Many of its recommendations are echoed in the digital exclusion report. I want particularly to highlight the notable and distinct lack of overall responsibility for digital policies in government. Digital is an issue that cuts across the remit of all government departments. Being digitally literate and engaged is an expected skill and, as both reports make clear, digital skills are as important to everyday life as learning to read or count.

However, this report is not just about digital. Its title is Beyond Digital: it is about the world we all live in now, a hybrid world. As the report sets out, the future was always going to be a hybrid one; the pandemic just meant that the future is here now.

As the noble Baroness said and the noble Lord, Lord Hain, just mentioned, the committee exposed the huge inequalities in how people experienced life during Covid. People who had no gardens were severely restricted in their access to open spaces. People who could not afford computers or an internet connection were cut off from work, school, services and society. People, such as the disabled and the elderly, who relied on others to help them exist every day had vital services withdrawn with no notice or consultation and were basically left to get on with it. None of these inequalities is new, but they were multiplied enormously by the pandemic.

What is interesting to me is to ask: what has happened in the years since? My experience comes from the world of health and from Scotland. I need to declare various interests here: I run Cerebral Palsy Scotland and I chair the Scottish Government’s National Advisory Committee for Neurological Conditions. The Covid public inquiries are under way in Scotland and in the UK, and I am giving endless evidence to the Scottish committee at the moment. I hope that both inquiries are able to learn lessons and do not just seek to apportion blame, because I do not think that would be helpful to anybody. I particularly want to learn the lessons of what we do not want ever to happen again.

It was concerning to see the arbitrary identification of what services were deemed essential and what services were dropped. For example, carers going into people’s homes were classed as key workers, whereas support health service workers—AHPs—became online only. Disabled people were being told in all the national communications that they were more vulnerable to Covid and yet what happened was that the services that they rely on to keep them well and active were being cut. I can tell your Lordships that you can achieve only so much through an online physiotherapy appointment. However, people with long-term conditions such as cerebral palsy rely on allied health professionals such as physiotherapists to enable them to keep well and to be able to function, yet somehow these services were seen as less important and were withdrawn— I make the point again—without any consultation with the people who relied on them.

As a result of my lived experience—to coin a phrase that the Government seem to like—I know of various developments since the publication of this report. In my organisation, we have developed a “virtual first” way of triaging people who come to us to use our services. The Scottish Government have published guidance on virtual versus face-to-face acute neurology consulting and they are preparing work for neuro- psychology in this area. We have to acknowledge that for some people this is an efficient, effective and easy way to use services—I point to people who live on the Scottish islands, those who need to take time off work to attend appointments or people who have caring responsibilities. However, we have to be clear what “virtual” means. For example, an acute neurologist in Aberdeen can absolutely have a detailed virtual appointment with somebody living in Orkney but only because they might have local health professionals on site to assist with that virtual appointment. When in-person is essential—for example, making a diagnosis of such conditions or if people do not understand the terminology of what is being discussed—it is important that that is prioritised.

My experience suggests that the NHS is indeed moving in this direction and developing effective hybrid service provision, but I want to see much more movement in the digital space on data. Where is the data, how do we use data to support people moving from different services, who holds the health data and how is it safely accessed and shared? Such developments must incorporate health and social care. Although we may be seeing progress with the development of data platforms within the NHS, social care has a long way to go before the data that it needs and the data that it holds are accessed and shared with others to enable people who we, during the pandemic, labelled as vulnerable to be supported to live and thrive.

The report also touches on education in schools. We already know that many pre-existing problems were faced by children with exceptional needs. They are more likely to live in poverty and less likely to have had access to new technologies, both of which have been linked to less intensive home learning during the pandemic. The report highlights how children’s social development was compromised by the closure of schools—again, I hope that we never do that again without serious consideration. Schools are so much more than places just for academic learning. I witnessed the impact on families who were struggling with children with cerebral palsy and trying to juggle the needs of their disabled child, without support and without the respite usually provided by schools, with the needs of siblings, perhaps trying to hold down a job while working from home, all at the same time—a frankly impossible task.

Granted, evidence from Scope to our committee outlines the advantages of online learning for some disabled children who are able to learn at their own pace. However, other evidence, such as that from the Nottingham Centre for Children, Young People and Families, emphasised that it is more difficult for children without traditional literacy or verbal communication skills to sustain interaction on-screen. While we learn from the pros and cons of online learning, it is my hope that we never again leave families with disabled children to cope on their own at home without access to local, in-person support.

In the report, Scope—I come back to Scope—highlighted some of the advantages of increasing reliance on digital technology in supporting some disabled people to work from home, facilitating more flexible working patterns and reducing the issues and stresses associated with commuting, for example, all of which I support. However, in my various working environments, from Parliament to my professional interests, as laid out in the register, there is too often an either/or approach to in-person or remote working. Insisting on just going back to a pre-pandemic way of working per se flies in the face of what is happening, whether that is in the retail sector, or about the impact of travel on the climate or on the ability to attract a wider pool of talent—or, frankly, on economic efficiency measures. Is hybrid working the best of both worlds or is it a tentative middle ground in which we find ourselves at this moment? I do not believe that we know where the world of work will land. This report recommends that the Government ensure that employment legislation is fit for the digital age. For me, this is still an evolving space and employers need to be supported to implement the flexibility required for their individual business needs.

In conclusion, if this report was a useful first step in looking at the impact of the pandemic, the intervening years since the first lockdown have seen some concerning trends that suggest that we have not done enough to make things better. Enabling people to flourish in a hybrid world means tackling digital exclusion and supporting digital skills. I look forward to future debates on our report from the Communications and Digital Committee. It also requires us to tackle the systemic inequalities exposed by the pandemic. We have to understand what we mean by essential in-person services. We need to work with disabled people and the organisations that represent them to understand the impact of online versus face-to-face services on their lives and we need to reimagine how we deliver social care. I also look forward to debating the report from the Adult Social Care Committee in due course.

The pandemic reminded us what really matters in our lives: personal freedom, celebrating with our loved ones, caring for friends and family, a stable economy, a vibrant NHS and happy, healthy, well-educated children. Let us not forget that as we move into our hybrid world.

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, I just want to notify the Committee that I am not able to speak because I cannot stay until the end. I should have been taken off the speakers’ list, as I was told had happened.