Digital Economy Bill

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 29th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

I have added my name to Amendment 32E from the noble Lord, Lord Lester, and I agree with all the speeches that have been made in this debate. The process for setting the licence fee is manifestly inadequate; it lacks transparency, fails to identify—far less promote—any coherent principle, and allows and indeed encourages a last-minute political fix. Does the Minister really think that this is a satisfactory means of promoting the independence and efficacy of the BBC?

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

I am also a member of the Communications Committee. My noble friend Lord Best set out our position so well that I shall not repeat it, but I wanted to add one thing. I could not possibly exaggerate the feeling of those who came before us giving evidence that the BBC must not only be independent from the Government of the day but must be seen to be independent. That is really what these amendments are struggling to insist on—that it is truly seen by all parties as independent.

On a secondary point, while we did our review I was struck by the huge number of duties that the BBC was given, many of which were very right-minded, about regions and nations and the types of programming that it must do, as well as about training. Those are all things with a cost, and a subset of the amendments is the suggestion that somebody independent gets to look at the duties of the BBC and set them against the cost of doing those duties. Perhaps we will have more reasonable conversations about what those duties ultimately are when we understand what they cost.

[Lord Maxton (Lab)]

Can I just be marginally controversial? I accept the first amendment, which would establish a BBC licence fee commission, but the time has come when we have to look at the licence fee itself. We should remember that the licence fee was established way back in the days of Lord Reith—an awful man, but that is beside the point—based on the fact that you had one broadcasting unit in your house. The licence fee is for the house, not the individual, yet I stand here today with at least three devices in my pockets which allow me to view or listen to broadcasts by the BBC or, in fact, by any other organisation that cares to broadcast.

The time has really come when we must look at whether or not we have one licence fee for one household, which could include the very poorest single woman or man living alone in their house with one television or one radio to listen to. They pay exactly the same sum of money as another household with five people in it, all of whom have different devices. There are now four of us living in my household and each room has a television in it and a radio, we have radio in the cars, television on iPads and phones, radio on this, television on that—we have too many, maybe. But the same licence fee covers everything. It is the same licence fee for everybody, whatever—and I am not even talking about hotels or boarding houses or whatever else we can include with them. It is interesting to note that the Government themselves, when they looked at the licence fee, changed it to a live or nearly live licence fee. It is nearly live of course because if you watch television on your iPad, it is about 30 seconds behind, so it is not directly live. So this is the first thing that has to be said: it is time that this commission looked at the whole of the licence fee, not just the level of it.

Secondly, and lastly, this is a tax imposed upon everybody and we are entitled to know exactly how that money is spent by the BBC. I notice that an ex-director of the BBC is hoping to get into this debate —we know what his salary is and we know the salaries of every member of staff on the managerial side, but we do not know how much is paid to Mr John Humphrys, for instance, or to anybody else on the news side of it. I think that the BBC ought to be completely covered by the Freedom of Information Act, which is something that the commission could look at.