Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Monday 7th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall]

My Lords, I add my support to the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Stevenson. I do so as someone who served until the general election on the Select Committee on Communications of your Lordships' House. Shortly before the election, the committee produced a detailed report on the state of the UK film and television industry as it was then—that is only just over a year ago.

A lot of the evidence taken by the committee then was in the wake of another huge success for the British film industry, although of a rather different nature from that of “The King's Speech” which we have been celebrating today. That film was “Slumdog Millionaire”, which also had huge success at the Oscars and elsewhere and depended for some of its success not on money from the UK Film Council but on a small amount of money, very early in the film’s development, from Channel 4. The reason that I mention that in relation to the amendment is that, as my noble friend Lord Wills just remarked, the UK film industry exists in a very fragile ecology. Its fragility concerns how difficult it is not so much to get things finished as to get them started.

The UK Film Council’s intervention, which allowed “The King's Speech” to be made, was at the beginning of that process. Anyone who has spent time over the past few weeks reading all the interviews and material generated by the success of “The King's Speech” will know that Tom Hooper, his screenwriter and the other people—the small group who believed in the project—struggled to get it going. Always, when we look at UK films that have big success, we think, “Of course. Why would it not be successful?”. It is not like that. One valuable thing that the UK Film Council has done, which is mentioned in the amendment, is to collect data and research on all the various ways in which the UK film industry is active. Those data reveal that the industry is in constant flux. It has moments of huge success and, at other times, moments when its success falls away.

In my view, that is partly because the industry has a relatively small domestic market. It has to get out there and sell itself into a wider world market before it can really start to make money. That is why film export is so important and why it is therefore necessary for the Government and the Minister, when she comes to reply, to explain how the film export aspect of the work of the UK Film Council will be supported and continued as we go on. The American film industry has a massive domestic market, and films can be a success in America using just that domestic market. Our film industry cannot rely on that market. It has to get out there and sell itself. The success of “The King’s Speech” is remarkable in that it has become a worldwide success. That is very hard to achieve from a UK base, and anything that is likely to undermine the continuing success of UK film by not properly supporting the export side of it is very much to be regretted.

I would also like to mention one other thing that is not specifically mentioned in this amendment, but I hope the Minister will find something to reassure the Committee about it when she comes to reply. It is about supporting film artists at an early stage in their career. Whether you are a director or a writer, the difficulty of getting your work funded at an early stage in your career is extreme in this country. That is probably an issue everywhere, but it is certainly so here. Among its many functions, the UK Film Council has over the years put some money into development and into making sure that a certain number of screen writers get to develop their work. I would like to feel that the Government understand the importance of this function and that when they come to review the way in which the functions of UK Film Council are to be transferred to the BFI that aspect of what it has been doing will be protected.

It is a very great matter of pride to all of us when a film such as “The King’s Speech” comes along and has such extraordinary success at home and in America, but it is an extremely long, hard journey to get a film such as that up and running and to get it to be as successful as that film has been. We cannot afford to lose any of the potential support for UK film makers.