Ofcom: Impartiality

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Monday 29th October 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Adonis]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of whether there is any conflict of interest between the duties of the chair and former deputy chair of Ofcom as impartial regulators of the BBC and their parliamentary duties including their voting record on Brexit.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, Ofcom is the broadcasting regulator, and its role was significantly increased last year when it was given responsibility for regulating the BBC under the new BBC charter. It is absolutely essential that Ofcom is impartial and seen to be impartial, and that impartiality must start at the top with its chair and deputy chair. Ofcom’s own code of conduct for board members could not be clearer about this. It says:

“There should never be any legitimate reasons for people outside Ofcom to suspect that Ofcom’s decisions may be influenced by … political interests and opinions, of Members”,


of the board. It further states that members of the board should avoid,

“expressions of opinion on matters of political or public controversy which could be thought to compromise the Board’s reputation for impartiality on editorial or other decisions”.


The memorandum and the code of conduct for board members lay specific additional duties on the chair of Ofcom. It says that the chairman shall have,

“particular responsibility for leading the Board in … encouraging high standards of propriety”.

In the case of uncertainty on the part of members as to what constitutes propriety, the code of conduct says:

“Members are asked, if in doubt, to consult the Chairman”,


who therefore must be entirely above board.

The problem is that the chair and the recently retired deputy chair of Ofcom do not command general confidence for being impartial. This has undermined and continues to undermine both Ofcom and the BBC at a time of acute sensitivity and controversy—sensitivity and controversy which are set to become still more acute amid the parliamentary, media and public debates on Brexit in the months ahead.

I obviously approach this issue with reluctance, since the noble Lord, Lord Burns, the Ofcom chair, and the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, the recently retired deputy chair, are both distinguished Members of the House, who in non-political respects I hold in high regard. But we are discussing public duties, and it is crystal clear that the public duty of the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, while they held or hold responsibilities at Ofcom, is not to damage the independence and impartiality of the regulator by taking positions on issues of political controversy.

I need hardly say that Ofcom’s requirement to abstain from all political controversy is of a level far greater than that expected of noble Lords who chair most other public bodies and who sit on the Cross Benches. It goes well beyond a requirement simply to be discreet and not court undue controversy. It is the impartiality expected of a judge to abstain completely from political engagements, because Ofcom, like a court, is a credible arbiter and enforcer only if its arbitration and enforcement command general confidence on all sides of disputed issues, which in the case of Ofcom means all disputed political issues, since all are the stuff of broadcast news and programming.

The post that most resembles the chair and deputy chair of Ofcom is the director-generalship of the BBC, which is also held by a Member of the House: the noble Lord, Lord Hall of Birkenhead. The noble Lord is a model of impartiality. He neither speaks nor votes in the House on political matters—indeed, on any matters at all since he took the helm at the BBC. The position of the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, who retired from Ofcom in May, is in every respect the reverse. She is not only a Conservative Peer who takes the Whip and speaks and votes with the Government consistently, she is an extreme Brexiter who voices her pro-Brexit views frequently in and out of the House, and she is brutally dismissive of those holding contrary views.

I do not wish to detain the House at great length but I have a whole pile of the noble Baroness’s tweets and speeches to give substance to the points I have just made. I will give a brief selection of her tweets while she was deputy chair of Ofcom, which aroused significant controversy in the House of Commons at the time. Before the 2015 election she tweeted:

“Be afraid. Be very afraid if @Ed_Miliband and #Labour get back into power”.


Her other tweets have included:

“We can never state too often the basic fact that every Labour government in UK history has left the country in financial ruins”,


and:

“OMG: Lord Mandelson: Britain could still join the Euro … Another good reason to keep Labour out”.


I have no idea what OMG stands for; apparently it is Twitter shorthand for something. These tweets and interventions are utterly inappropriate from the deputy chair of Ofcom.

This situation caused profound disquiet within Ofcom itself, particularly in relation to the Ofcom Content Board, the committee immediately responsible for media content regulation. Its then chair, Bill Emmott, a distinguished former editor of the Economist, left Ofcom two years ago after sharp disagreements over these very issues, and the regulator has not recovered.

In this situation it was essential that the noble Lord, Lord Burns—as the new chair of Ofcom, appointed last year—should command general confidence. But, again, I am afraid that the reverse is the case. The noble Lord, Lord Burns, came to the post with a history of support for Brexit in the House, which made it all the more important that he abstained from controversy after his appointment. Far from doing so, in the single most controversial vote in the House so far this year, in April the noble Lord voted with the Government against legislation for the UK to join a European customs union. I hardly need tell the House that this issue is at the heart of the ongoing Brexit controversy. It is especially controversial among critics of the BBC, who claim that the state broadcaster’s coverage of Brexit has been inadequate and biased. I was astonished at the time to see the noble Lord passing through the Government Lobby, and I raised the issue directly with him. I received a bland, dismissive response, and then no response at all when I pressed the matter further.

The situation is all the more serious because Ofcom’s regulation of the BBC has been notable by its absence. The rules it has put in place for considering complaints about impartiality and content at the BBC are so restrictive as to be almost inoperable. The one voice that has been totally silent throughout the controversy about the BBC and its coverage of Brexit has been Ofcom’s. As I see it, the BBC is in effect regulating itself, and when in doubt the BBC and Ofcom defer to the Government. This situation is clearly unsustainable.

The irony of the situation is that the person who has best described why it is unsustainable is the noble Lord, Lord Burns, himself. When he was giving evidence to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons at his confirmation hearing on 13 December last year, he said:

“One of the distinguishing features of our broadcasting world is the requirement both for accuracy and impartiality … I get very nervous when I see broadcast journalists tweeting in the way they do, where they make it perfectly clear what their own personal view is and then they appear on television the following day seeking to arbitrate between two people taking opposing views where they have already expressed their own views in print. I am uncomfortable with that”.


The noble Lord clearly had certain senior BBC journalists in mind when he made those remarks, and with good reason. But it is even more uncomfortable that the chair of Ofcom—at the apex of the whole system of media regulation—should seek to arbitrate between people taking opposing views when he too has already expressed his own. This undermines Ofcom, it damages our democratic institutions, it is simply unacceptable and it should not continue.