BBC Governance and Regulation: Communications Committee Report

Lord Birt Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, an old and much esteemed colleague. I applaud, as others have done, the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, and his colleagues for a careful and insightful assessment of the often tangled regulatory issues affecting the BBC, whose director-general I once was. I particularly congratulate them on the graphic and very telling clarity of the complaints chart, of which the noble Lord was justifiably proud.

The new system of governance for the BBC is an improvement on the old. Oversight and scrutiny are more arm’s-length, and the trust has clearly demonstrated its independence and its willingness to insist. Under its new chairman, who long ago proved that he is in no one’s pocket, I anticipate that the trust will be still more robust.

In due course, though, the governance of the BBC will need to be considered afresh, a common note that has been struck throughout this debate. We can all see that the media landscape is changing fundamentally—tumultuous, in the word of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler—and the imminence of a communications Bill and the proximity of charter review will, I hope, oblige us to redefine comprehensively our policy goals for UK media.

I expect this will be common ground among us: over the best part of a century, no country has regulated broadcast media more effectively than the UK. However, I observe with deep regret that we have somewhat lost our touch in recent times. In the past decade the UK was slow to adopt broadband. Moreover, as new media began to have a fundamental and adverse financial impact on mature media, the previous Government failed to deal with the inevitable consequences of the decline of ITV and the medium-term threat to Channel 4 as public service broadcasters.

At the time—some of us will remember this—the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and a very distinguished panel were invited to address these issues. Their report was acute and their recommendations radical but they were comprehensively ignored at the time. Thank goodness we still have a strong BBC, which is currently in fine creative form—as good as, perhaps better than, it has ever been. I echo the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, who reminded us of the current director-general saying, “Things are indeed going quite well”. However, we should not welcome the BBC’s re-emergence after half a century as a near-monopoly provider of public service broadcasting in the UK.

The second failure was the current Government’s. Eighteen months ago, in what felt like a covert midnight raid, they handed responsibility to the BBC and the licence-fee payer for funding the World Service and S4C. Most amazing of all, the licence fee was raided for a £150 million contribution to broadband rollout—in all, a regulatory nightmare. At the same time, the Government froze the licence fee in nominal terms. This was a double whammy. There was no Green Paper, no White Paper, no public consultation, no debate in Parliament and no discussion of, for example, the principle of asking the UK licence-fee payer to fund services for listeners overseas.

No one here would dispute the notion that, as the nation experiences the most hostile economic climate in many generations, the BBC, too, must share some of the pain. However, in the aftermath of that raid on the BBC, we should have debated the fact that, as far as I can gauge, for the first time in its history the BBC will see its core income fall well below the expected growth rate of GDP. Thus, for the very first time ever, the BBC’s role will almost certainly diminish.

Other mighty challenges are ahead elsewhere in our media, as other noble Lords have mentioned. We will need a careful and measured response to the wholesale lawlessness that we now know existed in parts of our print media. Secondly—here I declare another interest as chairman of PayPal Europe—in the virtually unpoliced and unregulated online world, crime is rife and insidious practices abound. Last week’s example was a Twitter application that, unbeknown to the downloader, extracts your personal phone directory from your mobile device. Even today, Google has announced its determination to amass, process and exploit across all its services the mountain of personal information that it holds about each of its billions of users.

Thirdly, we see Sky emerge as a leviathan, dwarfing all other broadcasters, including other commercial players. I have long admired Sky’s track record of bold innovation. I have welcomed, again and again, the manifest benefits that it has brought. However, its dominance and increasing integration down the value chain is not healthy and requires attention.

All told, this is not a comfortable picture. The UK media are not at present in a condition of which we can all be proud. The coalition Government should consider all these challenges comprehensively and strategically and institute a proper and full public debate. Only then can we address the questions raised so ably in the committee’s truly excellent report of what kind of regulatory architecture we will need over the next decade to oversee UK media in general and the BBC in particular.

Finally, we all here appear to agree with the strongly expressed views of the noble Lords, Lord Bragg, Lord Fowler, Lord Macdonald and Lord Hastings, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, about retaining a Select Committee on Communications in this House. We are entering a period where its cool deliberations will never be more necessary and valuable.