Channel 4: Privatisation (Communications Committee Report)

Lord Birt Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, it is most disrespectful to my noble friend Lord Best’s Select Committee to have allowed more than a year to pass before discussion of this insightful and comprehensive report. Indeed, discussion has been delayed so long that, as others have observed, the report has been overtaken by events; albeit in this case a most happy event. Thankfully, the Secretary of State proves to have a mind of her own and has rejected the option of privatising Channel 4, which an unlucky civil servant inadvertently advertised to the world—not the first person to fall foul of the powerful magnifying lens on the very doorstep of No. 10.

The argument against privatising Channel 4 is quite simple. It will apply as long as television channels remain a significant pathway for reaching audiences with television programmes, which will be for quite some time to come. The argument is this: alone in the world, in a century of benevolent and insightful regulation, UK Governments of both main parties have put public service broadcasting at the centre of our national life.

The BBC was born nearly a century ago with fine purposes but it was the regulators of Independent Television that required ITV, where I apprenticed as a lad, to spend its advertising monopoly profits across the gamut of public service genres, and thus spur the BBC to shake off the fusty cobwebs of the 1950s and to reach true heights of creativity and ambition. Channel 4, born without a profit motive, has for decades brought a new and different creative slant to British broadcasting —a more piquant taste: innovative, experimental, risk-taking. As almost all noble Lords have mentioned, its embrace of the Paralympics was simply magnificent—an extraordinary, unimaginable game changer which gave us a new cast of take-your-breath-away heroes for the nation.

Another of the channel’s greatest achievements is as a chronicler. If future generations want to understand the flavour of our times, how social attitudes and mores shift, they will be able to watch “Benefit Street”, “Gogglebox”, “Educating Yorkshire” and even “Naked Attraction”.

Like all institutions, however, Channel 4 has certainly slipped the odd catch. It completely failed over recent decades to appreciate the significance of digital, and it dropped the ball badly in acquiring “The Great British Bake Off”. Channel 4 is there to innovate, to create anew, not to outbid another public broadcaster with precious public funds and, in the process, fatally to wound a deeply loved national institution and, moreover, like “Strictly”, a quintessential BBC programme. The snatch was not even competently done. It was if Channel 4 long ago had bought the Beatles but forgot to contract John and Paul. The “Bake Off” episode was a grievous failure of both the management and governance of Channel 4. It will have new management, if not yet new governance. Let us hope that a new chief executive will put the channel firmly back on track.

We need Channel 4 to stick to its last because public service broadcasting in the UK is not waxing but waning. The competitive environment has changed fundamentally in two decades as advertising shifts to the internet. As a result, ITV, where I spent much of my career, now offers a tiny fraction of the public service programming that it once made. The BBC’s resources, too, have been massively depleted by the two raids on its finances since 2010, with substantial programme cuts still to come. So overall investment in the UK in public service broadcasting is declining substantially. If Channel 4 were to be privatised, the notion that somehow its public service broadcasting remit could be retained is simply sophistry. I have worked extensively in both public and commercial broadcasting and I am absolutely certain from my own direct experience that the imperatives are wholly different and that a privatised Channel 4 would be very different.

Our best and only hope for the foreseeable future is to have two independent public service broadcasters, the BBC and Channel 4, the one complementing the other, providing mutual stimulus, each keeping the other on its toes. We should not want to return to where we were 60 years ago, when I was a teenager, with a single public service broadcaster, with all the risk of stasis and complacency that all monopoly eventually brings.