Channel 4: Consultation

Lord Birt Excerpts

Tuesday 16th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The noble Lord mentions the work done by Ernst & Young. Our analysts, UKGI, and our corporate finance advisers, JP Morgan, take a different view and that is why we are taking a range of views on the suggestions. On the work that Channel 4 does across the United Kingdom, I say simply that Channel 4’s strengths in this regard are to be celebrated and maintained, and that is not at odds with private investment; in fact, Channel 4’s access to networks outside London and its ability to speak to such a diverse range of audiences are likely to be attractive assets to nurture and develop for any potential buyer, if that is the route we go down.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, there is a meme of the moment that Channel 4 and, indeed, the BBC are being marginalised by the awesome economic power of Netflix. Does the Minister accept that Netflix’s programme proposition, though wholly admirable, bears no relationship whatever to the breadth of the public service propositions offered by both Channel 4 and the BBC? Moreover, will the Minister remind his department that in terms of hours of consumption per adult per week, far from being marginalised, the BBC enjoys six times the consumption of Netflix, and that Channel 4 is level-pegging?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The noble Lord speaks with great experience of the sector. I am about the same age as Channel 4; the environment in which it was launched in 1982 was very different from the environment now. The Government should never stand still when it comes to ensuring the success of our public service broadcasters and the growth of competitors such as Netflix, as the noble Lord mentioned. That is why it is appropriate to reflect on Channel 4’s future and consider whether the current model gives it the best chance to succeed in the new environment as we seek to ensure that it is set up for success for decades to come.

UK Journalism (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Birt Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Birt (CB)]

May I, too, join the “when I was a lad” brigade? I should tell the noble Lord, Lord McNally, that when he and I were lads, I was actually a director on “All Our Yesterdays”, briefly.

Like others, I warmly welcome the real focus that the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, has brought to this critical issue, as all the contributions so far have made abundantly clear. Independent, challenging journalism is the sine qua non of a healthy functioning democracy, as the award last week of a Nobel Prize to courageous but endangered journalists in Russia and the Philippines underlined. In a scene reminiscent of “The Thick of It”, the Kremlin congratulated Dmitry Muratov on his award, describing him as “brave”. This is the very same Kremlin that had just expelled BBC journalist Sarah Rainsford, after 20 years of impeccable and expert reporting from Moscow.

Over centuries, the UK has enjoyed an unparalleled tradition of vigorous comment and challenge, beginning in our Parliament but extending well beyond to a lively press. Those on the receiving end may not always like it—it is not always scrupulous and fair—but that tradition guarantees that no part of our national life goes unscrutinised and unquestioned. That in turn guarantees, sometimes in a rough and chaotic way, that as a nation we will always expose and address problems of every kind that we, as a nation, will progress.

My first job out of university was as a journalist on “World in Action”, the programme with the proudest tradition of investigative journalism on British television. By the time I left ITV, the network boasted three major and well-funded national current affairs programmes. None now exists, nor does any equivalent. I left ITV because I was invited to lead the creation of BBC News as a single entity. Previously, it had been organised in separate, unco-ordinated baronies.

In the 20 years since I retired from the BBC and from broadcasting, I have had the painful experience, as someone who was involved in journalism every day of his career, of watching from the sidelines the massive loss of revenues suffered by our vibrant national and regional newspapers, the substantial decline of income of the advertiser-funded PSBs and two brutal cuts to BBC revenues—soon, I greatly fear, to be followed by a third.

The internet has brought absolutely huge gains in disintermediation, immediacy and the ability to find out anything we want in a flash. But the impact has been to reduce, not to increase, the amount of journalism of quality. For journalism of quality is expensive; it needs both expertise and time—not just to uncover wrongdoing but to get under the skin of the complex issues that face all Governments and societies.

Of course serious journalism of quality still exists: Tim Shipman’s must-read, careful and insightful chronicling of our national politics, the FT’s economic reporting and John Ware’s and Peter Taylor’s supremely authoritative unravelling of the dark side of the Troubles. But so much of our declining journalistic resource is now invested in simple reactive coverage of today’s overt events, or in the repackaging, aggregation and regurgitation of other outlets’ stories. Of the stock of current affairs programmes that existed when I departed the BBC 20 years ago, only a less well-resourced “Panorama” remains.

There are no easy answers to the questions posed this afternoon, but reducing the real funding of the BBC and privatising Channel 4 are not two of them. Let us avoid incrementalism; let us stand back and recognise the big picture. As the committee suggests, digital players should not have a free ride. The noble Lord, Lord Grade, expressed that particularly well. They must contribute to the cost of creating original journalism and content. We must do everything we can to put a foot on the brake of the decline of UK PSBs. We must also do everything we can to ease the decline of our vital newspaper sector. As the PM would say, it is surely time to “Prenez un grip”.

Television Licence Evasion

Lord Birt Excerpts

Tuesday 26th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The figures that my noble friend refers to—the 91 people receiving a custodial sentence—are for the period 2015-18, and those numbers have declined significantly in recent years. In relation to a civil sanction, it needs to be sufficiently robust to underpin the legal requirement to hold a TV licence, and, as I mentioned, it might result in higher financial penalties. We are keeping this matter open for further review.

[Lord Birt (CB) [V]]

My Lords, in recent times we have seen a rapid decline in the funding of one of our greatest achievements as a country, admired and envied the world over: British public service broadcasting. Over the past 15 years, investment in original UK production has been cut by 30%. Does the Minister accept that addressing this massive decline should be top of the agenda when the BBC’s licence fee is soon reviewed?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord makes an important point. In the review of the licence fee—which, as he knows, we are committed to until 2027—a very wide range of issues will be taken into account, including, of course, the importance of our independent production sector. As he understands better than I, it has been enormously successful and vibrant, thanks to a great deal of other investment as well as that from the BBC.

BBC and Public Service Broadcasting

Lord Birt Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, the BBC is the most potent institution created anywhere in the world for reflecting every aspect of a nation’s culture and affairs. It weaves a tapestry of national types echoing all our many idiosyncrasies as a nation: Captain Mainwaring, Alf Garnett, Basil Fawlty, the louche Patsy in “Ab Fab”, the nightmarish David Brent, the wickedly knowing Fleabag.

The BBC captures our brilliance in popular music as a nation—witness the extraordinary sessions recorded by the BBC over 60 years, daily paraded on BBC 6 Music. It has enabled Simon Schama and Lucy Worsley to tell our eventful national story and Brian Cox to explain the planets. It has commissioned 54 series of BBC Science’s “Horizon”. “In Our Time”, presented by the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, and Laurie Taylor’s “Thinking Allowed” offer unsurpassed insight into the work of the UK’s finest scholars. Possibly the BBC’s greatest gift to the modern world is its natural history programming, with David Attenborough at the prow. I could go on and on.

The BBC is peerless, but of course it is not perfect—not in my day, not now. We must engage with and not dismiss the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, and other considered critics. But let us nail the Netflix myth: that new subscription services are making the BBC less relevant. The BBC has a significant but no longer dominant position in UK media. Currently it enjoys 26% of all UK TV, radio and online consumption. I am an enthusiastic Netflix subscriber, but Netflix currently represents something like 2% of UK consumption —a thirteenth of the BBC’s. The two organisations are not remotely comparable in either their purpose or popularity.

How has the BBC been able to develop, over a century, a most extraordinary range and array of programming? First and foremost, because the licence fee has enabled the BBC over and again to take risks and innovate in a way that the private sector never can. Secondly, because, almost uniquely among the world’s publicly funded PSBs, the BBC is truly independent of government. Thirdly, because it has enjoyed enduring cross-party support from John Major, Tony Blair, Willie Whitelaw and—whatever her reservations, newly resurrected in recent weeks—Margaret Thatcher, as I can personally testify. I do not believe for one moment that our new Prime Minister really wants to “whack” the BBC, to quote No. 10 sources in the Sunday Times. He is a feisty career journalist, gifted of expression, and the child of a notably erudite, public-spirited and liberal-minded family. I do not believe for one moment that he would want to celebrate the BBC’s centenary with its destruction.

Let us reboot the debate about British broadcasting. Let us focus on the real issues: the 10-year assault on the BBC’s revenues, ITV’s and Channel 4’s revenue decline and the slow draining away of original British programming from all our screens. They are the issues that really matter.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Barran) (Con)]

My Lords, I start by echoing the comments of other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Young, for securing this important debate on the role of the BBC and public service broadcasting in the UK’s economy and our creative culture. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, for his sympathy. The more noble Lords remarked on the quality of the debate, the more my knees began to shake. As for Andrew Neil, I confess that, during the election campaign, I had a dream that I had been rung up and asked to do the interview, so be careful what you wish for. We have had some extraordinarily well-informed, eloquent and passionate contributions this afternoon. I will do my best to respond to them, but if necessary I may have to follow up in writing if time does not permit.

I start—I hope that this language is not too strong—with some of the accusations that have been made about this Government’s attitude towards the BBC. Noble Lords used quite strong language. The noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, talked about an unremitting vendetta and the noble Lord, Lord Foster, asked me to confirm that we do not see the BBC as a mortal enemy. I repeat what the Prime Minister said recently, as was echoed by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State: the BBC is a “cherished British institution” and a great source of national pride. Almost every noble Lord who contributed to this debate gave examples of why we should be so proud of the BBC, and why it is a cherished institution.

All our public service broadcasters play a vital role in not only our media ecology but our economy and, crucially, throughout our lives. The noble Lady, Baroness Bakewell—

[Lord Birt]

I welcome the Minister’s remarks, but perhaps she could help us understand something. Two weeks ago Tim Shipman, a most reliable and professional journalist, ran a piece on the front page of the Sunday Times about the BBC, sourced from No. 10. In it, the source said that the Government would “whack” the BBC, cut it back, scrap the licence fee, and appoint a new chair to sack the new DG if he or she was not to their liking. Are the Government repudiating that statement?

BBC Charter Review

Lord Birt Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran]

My Lords, the Government have said that we will review whether or not non-payment of a TV licence fee should be decriminalised. We will set out the steps on how we will approach this in due course. My noble friend is vastly more expert in this area than I am. I think two key things have changed: first, the broader landscape of what media is available and how we consume it has changed out of all recognition, and secondly—I am sure a number of noble Lords heard what I heard on the doorstep—this is a real concern for people. As a Government, we want to listen to the people who voted for us.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I too pay tribute to the assured and inspiring stewardship of the noble Lord, Lord Hall, as director-general of the BBC. On Monday, the political editor of “Newsnight” reported a briefing that he had had from No. 10 about the appointment of the next director-general. The drift of that briefing first set out what No. 10 thought the proper specification for the new appointee was—its wish list—and then expressed No. 10’s wish that it should be consulted about who the next director-general of the BBC should be. Will the Minister, without equivocation, restate the convention now nearly a century old that it is the BBC’s board and only the BBC’s board that appoints the director-general?

[Baroness Barran]

Obviously, I cannot comment on the briefing, but I am happy to confirm the noble Lord’s last remarks.

Armistice Day: Centenary

Lord Birt Excerpts

Monday 5th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow such a compellingly argued and inspiring speech from the noble Baroness.

I have more family stories for your Lordships. I am here, I exist, only because both my grandfathers survived the First World War. My paternal grandfather, William, born into a Liverpool Catholic family, was an athlete: he played football as a schoolboy for the north of England, and as a boxer he sparred with Bombardier Billy Wells. William served at the front in the Royal Horse Artillery, losing a toe during the years of conflict.

My maternal grandfather, Joe, was born in Belfast to fierce loyalist stock. Aged 18, he joined Carson’s UVF and trained with guns smuggled in from Germany. At the onset of war my grandad joined the 15th Battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles, a Protestant force that marched with marigolds in their caps to the tunes of King Billy. Joe fought on the front line and in the trenches, miraculously surviving for the span of the war. He was in the Battle of the Somme where, as we know, 50,000 were killed or wounded on the first day. At Thiepval, the 36th (Ulster) Division lost 5,500 men in two days. Whole areas of Ulster were plunged into grief. Joe went on to fight on the Messines Ridge, at Cambrai and at St Quentin, where he was captured, and saw out the war as a German prisoner.

I can never be sure what price my two grandfathers paid for their exposure to four years of the utmost horror. My paternal grandfather, William, was bright but quick to pick a fight; he rose in the war to sergeant, but was discharged as a private. He would become an alcoholic, a mainly unemployed Bootle docker. The NSPCC would be called in to consider the welfare of my father and his siblings.

My maternal grandfather, Joe, could be cruel to his daughters too, but he was mostly quiet and introspective, though he took me, his first grandchild, under his wing and talked to me endlessly and chillingly about his war and his grim experiences, taking solace only in his racing pigeons and his pride in once having sold a Jack Russell terrier to Gracie Fields. There was one benevolent consequence of Joe’s war. By 1917, so many soldiers from the Ulster Division had been killed that Catholics were finally drafted in to make up the numbers. Unexpectedly, the camaraderie of battle softened attitudes, and a year later St Patrick’s Day was celebrated in the trenches and shamrocks widely distributed. When my Protestant mother declared that she was to marry my Catholic father, my mum was ostracised by her fierce loyalist mother but Joe, the one-time member of the UVF, had lost his sectarian impulse on the fields of Flanders, and peace was soon restored to the family.

I have visited the battlegrounds on which my grandfathers fought. I have stood in empty, flat green fields with the birds singing, not a soul to be seen, the ground around still bearing the scars of trenches, and I have listened to friends reading out loud some of the eloquent and poetic first-person accounts of battles long fought, involving massive loss of life, in precisely the place where we were standing. How could humankind have possibly managed to create and continue such fruitless slaughter? John Keegan, at the end of his masterpiece history of the First World War, describes it as a mystery:

“Why did a prosperous continent, at the height of its success as a source and agent of global wealth and power and at one of the peaks of its intellectual and cultural achievement, choose to risk all it had won for itself and all it offered to the world in the lottery of a vicious and local internecine conflict?”.


Some 1 million British, 1.7 million French, 2 million Germans and many others lost their lives in the Great War, yet the First World War was unfinished business. Only two decades later it seeded the Second World War, with even greater horror—a fivefold increase in loss of life. No one has expressed that better today than the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup.

So far, the post-war embryonic alliances that eventually grew into the European Union have succeeded in locking most of the countries of mainland Europe into a secure, harmonious and prosperous peace. The single most poignant post-war image for me is President Mitterrand and Chancellor Kohl standing together at Verdun in 1984, side by side and hand-in-hand. Even without us, may those European bonds remain forever strong and may catastrophic war never again blight our continent.

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.