Media Bill

Lord Dunlop Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, Amendments 4 and 5 are in my name and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, for adding his name to them. We are of course moving on to the area of indigenous minority and regional languages. Proposed new subsection (16) in Clause 1 lists those languages. There are six of them: Welsh, of course—I am glad to see the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, on the Benches—and we have Ulster Scots, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Irish and, sixth and last to be listed, Cornish.

I am a resident of that area, Cornwall. I am English rather than Cornish, but I have lived there for some time and Cornish is a very important part of the culture of that far south-west peninsula. Many noble Lords will have visited Cornwall during their holidays, or maybe during vacations as children to its beaches or whatever. The Cornish language is of the Celtic family. It is actually nearer to Breton than it is to Welsh, but it is an important part of that family. It has been revived and is an important part of culture these days. Cornwall Council often uses Cornish in its public notices and publications.

What I want to emphasise in these amendments is, first, to welcome very strongly the fact that Cornish is named in the Bill as a minority and regional language. It was first recognised in 2002 by the Council of Europe’s convention on regional and minority languages and this is the first time, as I understand it, that it has appeared in British legislation. I very much welcome that. But it is my belief, having read through proposed new subsection (5), that there is an issue about this. It is around not just Cornish itself but those other regional and minority languages as well.

New subsection (5)(b) says that

“the audiovisual content made available by the public service broadcasters (taken together) includes what appears to OFCOM to be … (ii) a sufficient quantity of audiovisual content that is in, or mainly in, a recognised regional or minority language”.

That reads to me as if, in a practical sense, we could have hours of Welsh broadcasting, which clearly I would welcome, but that could be taken together as a substitute for these other minority languages as well. That is now the Bill reads to me and I do not think that is the Government’s intention. I will be interested to hear from the Minister his own interpretation. That is also why, in my Amendment 5, instead of saying

“a … regional or minority language”,

I have said “each” regional and minority language.

There is a strange bit of grammatical use in new subsection (5). It puts “taken together”, which is what I see as contentious, in brackets. I have looked very briefly through the rest of the Bill and have found no other key provision that is in brackets. My theory is that, when the Bill was put together, those brackets were not normal brackets: they were actually square brackets and there was a question about whether that phrase—the two words “taken together”—should be in the Bill. Then, somehow, they have been translated into normal brackets and so have appeared in the written part of the Bill. I would love to think that that was the case.

Of course, the Government’s statute writers are normally absolutely perfect in what they do, but I genuinely believe this is not what the Government intend. It is really important that each of those minority and regional languages is represented sufficiently in the public broadcasters’ output. On that basis, I would be interested to hear from the Minister whether he agrees that that is the intention or whether we could have a further conversation to try to get this right. I beg to move.

[Lord Dunlop (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 6 and 10 in my name and the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness. I am very grateful to those noble Lords for their cross-party support.

These amendments are designed to address an urgent problem. They seek to provide more explicit protection for Gaelic-language broadcasting within the Bill. Gaelic broadcasting faces a crisis—and I do not use that word lightly—caused by decisions over the allocation of responsibilities when the Scottish Parliament was established. As a result, there is no reliable mechanism for resolving funding and operational matters.

Gaelic broadcasting is provided by the BBC Alba channel, a joint venture between BBC and the Gaelic Media Service, otherwise known as MG Alba. The channel is resourced by the BBC’s contribution to the JV of content and people, valued at £10 million per year, and MG Alba’s annual budget of £13 million per year. Its funding is provided by the Scottish Government via Ofcom. The effect is to split responsibility for Gaelic broadcasting. Broadcasting is a reserved matter. The statutory underpinning for MG Alba is UK legislation—the Communications Act 2003—and Ofcom, the UK regulator, is arbiter of whether enough Gaelic is being broadcast. However, funding responsibility for the forerunner of MG Alba was devolved in 1999 to Scottish Ministers, who are not answerable to Ofcom.

The consequences of this split are clear to see. In 1991, a Conservative Government set up the first Gaelic television fund of nearly £10 million a year; today that would be worth £25 million, almost double MG Alba’s current budget. The Scottish Government have chosen to freeze MG Alba’s budget for the last 10 years and, if that trajectory continues, in two years’ time its budget will be worth half of what it began with in 2008. These arrangements do not provide Gaelic broadcasting with a sustainable future, with all the potentially adverse consequences for Gaelic as a living language, because, make no mistake, education and broadcasting are the twin pillars of its survival.

Let us consider for a moment the practical implications. First, viewers increasingly consume content online rather than via the traditional linear services. To succeed, Gaelic content must be prominent and visible on the new digital channels that people actually use. Digital transition requires investment. I see the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, in his place, and S4C has been provided with ring-fenced funding to develop its digital services, but BBC Alba has not.

Secondly, if Gaelic broadcasting is to engage the next generation of young would-be Gaelic speakers it needs to be able to create new content and not rely on repeats which are increasingly dated. BBC Alba can afford only to broadcast one hour and 40 minutes of new content per day and to commission three hours of drama per year.

Thirdly, one of MG Alba’s potential advantages is the freedom to invest in co-productions with commercial producers, yet it lacks the funds to be an attractive investment partner of any scale for commercial producers.

MG Alba commissioned EY to assess its future funding requirements. EY’s report suggests that an annual budget of around £25 million is required—in effect, restoring the value of the original Gaelic Television Fund —to put the business on a sustainable footing. Unfortunately —this is the main point of my amendments—there is no forum for evaluating this report because Gaelic broadcasting, MG Alba in particular, currently has no formal mechanism for ensuring that its needs are assessed in a holistic way.

This is the context for the amendments tabled in my name, which are supported by both the BBC and MG Alba. As we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, new subsection (5)(b)(ii) in Clause 1(2) places a duty on Ofcom to assess whether public service broadcasters, taken together, are producing

“a sufficient quantity of audiovisual content that is in, or mainly in, a recognised regional or minority language”,

specified as including

“Welsh, the Gaelic language as spoken in Scotland, Irish, Scots, Ulster Scots or Cornish”.

This is very welcome. It does not, however, provide sufficient protection for Gaelic broadcasting, which will otherwise, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, be swept up in a generic assessment of minority languages across all PSBs.

Amendment 6 therefore obliges Ofcom to consider specifically the needs of Gaelic broadcasting when making its assessment of sufficiency. Without this specific obligation, Ofcom could determine, for example, that an on-demand curated collection of Gaelic content is sufficient, rather than what is necessary to sustain a Gaelic media service, with at its beating heart a schedule of live daily news, sports events, and topical and lifestyle programmes.

Amendment 10 would bring the Gaelic Media Service into the scope of the PSBs to be assessed by Ofcom. Amendment 11, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, addresses the same issue. This is a very modest and narrowly focused amendment. The Gaelic Media Service would be considered a PSB only for the purposes of assessing Ofcom’s duties in new subsection (5)(b)(ii).

In practical terms, the proposed designation would formally include MG Alba in the scope of Ofcom’s five-yearly review for the period 2019-23, which will start later this year. This will provide a yardstick of sufficiency and a mechanism, which is currently missing, for assessing the needs of Gaelic broadcasting in the round. The affect is more limited than making BBC Alba a PSB in its own right, so Ministers can be reassured that, in agreeing to this amendment, they would not be creating—however great it is—another S4C, with all the associated legal, financial and other obligations, not least for the BBC, that this entails.

The other feature of these amendments is that they would tie the Scottish Government more explicitly into the process for putting Gaelic broadcasting on a more sustainable footing. MG Alba is under a statutory responsibility to provide a wide and diverse range of high-quality programmes in Gaelic. Scottish Ministers have a statutory duty annually to provide Ofcom with a sum they consider appropriate for MG Alba to discharge its responsibilities. However, there is no guidance to or formal expectations of Scottish Ministers in this regard. By bringing MG Alba within the scope of Ofcom’s assessment, Amendment 10 would establish a direct link with Scottish Ministers’ statutory funding responsibilities.

Should Ofcom determine that there is insufficient Gaelic content, the BBC and MG Alba, and by extension its funder, would be obliged to respond to Ofcom. This would create an expectation for the first time of Scottish ministerial participation in a more formal, transparent and joined-up process to consider the overall sufficiency of Gaelic media content.