BBC and Public Service Broadcasting

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, I am grateful to speak in this debate and I join in the justifiably effusive congratulations to my noble friend Lord Young. This has been one of the most impressive and informed debates I have sat through in this Chamber, and we have many impressive ones—it has been really tremendous.

The role of public service broadcasting is a crucial issue. I highlighted it recently in a report I was privileged to prepare for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on threats to media freedom throughout Europe. As I reported, public service broadcasters are under increasing threat from the growing number of authoritarian Governments in Europe today, and now, sadly, we see it happening here in the United Kingdom, as my noble friends Lady Liddell and Lord Puttnam said. As was made clear to me by MPs from all over Europe at the parliamentary assembly, the BBC is seen as the gold standard in public service broadcasting.

As my noble friends have said, the BBC is under attack in different ways: the principle of funding through the licence fee, in particular; but also, as others have said, in the despicable way of passing the buck for free TV licences for the over-75s, which is and ought to be the responsibility of the Government, and the Department for Work and Pensions in particular. It is disgraceful that that buck should be passed to the BBC. It will have a huge impact on vulnerable pensioners up and down the country, particularly those who fall just short of qualifying for pension credit but are by no means well off. It is those people who will be hardest hit by the changes, contrary to what was in Tory manifesto, which promises older people

“the security and dignity they deserve”.

Loneliness is a critical issue facing older people. It is an issue I have raised previously, in this Chamber and in my work as chair of Age Scotland, and it is one that the Government pretend to be concerned about. Research by Age UK found that more than 1 million people say that TV is their main source of company, yet the lack of responsibility from the Government to honour their promise to support older people who rely heavily on TV has been rightly met with overwhelming dismay and disappointment. That 2019 manifesto said:

“We recognise the value of free TV licences for over-75s”,


yet the Government still continue with the nonsense that their licences should be funded by the BBC, despite the widespread opposition.

Another worrying aspect of this approach is that asking the BBC to take on this responsibility must be incompatible with data protection laws, as well as being a time-consuming and costly exercise. Above all, I fear that some pensioners who will, in fact, remain entitled to free TV licences will nevertheless pay the fee for fear of prosecution, the resultant fines and even the threat of imprisonment if this remains a criminal offence. It is outrageous that the Government should put the most vulnerable people in our society in this position.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

We are now into March. This scheme is supposed to come into operation in a couple of months, yet we do not know how it is going to operate, who is eligible or whether the data protection laws will come into it. The last time I raised this, the noble Baroness said that she was disappointed that the BBC had not taken the funding on board. What is happening in relation to sorting this out?

[Baroness Barran]

If he will forgive me, in the interests of time I will write to the noble Lord with some of the detail. He raised a point about data sharing and the over-75s concession. The BBC’s decision document sets out that the BBC will operate a self-verification model. Therefore, the issues that he has raised should not arise but I am happy to write to him in detail about this.

A number of noble Lords, including the noble Lords, Lord Judd, Lord Hennessy and Lord West, raised soft power—a matter that I have already touched on. The Government strongly support the BBC’s mission to bring high-quality and impartial news to audiences across the world. The noble Lord, Lord West, had done some clever maths on expenditure.