Culture: Cinema

Lord Macdonald of Tradeston Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macdonald of Tradeston (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a former governor of the British Film Institute. I thank its former distinguished director, my noble friend Lord Stevenson, for initiating this debate, and congratulate him on his opening contribution, which framed the issues so well.

After leaving the BFI, my noble friend Lord Stevenson worked closely with successive Labour Governments to attract more investment into the UK film production sector. In collaboration with Gordon Brown, a long-time supporter of cinema culture, he helped devise the increasingly successful film tax relief scheme. In recent Budgets, George Osborne has made this scheme even more accessible to potential investors, as the noble Viscount, Lord Falkland, also acknowledged.

In your Lordships’ House earlier this week, the Minister said that the UK film and allied industries generate more than 100,000 jobs and contribute more than £4 billion to the national GDP. Last year our film production sector’s total spend was more than £1 billion, with most of that money coming from international companies basing productions in Britain. Just outside the M25 near Watford, Warner Bros is investing £100 million to make its Leavesden studios one of the best film facilities in Europe. The president of Warner Bros UK, Josh Berger, said recently that Britain was in “a new golden age” for film-making. The impact of this international investment is demonstrated by the Oscars and BAFTA awards won by big-budget movies such as “Gravity” and “12 Years a Slave”.

We should also celebrate the BFI’s unique contribution to our cinema culture through its financial support of recent British films such as “Sunshine on Leith”, “Philomena”, “Le Week-End” and “The Selfish Giant”. It is a good performance in these challenging times because, like other public bodies, the BFI has had its grant in aid from government cut significantly, while being asked to do more. When the incoming coalition Government abolished the UK Film Council in their bonfire of the quangos, the council’s extensive commercial responsibilities were transferred to the already overburdened BFI. My noble friend Lady Bakewell asked some very trenchant questions regarding that decision.

The new Government also set up the Film Policy Review Panel under the chairmanship of my noble friend Lord Smith of Finsbury, a former Labour Culture Secretary. It was a wise choice. When the Smith panel reported in 2012, its recommendations were supported by the Government and well received across the film industry. The review’s findings also helped the BFI shape its subsequent strategy document, Film Forever, which declared three core priorities: expanding educational opportunities and boosting audience choice; unlocking film heritage for everyone to enjoy; and, of course, supporting the future success of British film. In January this year my noble friend Lord Smith and his panel updated the review and gave the BFI a largely positive report; in a phrase it might be, “Doing well but could do better”. Across the board, a more collaborative approach by the BFI to potential partners and stakeholders was suggested.

The most direct criticism in the two-year update on film was of government inactivity. Back in 2012, in their response to my noble friend Lord Smith’s recommendations, the Government backed the panel’s call for increased investment in film by our major broadcasters. At present, BBC Films funds some original and popular films, but this investment represents a rather small percentage of the BBC’s huge programme budget for TV and radio. Our other not-for-profit public service broadcaster, Channel 4, now has as a statutory remit,

“the making of high quality films”.

Its Film4 arm is investing £15 million a year to produce an ever expanding slate of successful films. It also broadcasts the UK’s only free-to-air digital channel dedicated to films of quality from around the world, and 22% of its output is British.

That contrasts with the record of our major commercial broadcasters for film production. Back in 2012, the Government said:

“We want to see broadcasters like BSkyB, ITV and Channel 5 doing more to support the industry and this is something we intend to raise with them as a matter of priority”.

Two years on, can the Minister tell the House why nothing seems to have happened?

Apprenticeships

Lord Macdonald of Tradeston Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macdonald of Tradeston (Lab)]

My Lords, in his Budget Statement the Chancellor said,

“we have doubled the number of apprenticeships, and I will extend the grants for smaller businesses to support over 100,000 more”.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/4/14; col. 789.]

That is, of course, welcome news. It builds on the progress made by previous Labour Governments and strengthens the cross-party consensus on the importance of vocational training.

As other noble Lords have already argued, more needs to be done, but we have surely come a long way since the 1990s, when apprenticeships were in danger of dying of neglect. By the time Labour left office in 2010, apprenticeships had increased significantly to almost 500,000. The forecast for this year is 931,000, for apprentices of all ages. While respecting the caveats of my noble friend Lord Young regarding the statistics, under Labour and now the coalition, apprenticeships are again being given the priority that they deserve.

I thank my noble friend and fellow engineer Lord Young for initiating this debate. I speak on the subject fondly, having served a five-year engineering apprenticeship after leaving school at 15. It is a rare pleasure, as my noble friend Lord Martin said, to speak in the company of two other time-served Glasgow craftsmen.

The focus tonight is on 16 to 18 year-olds and how best to improve the number and quality of the apprenticeship opportunities on offer. That concern is understandable. While those of my generation started their apprenticeships at 16, most of our recent successes have been in placements for those aged 19 and over. Remarkably, as has been mentioned, many of the new apprentices are over the age of 24, as my noble friend Lord Young highlighted.

The time served has gone down from five years to perhaps just one year, a minimum length introduced in 2012 to strengthen the quality and standard of training. On the positive side, while apprenticeships were once largely in manufacturing and almost exclusively male, today I am told that half the new apprenticeships are won by women. I say “won” because I read that the demand for places is 12 times the number of jobs on offer.

Other major changes are in the range of the jobs on offer. The top sector now for new apprentices is business, administration and law, which makes up 31% of the total. Next comes the health, public services and care sector with 24%, then retail and commercial enterprise with 20%. The traditional apprenticeship sector, engineering and manufacturing technologies, is in fourth place with 13%. However, that equates to 66,000 new apprentices, which is not negligible.

The breadth of these sectors, across both public services and private companies, offers job opportunities to applicants from very diverse backgrounds and with different attributes and educational qualifications. In our rapidly changing economy, this change in the nature of apprenticeships is both inevitable and largely positive. However, the particular problems of 16 to 18 year-olds remain a concern. In 2012-13 the number of apprentices from this age group was marginally lower than it was back in 2009-10. This may be explained in part by the requirement introduced last year for young people to be in education or training until they are 17—that age will be raised to 18 next year. On the plus side, the youth contract for 16 to 17 year-olds, launched in 2012, offers employers an enhanced grant of £2,200 per annum per head for each new recruit not in education, employment or training—the NEETs. The Government also forecast a boost in apprenticeships for 16 to 18 year-olds this year, up from 179,000 to 257,000. That is quite a jump so I hope that they hit that target.

Your Lordships will be aware that many 16 to 18 year-olds would like nothing more than a job in our creative industries, where talent, drive and creativity often trump academic qualifications. The appeal is even greater when the commercial creative industries have a growth rate much higher than the rest of the UK economy. These creative industries are now estimated to make up almost 5% of all UK employment. The subset of arts and culture inside the creative industries employs more than 100,000 people directly and another 150,000 indirectly. However, at a meeting of the Performers’ Alliance here in Parliament yesterday, actors, musicians and writers complained that the recent changes to the curriculum in English schools meant that the teaching of arts and cultural subjects was suffering from the Department for Education’s emphasis on science, technology and engineering—the so-called STEM subjects. In a debate in your Lordships’ House last week, the accusation was made that music and drama classes were being cut back severely and that the number taking art GCSE had fallen by 14% between 2010 and 2013.

The fear is that pupils who might not aspire to university could be denied the creative input that might help them into an arts-related job on leaving school. Looking at the figures produced by the Government, apprenticeships for arts and culture jobs seem surprisingly limited—just 1,000 out of a total of 500,000. I know that there are many excellent skills programmes in the creative sector but they are often skewed towards highly qualified graduates and well connected interns. The initiatives of the Arts Council, UK Music and the BBC to offer more accessible apprenticeships are welcome but still number only in the hundreds. Does the Minister think there is a particular problem with availability of apprenticeships in the creative industries, and what measures might be taken to ensure that they increase in number and are made more accessible to those from less privileged backgrounds, especially for 16 to 19 year-olds?

Leveson Inquiry

Lord Macdonald of Tradeston Excerpts

Friday 11th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macdonald of Tradeston]

My Lords, at this late stage in such a long debate, having heard the main issues so well analysed, I shall base my contribution on my media experience of regulation. Having spent four decades working as a journalist and executive, mostly in television news and current affairs, I am all too aware of the many legal restraints on journalism. Compliance with the law should have been ensured in newspapers by the editors’ code and, ideally, enforced by the Press Complaints Commission. The culture in some organisations led to the code being breached, and its ethics ignored, and the resulting squalor is documented in the Leveson report. Clearly, there is still a lot of uncertainty about what progress has been made in cross-party talks and with other initiatives. One thing that everybody seems to agree on is that the press must remain free from political meddling. Even with a degree of regulation, I believe that its independence is not under threat.

Coming as I do from a background in regulated public service television, I see no real cause for concern in the smidgen of legislation proposed to underpin a “recognition body”, set up simply to guarantee the independence of a self-regulating replacement for the Press Complaints Commission. The distinguished members of that body would check periodically on the independence and effectiveness of self-regulation by the new press trust. The alarms raised by some sections of the press seem to me out of all proportion to the threat. What is proposed is a much lighter touch than existing broadcasting regulation and legislation.

The BBC and independent television have been much more vulnerable than newspapers to direct political interference. Over the years Governments have tried to influence broadcasters’ output through appointments from among the great and the good to oversee broadcasting regulation. Fortunately, most chairs and board members, once appointed, were not inclined to compromise their personal integrity in pursuit of a political agenda.

Despite all the onerous regulation, the remarkable fact is that public service broadcasters have for the past half century or more produced respected news bulletins, high-quality documentaries and investigative current affairs series such as the series I once edited—“World in Action”. We had our rows with the Independent Television Authority but considerations of public interest almost always won out. The regulators would be consulted and required to approve secret filming, bugging of conversations, breaches of so-called “official secrets” or the use of confidential documents received from whistleblowers. Only rarely did they inhibit series such as “World in Action” from broadcasting and, if they did, we could predict that they would soon read about it in a newspaper.

Let me be clear: I do not wish any of these public service obligations on the press. My point is, if you are operating inside your own editor’s code as a newspaper journalist, you have very little to fear from regulation. Like others who have spoken, I have my reservations about some of the proposals floated by Lord Justice Leveson. Much as I admire Ofcom, it should not be involved in press regulation, nor would it want to be. The Information Commissioner is right to warn that tougher data protection laws,

“could have a ‘chilling effect’ on investigative journalism”.

Changes to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act might make it easier for the police to seize journalists’ documents, identify their sources and deter whistleblowers. Given these complexities, it is no surprise that deadlines for cross-party decisions are slipping. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is not in his place, but he and his publishers have a lot of conflicting interests to reconcile, and I wish him well, but need it really take until the middle of the year for them to reach agreement? I hope that the members of the commission will follow the Prime Minister in welcoming Lord Justice Leveson’s suggestion of a conscience clause for working journalists. That is a long-standing demand of the National Union of Journalists and a reform that could help reinforce ethical considerations in newspaper practice. That change in newspaper culture has been demanded by many noble Lords today.

In television, we concluded that the legislation that required accurate, fair and impartial reporting helped generate the public trust and support that we needed when we were threatened by political pressures. Newspapers, of course, are very different in their opinionated reporting, provocative analysis and capacity to campaign and to make mischief—and long may they continue to do so. Regulation with the lightest touch in the manner proposed should not interfere with any of that. Nor can every issue be solved before a decision to legislate is taken. I say: get it done and see how it works out. Given the power of the press, they will certainly not be bullied. If they can enforce their codes and change the worst aspects of the old culture, they will attract much more public support—enough, I trust, to deter any politician who subsequently tries to interfere.

Disability Services

Lord Macdonald of Tradeston Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macdonald of Tradeston]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to my noble friend Lord Boateng for giving us this opportunity to discuss the problems of the estimated 1 million disabled people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. As he has made clear, the Scope report makes a persuasive case in arguing that ethnic communities in particular are underinformed and poorly served. Their difficulties in accessing treatment are obviously worsened by problems with language, form-filling and bureaucracy and by simply not understanding the jargon of well intentioned specialists.

I strongly support Scope’s recommendation that a network of BME advocates be developed to improve the quality of communication that is so vital in defining medical conditions, patient needs and the nature of the support and treatment available from local commissioners and service providers. As the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, said, very little is simple when dealing with the range and complexity of disabilities, yet what we may experience as frustration and exasperation can deepen into despair for those most in need, especially if they are also socially isolated. Sadly, many of those questioned during research for this report claimed that they were stigmatised and isolated inside their own BME communities.

Of course, disabled people have been, and still are, stigmatised across our society, despite the progress made in recent years and the extraordinarily positive impact of this summer’s Paralympic Games. The Scope report also rightly stresses that cultural differences must be acknowledged and respected. Certainly, we must be very sensitive to them, but we must also be robust in constantly challenging attitudes that are rooted in prejudice or ignorance, whatever the cultural factors that nurture hostility to disabled people across the UK, whether those people are ethnic or otherwise.

Scope is a national disability organisation providing information and support, particularly to those with cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy is the most common motor disorder, with two or three cases occurring per 1,000 births. In the UK, that adds up over the years to 100,000 or more sufferers. In perhaps 20% of cerebral palsy cases there is also a related condition generally defined as dystonia. Here I declare an interest as patron of the Dystonia Society.

Dystonia is a neurological condition that causes involuntary and sometimes painful muscle spasms as a result of incorrect signals from the brain. Dystonia can affect many parts of the body. The symptoms include painful twisting of the neck, what we call writers’ cramp, eyes clamping shut, limbs contorting or difficulties simply in speaking or eating. An estimated 70,000 adults and children in the UK have some form of dystonia, of which there are more than 30 different types. The experience of the Dystonia Society may highlight some of the problems that voluntary groups face in relation to those in the BME communities with less common disabilities.

When a disability is little known or rare, the problems of access to treatment faced by black and minority ethnic sufferers are further increased. First, the general lack of awareness of dystonic symptoms is even lower in BME communities. Secondly, since dystonia sufferers often struggle to have their condition properly treated, those from BME backgrounds bereft of support and advocacy risk further marginalisation in the provision of services. However, lack of awareness does not imply lack of importance. Although individual diseases may be rare, collectively they present a major problem for the National Health Service. It is estimated that rare diseases of some kind will affect about 6% of the UK population at some time, perhaps 3.5 million people in total.

On that calculation, perhaps 300,000 or 400,000 people from BME communities will suffer at some point from a rare disease. Unfortunately, many will continue to suffer in silence, undiagnosed and untreated, unless their problems are more actively addressed. Too often we lack the evidence to pin down these problems.

For example, with lesser known conditions, the incidence of dystonia is still uncertain because the epidemiological data are limited. Worldwide there have been some studies that suggest that its prevalence is similar across Chinese, Egyptian and Asian groups studied, but for our BME communities in Britain, such as the Afro-Caribbean community, the data are very limited. It is therefore quite possible that prevalence in some communities is higher than average. For instance, it is known that a gene that causes generalised dystonia—the DYT1 gene—has a disproportionate incidence among Ashkenazi Jews. Despite the good work done by Jewish Genetic Disorders UK to increase awareness of the condition, the Jewish community in the UK is probably not as well informed as that in the United States.

Other problem areas are delays in both timely diagnosis and access to specialist treatment. The average time to diagnosis for dystonia is still longer than three years. For BME communities, we suspect that the delays must be even longer, but again we cannot be sure because no data are available on times to diagnosis. Neurologists who work with groups of dystonia patients also report that participants are very largely white and British born. Similarly, the 3,000-strong membership of the Dystonia Society does not reflect the likely incidence of the condition in BME communities, and ethnic minorities make little contact with our advice line or information website. That is despite the commendable efforts of Dystonia Society staff and the 38 branches to increase awareness and engagement across the country.

The truth is that voluntary organisations like ours, which help those with rare diseases, tend to be too small and underresourced to do effective outreach work with scattered BME sufferers. The Dystonia Society and others like it would therefore welcome the opportunity to contribute their specialist expertise to, for instance, the national race equality strategy advocated by Scope. We are also keen to work within the new structures of the National Health Service, especially at local level, on targeted information campaigns to build awareness of rare disabilities and to develop more comprehensive databases to ensure fairer access to services.

We should support the call on the Department of Health to provide leadership in improving collaboration among local authorities, the new clinical commissioning groups, service providers and ethnic communities on all disability issues. The Scope report, with its extensive research and cogent analysis, includes a series of other recommendations that seem, at least to me, both practical and affordable. I hope that the Minister will agree.