BBC Charter Review (Communications Committee Report)

Lord Maxton Excerpts

Thursday 21st April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maxton (Lab)]

My Lords, I am last but, I hope, not least. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Best, for the excellent way in which he introduced his report, and for the report itself, which is very good, although there are criticisms that I will make of it as we go along. For a start, the report does not mention the fact that the BBC ought to be established by an Act of Parliament, not by royal charter. That ought to have been in the report, and it should have been said loud and clear.

On the idea from the noble Lord, Lord Lester, for an independent board and so on, I would like to combine the two and suggest that we ought to look at an advise-and-consent procedure, whereby anyone who is named as an appointee should appear before a Select Committee of the House of Commons before being appointed. They would then be appointed thereafter. That is just a thought that I am throwing into the debate.

On the licence fee, I think that it is time that we looked at it. I am not saying that my noble friend Lord Desai’s ideas are the right ones, but we certainly have to look at it. We have to remember that the licence fee was introduced, in the first place, for one radio in one house. It was then expanded to include one television and one radio in one house. Now, if you take just myself in my house in Hamilton as an example, we have eight different ways of watching television—we have two televisions, two computers and two phones, which we can watch television on; I even have a phone in my car, which I emphasise is a Skoda—as well as having a radio in my car, and a radio in my son’s car as well. We are all covered by a single licence fee. It cannot be right that we have one licence fee to cover so many different options.

I am standing here today with two devices in my pockets—one my mobile phone, one my mini iPad—on which I could watch television now. In fact, I could go further than that, because if I forget to record a programme at home in Hamilton, I can look it up on the Virgin app on my mobile and set it to record the programme. I can do that now, standing here—although I will not. That makes a nonsense of the whole idea of having a single licence fee to cover one house, which was the initial idea. It is regressive and it means that those who are poorer or older—not a lot older than me, maybe—and who have only one television and one radio in their house pay exactly the same as I pay for all the devices I have in my house, and that cannot be right.

My third point relates to a word that has not been mentioned in the whole of this debate—yet no other area has seen a bigger decline in BBC output than sport. It used to be the case that, if you wanted to watch or listen to a football match or a cricket match or whatever, you went to the BBC. The BBC cannot do that anymore. It appears that it cannot afford it, and maybe it cannot. However, there are a lot of other sports that are not professional which would welcome the BBC showing their sport on television. I am told that netball, for instance, which is now being shown on Sky, has become a very popular sport indeed. Sky shows it, young girls are encouraged to go and play netball, and as a result the number of people who participate in that sport has increased. Noble Lords may say, “What’s this got to do with the BBC?”. The BBC’s mission statement is to “inform, educate and entertain”. I accept that sport entertains, but it also educates. There is a lot of evidence that, if you show a sport on television, you raise the participation rate of that sport generally in the country, and as a result you increase the levels of health in the country. There is no question that playing sport is a way of ensuring that people are healthy. They may not necessarily lose a large amount of weight when doing sport but they are kept healthy.

I will also raise an issue, which again was not raised in the report, which is that the BBC has a wonderful, enormous archive, both as regards sport and a whole range of different programmes. Why is that archive not readily available to all of us? Why are we not able to watch programmes on the BBC website? We can watch some programmes which are on Gold, or whatever the channel is called these days, but a lot of them are not. That brings me back to sport, because a whole range of great sporting events are never shown on television but they are in the archive. The BBC promised years ago that it was going to digitalise its archive. It has failed to do so and it has failed to put it on its website.

I now turn to the major point. I accept the report, which I think is good, but I do not like the title, Reith not Revolution. I looked up Lord Reith on the internet—not on the BBC website but on Google. I googled his name and discovered what a nasty piece of goods he was. He was a thoroughly nasty man. He supported Hitler and Mussolini during the 1930s. He also disliked Winston Churchill. There may be a reason for that, but he was an enemy of Winston Churchill throughout the whole of his career. He also never watched television. He sometimes listened to the radio when he was director-general, but I do not think that he ever listened to it after that.

However, my main point relates to the words “not revolution”. The fact is that we are living through a revolution. We are in the middle of a technological revolution that goes much further than just the media, but the media are living through it as well. Since the 10-year period when I sat on the Select Committee under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, the world, even in those 10 years, has changed dramatically with the advent of the iPad, the iPhone and all these new devices and means of getting on to the internet. We have seen the way in which apps are now used on the internet. There is now a whole range of things that were not available in those days. So there is a revolution and it is going to continue. I can watch programmes on my television set via my iPad, and that will become easier and easier to do. How do we combat that?

I am a supporter of the BBC. I believe that it ought to continue and that it ought to be part and parcel of the revolution, but it will become a producer of programmes—and I am happy to pay a licence fee towards that—rather than a broadcaster in the sense that we now know it. People will not watch a television or listen to a radio; they will record programmes and watch them on catch-up or on the internet. They will do that in a variety of ways, but they will still be watching the BBC.