Cairncross Review

Lord McNally Excerpts

Tuesday 12th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

Now your Lordships are rising to the bait, which I appreciate. It was, of course, the same newspaper in Llanelli—and in Llangennech and Llwchwr—but the front page was different. When somebody had moved out of a house, a boat had sunk, somebody had passed the 11-plus or there was to be a flower-arranging display in one of the local chapels, it was my job to tell the community about it.

Community cohesion is undergirded by an active press. None of us should simply take for granted that its disappearance will not have effects. How can the Government address this? The BBC has embedded reporters into local areas, which is brilliant. How much more of this can we hope to do? What about the idea of a regulator, which was picked out from the report by the press this morning? How effective will such a regulator be? What will his or her terms of reference be? Will there be teeth to the job that that person is asked to do?

There are so many questions, but above and beyond them is a very real concern. This is a matter which belongs to Parliament as a whole—and to bipartisan approaches—and is a real problem at a local level. I conclude my remarks by emphasising once again the levels of concern, the health of communities and the need for instruments such as a local newspaper to forge an identity for a locality. Burry Port was never Llangennech, and Llwchwr was never Llanelli, because the press helped us give expression to a real sense of identity. How on behalf of the Government will the Minister—and how will we as a Parliament—make practical proposals to achieve these noble ends?

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, paints a romantic and nostalgic picture of the local press, and he is right to do so. But, in trying to solve the problems that face us in somehow helping the Burry Port Star, we must beware. The press owners have come with a begging bowl. They earlier proclaimed their resistance to any government interference, but quite ready to dip their hands into the public purse are very large and rich companies, many of which have delivered redundancy after redundancy to local papers in favour of their shareholders.

That is one of the reasons why local journalism is in the state that it is in. I also suggest that the National Union of Journalists might be added to the list of people to consult that the Minister read out. There is a serious challenge to local media. Dame Frances set it out very bleakly in her report and the Minister repeated it. There is massive technological change and that impacts on how news is received and—particularly with the under-25s—how it is digested.

I welcome some of the actions announced by the Minister to refer some of the recommendations to relevant bodies. However, the ambitions of the Government and newspaper proprietors would be more credible if they had not been so eager to bury the Leveson report and ignore its call for the establishment of a regulator set up by royal charter which could do many of the tasks called for in this report.

As I said, freedom from Government does not seem to stop the press barons from dipping into the public purse. Therefore, although I welcome the recommendations on digital and media literacy, online advertising and news quality obligations, we should be hard-nosed about how and where tax relief and innovation fund money is spent. It is not there simply to line the pockets of Newsquest, JPI Media and Reach, which are all big, profitable companies that have taken the lion’s share of the existing Local Democracy Reporting Service, which costs the BBC £8 million.

Some of the powers advocated in this report could be taken on by the Press Recognition Panel, the independent body established by Parliament under royal charter. The recommendations on how to bring the FANGs within the rule of law go wider than the issues covered by this report but its recommendations on new codes of conduct for online platforms are to be welcomed.

But what do we find in the report? As usual, it is a quick dive to try to weaken the BBC. In almost 40 years of being involved in this I have explained to various media proprietors that 90 years ago a Conservative Government had the common sense to nationalise the BBC as a public service broadcaster with a mandate that consciously distorted the market in favour of public service broadcasting. They want to have a go at the BBC online because it carries the same credibility and weight as the broadcast BBC. I hope that although the Minister has asked Ofcom to look at this, Ofcom will be very sceptical about trying to weaken one of the strongest public service journalism outlets in this country, one which should be defended.

I hope also that the Minster will use his good influence to secure a full day’s debate in this House. This is an important report; so is the one published today by the Press Recognition Panel. This is an ongoing debate and the knowledge that exists in this House would be of benefit in taking a very wide agenda forward.

[Lord Keen of Elie]

I thank the noble Lords. I entirely concur with the observations of the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, and the emphasis that he laid on local journalism and its impact on and importance to local democracy and indeed to wider societal issues that arise at a local level. To that extent, I believe that we are all pleased with the steps taken by the BBC with regard to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, which has been effective. The conundrum now is how to redress the balance. I believe that a starting point is for the CMA, which has experience and expertise in this area, to look at how the market is working. That will not be a solution in itself but it will give us a starting point from which we can work. As regards a regulator, that is a medium-term or longer-term ambition. Again, we will have to look at how we can develop that, but we are conscious of its importance.

The noble Lord, Lord McNally, made the perfectly valid point that many of our printed press corporations remain profitable. The difficulty is the disparity between the profitability in some areas and the poverty in others, as illustrated recently by the demise of one of the largest publishers of local newspapers in the country. In so far as the press industry seeks to, as the noble Lord put it, put its fingers into the tax pot, it is fair to say that he can anticipate that the Treasury will be pretty hard-nosed about that. We will seek to ensure that any benefits that can be provided go to the right place for the development of public-interest journalism.

I do not see this as an attempt to weaken the BBC, although there might be issues there that we will look at. I appreciate the importance of the BBC as a source of reliable journalism, but perhaps there are areas where it goes where it would not have gone before. I am not sure that it is necessarily in the public interest to have “Love Island” news online—although I may be corrected by some. It seems to me that these are areas where, for example, more commercial enterprises might be allowed into the market. I will just raise that as an issue.

I welcome the comments that have been made. We will want to review matters. The noble Lord raised the question of a debate. Of course, we have the forthcoming White Paper as well, and it may be that, in the light of that, a wider debate will be appropriate.