Media Literacy (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord McNally Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, this has been an encouraging debate, although the Government’s response to our report was a little last-minute, as has been said. My noble friend Lord Storey did not even know that we now have a Minister to cover this. That was not his fault: rather, it was a matter of the delivery of the action plan.

My skin in the game goes back even further. I was on the Puttnam committee that gave pre-legislative scrutiny to the Communications Act 2003—the Act that created Ofcom—and one of the responsibilities we wrote into Ofcom’s mandate was education on media literacy. I think it is fair to say that Ofcom had other things to do in the first 20 years of its life: nevertheless, media literacy was something important, and the technical, social and economic changes that have taken place since 2003 have only increased its importance.

When I was not embroiled in student politics, I was at UCL studying economic and social history. One of the things that always stuck in my mind was the famous Lord Sherbrooke quote after the 1867 Reform Act that we must now set about educating our masters—the realisation that an extended electorate was safer if it was an educated electorate.

We have almost the same problem now in reverse. We have a technology that can inform that electorate and a real need for the electorate to understand the various parts of the technology that gives them information now. In my more pessimistic moments, I think that the threat to stable government, democracy and the workings of liberal democracy—in a broader sense, not a party-political sense—are probably under more threat now than they have been in my lifetime. We have to equip our societies to see, assess and respond to those threats as a matter of real urgency.

We now have three Ministers leading on this area according to the information received today. I always hated the term junior Ministers, but that is what they are; they are not heads of their departments. I agree with much of what has been said. There is a need for cross-government co-operation on this, and I have had some experience of that. That ability to get cross-departmental co-operation needs real leadership from the centre, so I hope it does not do too much damage to his reputation to suggest that as well as the three Ministers announced today, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Darren Jones, who serves as Minister to the Prime Minister and has a fairly blank menu to fill in, could do a real service by making sure that there is the kind of co-operation that has been advocated for today with cross-departmental working. Perhaps only a Cabinet Minister with direct access to the Prime Minister would be able to achieve that.

I was hoping that we would have unanimity, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, and others have said, on the importance of the BBC in delivering this capability to our society. I hope that as part of the charter review responsibility for media literacy is given in part to the BBC, which can use its tremendous skills to deliver it.

Interestingly, as many of us do, I mentioned to my son John that I was speaking on this debate. He said, “Oh, you should look at ‘Crash Course’ on YouTube”. I said, “What’s ‘Crash Course’?” He said, “‘Crash Course’ is an American programme on media literacy”, so looked at it and it is very good. I am not suggesting that we start from scratch on this. Although we quite often criticise our American cousins for various aspects of their media, at local level and at this individual level, they are showing that media literacy can be taught and understood. I am not that defeatist on this.

I have wandered on; I am sorry. We have a battle on our hands and the technology is complex. The BBC is something not to be destroyed but defended. It has extended its responsibilities. The majority of the Committee would keep to that, I think. However, I still fear that the power of big tech is influencing government in a worrying way. Perhaps it is for Parliament to take the actions that will make sure that our society is protected from what is, as I say, probably one of the most disruptive technologies since the invention of the printing press.