BBC Governance and Regulation: Communications Committee Report

Lord Patten of Barnes Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten of Barnes]

I should straight away declare an interest. As noble Lords cannot but be aware, I am chairman of the BBC Trust. This is a fairly rare intervention for which the House should be grateful. I shall make it fairly brief, but perhaps I may say at the outset how grateful I am to noble Lords on the Cross Benches for giving me a perch and a haven for the duration of my chairmanship of the BBC.

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, on the report before us. It is a high-quality document; and that quality suggests that the life of the committee should extend not only up to but well beyond the crack of doom. I imagine that the House authorities will have taken account of all the voices raised in support of that proposition. The report was a considerable help to me when I arrived at the trust. I had said that I wanted to have a quick look at governance and make a few changes. As the noble Lord pointed out, we have responded very positively to most of the points in the report, to which I shall come back in a moment.

I should mention three of my prejudices about governance. First, it may be a consequence of the fact that I spent five years of my life working for the European Commission in Brussels that I have rather limited patience with institutional navel-gazing; I prefer to get on and try to make things work rather than engaging endlessly in institutional Lego.

Secondly, we have a national tendency to fiddle around with and reorganise the things we do best. The BBC has its faults. It can be both smug and complacent; it is not always as distinctive as it should be; it is, after all, created from the crooked timber of humanity. However, over the years, it has established a reputation as probably the best public broadcaster in the world—perhaps the best broadcaster in the world—year in, year out. We should be aware of what others have referred to as the gold standard.

Thirdly, it is not long since we shaped the governance of the BBC in the charter review. In due course, we will be debating the next charter review. If you were one of my colleagues in the executive of the BBC, you could be excused for thinking that governance had been debated to death, but doubtless it will come back for a resurrection before too long. We need to remember that the BBC's institutions have often been shaped by rude politics rather than the wisdom of philosopher kings. The noble Lord—actually, let us be clear, my noble friend—Lord Fowler was pretty right earlier when he intimated that the present structure of the BBC owes quite a lot to events surrounding the one fact that the Government got right and the BBC got wrong in the run-up to the latest Iraq war. There are quite a lot of lessons in that.

Nevertheless, despite all the debate, the BBC remains a national rather than a state broadcaster and one of the most trusted institutions in the country. If you read all the polls of which media organisations people trust, the figures are so good for the BBC that they are almost impossible to use.

I want to refer to just four points in the report. They are changes that we have made. First, we accepted much of the criticism of the complaints system in the report—that it is too complicated and often too slow—and we will shortly be consulting on specific proposals to address those issues, including appointing a chief complaints officer. Secondly, we have a good relationship with Ofcom. We have agreed to use its expertise to advise the trust more formally on the market impact of BBC proposals, as the noble Lord pointed out.

Thirdly, the trust and the executive board have agreed changes which will, I think, produce more clarity about the role of non-executive members of the executive board. We noted what the committee said about the expertise of non-executive members, which is one reason for the appointment of Dame Fiona Reynolds as a non-executive member of the board, which I am sure the House will welcome. Fourthly, I refer to the improvements we are making in in-service licences, which have worked pretty well in the past and should work even better.

I mention one other thing we have done. The issue of executive as well as talent pay was pretty toxic in the BBC. We have dealt with that pretty rapidly by implementing one of the central findings of the Hutton report and putting a cap on senior executive pay in relation to median earnings. I hope that what we have done other public bodies will do as well. I have every intention of reducing the cap steadily over the next few years.

It is a privilege to work with the BBC and with such a distinguished director-general. He and his successors will have the job of continuing to provide quality programmes with a tighter budget at a time of turbulent technological change and when, as the noble Lords, Lord Macdonald, Lord Bragg and Lord Fowler, and my noble friend Lord Birt said, the broadcasting economy is changing substantially.

At the time of the coronation, the BBC had a monopoly of the broadcast economy in this country. At the time of the Diamond Jubilee, commercial revenues are twice the size of the licence-fee revenue of the BBC. There has been a fundamental change over the years, partly because of the commercial success of Sky, and people should recognise that.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, and others have said, we are tonight celebrating the 80th birthday of the World Service. We will take financial responsibility for it, on the shoulders of the licence-fee payer, in 2014. I have given an undertaking that we will continue to fund it as well as we possibly can, and there has been appointed by the Privy Council an international trustee who sits on these Benches: the noble Lord, Lord Williams, who has considerable experience in the Foreign Office, the World Service, the academic field and the UN, where he was most recently the UN special representative in Lebanon. He will be a splendid guardian of the interests of the World Service. I hope that all of us in the BBC can live up to the extraordinary standards which the World Service has established over the years and which have made us even more respected than we would otherwise have been around the world.