Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Wednesday 1st December 2010 Lords Chamber

I should again emphasise that I am in no way anti-BBC; I think noble Lords may have detected that. On the contrary, I think it is fundamental for the state of the media in this country, but my view is that this divided structure does the BBC no favours whatever. It is in the interests of the BBC that we should have one board and one chairman, and that means abolishing the BBC Trust. No one seriously believes that the trust will survive another charter review in four, five or six years. No one thinks that if we are going to go ahead with a charter review, the BBC Trust will come out of it as a solution because it is virtually certain that it will not. Rather than waiting for five or six years, there is everything to be said for acting now—saving money, certainly, but above all getting clearer lines of responsibility than we have at the moment. I beg to move.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of your Lordships’ Select Committee on Communications and pay tribute to the stewardship of the former chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, who has just spoken. It was interesting to listen to the initial spat between the noble Lord and another former member of the committee about whether this amendment could be permitted. In truth, the whole of his speech appeared to be about moving the BBC into Schedule 7, not Schedule 1. The attack, as it was, on the current governance arrangements of the BBC was well made and echoed what was in the Select Committee’s report a few years ago, but it is really about change, not abolition. However, I will pass on because we are in tickling and teasing mode rather than worrying too much about exactly how these things are coming out at the moment.

Today’s debate has been, for those of us who are somewhat new to the arrangements for discussing Bills, a wonderful tour d’horizon of the far reaches of our constitutional arrangements in this country. I did not know enough about agriculture, justice, the Audit Commission or various things to do with shipbuilding. I may even have heard about aircraft—or was it the other way around? I was not quite sure at the end of that discussion whether we had in fact had an answer to the amendment earlier today, but, again, I will pass on. We were only tickling there. Underneath all this, however, does the discussion not raise one or two principles? It seems to me that, although a lot of the heat and energy in this debate has been about whether we are doing it right, the elephant in the room—that terrible hackneyed phrase—is really what this says about our constitutional measures.

Every Government and every governing operation has to work out how to deliver the services that legislatures create for them. In that, we have to think about subsidiarity—the lowest level to which we can devolve the operations which are to be carried out, and make sure they are done properly. We have to give protection from undue interference from those who have set up the arrangements and freedom to those who are charged with getting on with the duties to undertake reasonable stewardship. I do not hear those principles coming through very much in the debate we have been having, but they are surely underlined in what we are saying.

The amendment to which I am speaking is really, as I said, a teasing amendment—a hypothetical situation perhaps. But the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, brought out very well, and I am sure other speakers who will join us in this debate will also say, that nobody argues against the very special place that the BBC holds in this country. It makes entertainment programmes among so many other things, so it obviously affects every aspect of our culture, and it informs and therefore changes the terms of the political debate. It is absolutely at the heart of what we believe our country is about. It is important that we find some form of super-protection, and I think the noble Lord was saying the same thing, both within the environment in which the BBC operates, but also against Ministers and even against Parliament. One could not imagine, if the BBC were to be abolished, the DCMS accepting responsibility for all the various aspects of our life that the BBC influences. That must not be right.

We could not abolish the BBC, but how do we manage it? That is the question that we have to think about. Clearly, the state has to balance the interest it has in economy, efficiency and effectiveness, and apply that to all its public bodies. I worked in a similar body, the British Film Institute, some time ago; just before I arrived, it had negotiated very hard indeed against the then Government to achieve a royal charter, which was given to the BBC about 50 years after its incorporation in 1933. We celebrated that, because it felt as if we had received the gold standard in terms of freedom from interference from Ministers and those in authority. It was illusory, obviously, because Ministers are very persuasive and good at getting around anything that could possibly smack of concern about these sorts of issues; but it was something that we ritually touched every month or two, just to reassure ourselves that we did exist, that we had that protection and that we should have had it. The BBC is in a similar position. Its charter is renewable, as it was not in the BFI’s case, but there was sufficient public interest and discussion in the renewal process to ensure that the BBC would not be affected too badly.

My concern in this amendment—and I am not entirely sure whether I am speaking in favour of it or against it, but I suppose I am tickling it—is that this is really about how one would find in a constitutional settlement, perhaps a codified constitution towards which we are surely moving, a way of expressing some of the issues that appear in our day-to-day existence, which we take for granted, such as academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the ability to switch on our television and see unmediated news and entertainment. These things have to be written in somewhere, not be dealt with simply by a framework Bill, a subsequent affirmative order or in speeches made in this House or another place. That is more important than some of the points made around other bodies here. There are one or two organisations and bodies that we would recognise as being hard-wired in our operation of this country, but I have yet to find an appropriate place within the various organisations that we currently see.

In another debate at another time, I encouraged the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, to talk a little more about his ideas for a council of state, which might in some way take on the responsibilities of this Chamber. It may be that at some point we should think again about how we account for those senior bodies, such as the BBC, that we must have in our arrangements. I leave that thought with this House.

[Lord Maxton]

My Lords, given that I waited 40 minutes for a bus last night in the cold, I do not intend to detain the House for long tonight. I do not think that this amendment could be part of this Bill. The BBC is part of the royal charter. To get rid of the trustees, as the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, said, you would need to put the BBC on a statutory basis in an Act of Parliament. I accept the tenor of his amendment, and I supported the report when it was published in terms of not wishing to have trustees but having a different type of governance. However, my worry is that, if we get to the point where the BBC is to be established by an Act of Parliament, it would mean passing an Act of Parliament to abolish the present situation—essentially abolishing the present BBC—and then re-establishing it. In those circumstances, given what the noble Lord said about the threat that is coming to the BBC from external forces, we would put the BBC under even greater threat. That would be the whole existence of the BBC in those circumstances.

Having said that, I have a lot of sympathy with what the noble Lord has said, not just because the governance of the BBC is wrong in terms of the trustees. This is no criticism of the trustees personally, but they have failed in one of their primary responsibilities—to hold the BBC, somehow independently of the BBC, to account. They have failed to do that job properly in one particular regard. The BBC, after all, is funded entirely out of public funds, and the trustees should say to the BBC that it should be accountable to the public in the same way as is every public body funded by the taxpayer. In particular, as the noble Lord will know, I believe that the whole BBC—every person, both employee and contractor—should be subject to the Freedom of Information Act in the same way as are all other public employees. Therefore, we should know exactly what some of the people in the BBC earn, and I do not mean the big entertainment stars. I am much more interested in knowing what some journalists earn, as they attack those of us who are public servants in other ways, including attacks on MPs about their expenses. In that sense, the BBC Trust has failed in its duty to hold the BBC to account. For that reason, I would support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, but I feel that if his amendment is carried it would put the BBC as a whole at some risk.