Ofcom: Appointment of Chair

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Tuesday 26th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Government on the launch of their great comedy drama “Ofcom Succession”. My understanding is that the first process was stopped because the Government had failed to appoint a headhunter to seek out the highest-quality candidates to apply for this important role. Can my noble friend tell me, first, has a headhunter been appointed? Secondly, if so, who is it? Finally, can I have their phone number?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his question. Yes, following Cabinet Office approval and a fair and open tender process, an executive search firm has been appointed. It is Saxton Bampfylde and I am sure that its contact details are available on its website.

UK Journalism (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to speak in this debate as a member of my noble friend Lord Gilbert’s committee, though I had very little input into this report and so can speak objectively about it. My noble friend Lord Gilbert began by praising our clerks and the people who work for the committee. Of course, he himself deserves a great deal of praise as a superb chair of our committee. He steers it with a deft hand at the tiller and it has been a pleasure to serve with him so far. Has that got me a lot of brownie points? Yes—good. Next time I apply to ask a question at an evidence session, I will be top of the list.

There needs to be a dose of realism about the future of UK journalism because a lot of the crisis in journalism has been brought about by journalists themselves—or, more accurately, by the proprietors. Let us not forget that newspapers were established not as an act of altruism or charity but to make money. Eighteenth-century newspapers were vehicles to carry advertisements and the news was an aside. Like many other content industries, whether music, television or film, newspapers have struggled to adapt to changes in technology. Indeed, the disruption of technology has brought about new news providers because everyone will fill a vacuum—whether it is Tortoise, Politico, Axios or Sifted. There will always be an opportunity for us to get news.

The reason why we talk about newspapers and journalism and why we talk, as politicians and policymakers, about intervening is, to echo what my noble friend said, the huge importance, particularly in our democracy, of people having access to trusted sources of news and journalism. By the way, in my earlier remarks, I did not want to denigrate in any way the professional qualifications and training that many of our journalists have. That is why it is important that we debate this and that we have this report.

I also use this opportunity to echo, to a certain extent, what the noble Lord, Lord McNally, said. It is exhausting how often the BBC is attacked. We need to take a step back and realise just how extraordinarily lucky we are to have that institution in this country. There is no such thing as a perfect institution. I do not necessarily believe that it is the billionaire proprietors who are pushing this agenda; it is just easy, lazy journalism to always attack the BBC. We threaten its future at our peril, not the BBC’s peril.

I congratulate the committee that took all the evidence and produced this report on its instant win with the establishment of the Digital Markets Unit. My noble friend Lord Gilbert was quite right to press the Government to bring in the legislation to make it work.

I want to focus only on one point and one recommendation in the report, because of the short time allotted. It is the point that my noble friend Lord Gilbert referred to about collaboration of the different organisations that seek to support local news and journalism. There is a lot of good will out there, but good will can often be misdirected or energy can be wasted. We have Facebook giving money, we have Google giving money and Ministers are constantly demanding that the BBC support regional news and give it a platform. But all these efforts could be much more effective if they were more co-ordinated.

It was remiss of me not to take yet another chance to welcome the new Minister to the Dispatch Box—I welcomed him earlier in Questions. This is a chance for him to show his mettle. He is dressed elegantly today because he took a Question on fashion, but he is also a man of action. I know that, having listened to the chairman of our committee, he will leave this debate, go back to his officials and say, “Action this day. We want to see Facebook, Google, the BBC and others in my office”—because Covid restrictions are at an end—“for a face-to-face meeting to discuss how we can put all their efforts together to make it more joined up and co-ordinated to provide financial support for regional news journalism.” As I say, regional news has brought many of its problems on itself. If anyone tries to access a story in a local newspaper on their mobile it is a nightmare—a terrible experience. However, maybe we can help it at the other end by co-ordinating the efforts of the major platforms and of our much-loved, cherished BBC.

UK Fashion Industry

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

Sadly, the negotiated outcome which the UK proposed with the EU was not something it was willing to agree in the negotiations before we left the European Union, but the Intellectual Property Office is considering concerns such as those which the noble Lord raises to see whether any changes can be made to the UK’s design systems to address the issue in the future.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, I echo the congratulations offered to my noble friend on his new appointment on the Front Bench. We look forward to seeing him on the front row of many fashion shows at London Fashion Week next week, where he will be an adornment and perhaps even a distraction.

My noble friend will know that many highly successful domestic fashion companies manufacture in this country. They depend on high-net worth foreign individuals coming here and buying their stock. They used to come here because they could reclaim their VAT. The Chancellor has of course got rid of this scheme. Will my noble friend brief himself on the impact this has had on domestic fashion companies and keep engaged with the Treasury, as does our Business Secretary, on this important issue as it develops?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his warm words of welcome. He knows better than most how lucky I am to have the job I have just begun.

The issue of VAT is one that my noble friend has campaigned on, both in your Lordships’ House and in another place. We did not have the choice of maintaining the VAT retail export scheme as it was; the choice was between extending it to EU residents, at significant cost to the UK taxpayer, or removing it completely as WTO rules mean that goods bound for different destinations must be treated the same. I will of course look into this further, as he suggests, but my understanding is that fewer than 10% of visitors to the UK use the VAT retail export scheme and that extending it to the EU could increase total costs by up to £1.4 billion a year.

Telecommunications (Security) Bill

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 29th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I am grateful to have the opportunity to take part in this important debate. This Bill is, broadly speaking, uncontroversial. No one would seek to oppose legislation that makes our telecommunications networks in the UK more secure. Certainly, if one looks at the debates in the other place, amendments were very few and far between, and they were tweaking amendments rather than fundamental.

It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, and I have a great deal of sympathy with what he said about combating online scams; whether the Bill can be used as a method to test the Government’s resolve in combating this issue remains to be seen. I certainly recall when I was the telecoms Minister working closely with Ofcom and the Information Commissioner’s Office to try to combat nuisance calls. There are a variety of factors in play in trying to combat this kind of plague. One is the willingness of the regulators to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty in carrying out prosecutions, and another is certainly technology solutions, which can and should be encouraged by all the operators.

The third—the noble Lord referred to the Government’s review of action on fraud—is a much wider landscape approach from the Government on how to combat this. For example—and this is no criticism of the police—it seems to me that we still have a Victorian police structure in the 21st century. We should be thinking about leaning in and recruiting cyber specialists far more effectively to work in the police force to combat these kinds of crimes, not simply bringing people to justice but combating this kind of work on the network.

I will begin with one of the elements that lies behind this Bill: the concern over Huawei and its presence in our telecoms network. Many noble Lords have set out strong views on Huawei and the Chinese industry in general during this debate. I was particularly struck by the excellent speech of my noble friend Lady Stroud. When I was a Minister, I worked closely with Huawei, in the sense that we had in place a protocol with the security services to check the kind of equipment Huawei was installing in the networks. It was a transparent process; nobody was pretending that Huawei was not involved in selling equipment to our telecoms providers, nor that it was not being installed in the UK telecoms networks. That equipment was reviewed in a very transparent way and Huawei was forced to put in place a UK board made up of UK citizens to supervise its work.

While I wholly condemn Chinese behaviour as far as the Uighurs and Hong Kong are concerned, one should be cautious in assuming that every piece of Chinese commercial activity is somehow linked to espionage. I certainly do not think that, when one of my children uses TikTok, they are somehow being caught by the Chinese state. There is some irony that we often debate these issues while looking at our iPhones, which of course are manufactured in China, or perhaps using a Dell laptop supplied by the Parliamentary Estate, which has been made in China as well. One must be open-eyed and transparent about this, but not assume that everything coming from China will undermine our national security. Nevertheless, I wholly agree with my noble friend that one of the problems with Huawei was that it was effectively an unfair competition. Our markets are much more open to foreign investment than the Chinese market, and Huawei was certainly heavily subsidised by the Chinese state, so a pushback in that sense is very welcome.

The key to this Bill is ensuring that we have secure telecoms infrastructure, and I echo the remarks of noble Lords about the general resilience of our infra- structure. It is not only state actors who can provide malign effects on it; we have only to look at the recent SolarWinds attack on a critical piece of US infrastructure to see how easy it is for criminal groups, sometimes tacitly supported by the states in which they reside, to attack our networks. To make those as robust and secure as possible must be an absolute priority for the Government as we move more and more into the digital age.

It is quite right that this Bill comes forward to put security duties on our telecoms companies for the first time. I note that the detail of those security duties will be contained in regulations and hope that the Minister will bring us up to date on how those regulations are progressing. I also note that Ofcom will take a key role in overseeing how those duties are fulfilled, working closely with the National Cyber Security Centre. I am delighted to see that Ofcom’s budget has been increased to take account of those new duties.

Given the recent political furore over Ofcom, this is a useful reminder that it is not a political regulator; it is a boring but essential regulator that carries out vital work to keep our network secure and our communication markets competitive. I hope the Government take that point on board and give Ofcom as much freedom as possible to carry on doing the excellent work it has done for some 20 years. Ofcom is working more and more with other regulators such as the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Competition and Markets Authority. This is partly out of necessity, because to hire the talent that these regulators need, they will sometimes now have to hire employees who work across all three regulators. It is an illustration of how regulation is becoming more and more intertwined.

With that in mind, I hope that the Minister will bring us up to date on how Ofcom is working with other regulators to keep all our essential infrastructure secure—and with regulators across the world, because this affects us all, particularly western democracies. I also hope the important work carried out by the noble Lord, Lord Livingston, on supply chain diversification will be leaned into. I particularly support his call for government-sponsored research into how open RAN networks can play a vital role.

Finally, can the Minister bring us up to date on how well new vendors are doing in coming into the market? With Huawei effectively expelled from our market over the next five years, I hope we will see many more European vendors able to take up the slack and provide the equipment that our infrastructure providers need.

Destination Management Organisations

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government recognise the role that regional transport authorities can play in providing information and assistance to visitors, as my noble friend has outlined, particularly when they co-ordinate that work with the DMOs. I have already mentioned the £25 billion provided to support the sector, which has been one of the worst hit; we have supported over 87% of businesses in this area.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

The Government’s support in that respect is very welcome. One of the themes of these questions is greater co-ordination between DMOs and greater co-ordination of funds. Are the Government planning a big domestic marketing campaign, given that Matt Hancock has turned us into a captive audience for domestic tourism?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

We are currently working with VisitBritain, VisitEngland and local partners, including DMOs, to champion the diverse tourism offer we have in this country through the Enjoy Summer Safely campaign. We spent £19 million on domestic marketing activity last year, and much more is planned for this year.

Public Service Broadcasting (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, I refer to my declarations in the register of Members’ interests. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, for being on the Front Bench, and say how jealous I am of her meteoric rise. I also pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Gilbert. I am very lucky to serve on his committee, although I did not contribute to this report. He is a superb chairman who clearly has an extraordinary ability to herd cats; he keeps us all in order and produces great conclusions from many dissenting voices. I am sad that I am speaking before my noble friend Lord Hannan, because normally he provokes me to such paroxysms that I give better speeches. Last time, he proposed the privatisation of the British Library, and I look forward to what is coming next.

Let me try to out-provoke him to begin with by saying that when it comes to the public service broadcasters, it is important to be a critical friend and ask tough questions. I have, for example, once been on the front page of the Sunday Times proposing the privatisation of Radio 1, because it was only set up to take on the pirate radio stations, and I wondered what the purpose was of having a popular music channel funded by the BBC when there is now so much choice. I opposed BBC Jam education services because, in my constituency when I was an MP, lots of my constituents worked for education publishers and they asked me how on earth they were meant to compete with free services. I initially opposed John Whittingdale’s proposal of a content fund, because I saw how criticised the BBC was and wondered if we wanted to create another one, but it has been a great success. It may be that, as the debates about the future of public service broadcasting continue, we may have debates instead about public service content.

What this report says is true: the BBC has to look very hard at how it serves minorities and young people, and it must look very hard at whether it is simply producing popular services or producing services that the market cannot provide. If we are to help public service broadcasters, we should deregulate them, if that does not sound like a contradiction in terms. I completely agree with the report’s conclusion that imposing the free licence fee on the BBC was a terrible error. I was the Minister at the time, and I have said before that I probably should have resigned, but I did not. It was made worse when the Government campaigned against their own policy by telling the BBC that it should keep the free licence fee, when it had already agreed that the BBC could change it. The noble Lord, Lord Hall, deserves a great deal of credit for absorbing that policy change and reforming how free TV licences work. I supported the deregulation, for example, of some of the regulations around commercial radio. I think we could support advertising minutage changes for ITV. I supported changes to product placement for ITV. The market is now so saturated that, in effect, broadcasters should be given as much freedom as possible because they will regulate themselves. We will not get ITV putting on 40 minutes of adverts every hour, because it competes against advert-free subscription channels such as Netflix.

The key, for me, is that public service broadcasters are a bit like B corps: they do not have shareholders and they have to take into account the wider community interest. Some public service broadcasters are too focused on the metric of audience share, rather than their role in supporting communities. It should not be Government intervention that puts the BBC in Salford or Channel 4 in Leeds or that drives the agenda on diversity. I was very struck that when I campaigned for greater diversity in the media, the BBC issued dozens of reports whereas Sky simply said “Yes, you’re right, we’re going to get to 20% by such and such a date” and just went on and did it. The public service broadcasters, the BBC and Channel 4 in particular, have a great opportunity, sheltered as they are to a certain extent from market forces, to really move the dial on issues such as diversity, regional production and skills—just as the excellent report from the communications Select Committee makes clear.

I conclude simply by saying that I firmly believe that we need public service broadcasters. It is obviously fashionable to look at our crystal ball—or, indeed, the screen in our sitting room—and say that we now live in an age of streaming and that the young no longer watch television, but the BBC in particular does not make the case effectively enough about the myriad services it produces; that may not be its fault. When we had floods in my constituency in 2007, I was fond of referring to BBC Radio Oxford as the “fourth emergency service”. From orchestras to local radio, public service broadcasting makes a massive difference; it is not simply about whether you like “Strictly”. The BBC needs to be careful to get out of the way and to realise that commercial broadcasters need to make a living. However, in an age of disinformation, as has been referred to, we need public service content that reflects British culture in all its shapes and sizes. That is why the thrust of the report—that the BBC and public service broadcasting should be supported—is so important.

Finally, do not read into the conspiracy theories in the newspapers. I genuinely do not believe that the Government have a hidden agenda to close down the BBC or knobble it in any way, although it is going about some of its business in very odd ways.

Dormant Assets Bill [HL]

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 26th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, since I was introduced to your Lordships’ House in September I have been given many opportunities, but I did not realise that I would have the wonderful opportunity to follow my noble friend Lady Fleet and to sing her virtues, although after her maiden speech I feel I should now praise her in 24 different languages on the basis of her distinguished ancestor.

As my noble friend indicated, and as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, pointed out, she has an immensely distinguished career both in the media and in the arts. She was deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail before becoming a campaigning editor of the Evening Standard and helping to secure two great adornments to this country: the London Olympics and our current Prime Minister. When I dabbled in freelance journalism, I occasionally sat at her feet writing the odd editorial under her instruction, but she and I worked most closely together when I was lucky enough to be Minister for Culture when she was taking up prominent roles in the arts, as chair of Arts Council London for almost 10 years and as a senior adviser to the then London mayor, now the Prime Minister. She set up the London Music Fund, which was originally called the mayor’s music fund, but it should really have been called the Wadley music fund. It has delivered more than 500 music scholarships for young musicians in London. Her latest work on the music curriculum has also been incredibly important. I wholeheartedly second what she said about how important music education is for young people, not just to give them a love for and appreciation of music but to give them some of the skills and qualities one needs to succeed in wider life.

My noble friend served as a distinguished board member of the Yehudi Menuhin School and is now on the council of the Royal College of Music, chaired by my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood. I can say only, as I have said before in this House, that it is a wonderful privilege to serve here with so many experienced and distinguished people, but to have my noble friend join our ranks and bring her expertise in culture is a particular pleasure to me.

I turn to the substance of the Bill. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, for reminding the House of the important role played by the noble Lord, Lord Field of Birkenhead—mainly on a personal basis, as I have known him all my life as a close family friend. It is a great testament to the success of the scheme that it has been broadly uncontroversial, very much welcomed and has channelled many hundreds of millions of pounds to good causes. I echo the noble Lord, Lord Adonis: it is hard to think of any reason to oppose the Bill, although there may be opportunities to improve some of its detail. Nobody can oppose the need to extend the remit of the dormant assets scheme to insurance and pension products and potentially to unlock a further £2 billion for good causes.

I take on board the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Barker: it would be interesting to know what one could learn from how the dormant assets scheme has been working in the past decade or so and how effectively the money has been used. Partly on a financial basis, I should be intrigued to know—I may be going a bit off piste here—whether we can learn anything about what type of financial assets are unclaimed and why. I think this will become rarer as we move into a digital age. Noble Lords have mentioned the digital dashboard. As more and more of us manage our finances online, there will be no need to write to our insurers to tell them that our address has changed, because our digital address should, broadly speaking, remain the same.

I was also musing, because I am obviously thinking ahead to my speech on public service broadcasting in tomorrow’s debate, that some of the great causes that the dormant assets scheme has supported so far are exactly the kind of programme that the BBC should be making, so I think we can elide the dormant assets scheme with the future of the BBC.

I want to use this opportunity to raise one specific point that has been a hobby-horse of mine for several years, and I think I may have played a tiny role in nudging things along. As I do not tell need to tell your Lordships, because you all know what I am about to say, I am talking about the National Fund, which is on everyone’s lips. The National Fund was started by a man called Gaspard Farrer in 1928. He was a member of the distinguished Farrer family, the solicitors, but he was a partner at Barings Bank, and he gave half a million pounds to the National Fund, intending it to pay off the national debt. That half a million pounds attracted a few other public subscriptions, and it was then promptly forgotten about, although I think it was managed for years by Barings Bank, which probably claimed useful fees from it. It was actually managed extremely well, because in 2019, before the stock market boom, it was worth £519 million.

We have had one dormant assets Bill in the past decade which has unlocked about £700 million or £800 million. We now have a Dormant Assets Bill which might unlock £2 billion, but we do not have a National Fund Bill, which at one stroke could unlock £519 million, which I know that my noble friend Lady Fleet and I would deploy very effectively to support the arts and music.

What on earth are the Government going to do about the National Fund? At the moment, its future is the subject of a modern-day Dickens novel as it grinds slowly through the courts. I lobbied the Attorney-General, he forgot about it. I lobbied him again, he forgot about it. He finally went to court. At a court hearing at the end of last year, the High Court judge decided that the National Fund could potentially be wound up and its funds deployed to causes other than the national debt. He concluded that because the National Fund represents 0.03% of the national debt, despite the excellent management of Barings and others, it was highly unlikely to achieve its purpose of paying off the national debt, which I think is now £2 trillion. It has even been spotted by the Prime Minister’s former private secretary, Danny Kruger, now a distinguished Member of Parliament, who in a recent report on community service asked why we cannot deploy the National Fund.

I am afraid that I have slightly hijacked the debate on the Dormant Assets Bill to once again bring the National Fund to the Government’s attention. I know that there is no more able and effective Minister than my noble friend on the Front Bench this afternoon to grab this issue, run with it and bring forward appropriate government amendments in Committee to unlock the National Fund and, at a stroke, double the assets available to good causes.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Watkins of Tavistock) (CB)]

My Lords, I am aware that, due to the reduced capacity of the Chamber, many people were not here earlier, when the normal rules for the current situation were read out. I remind Members in the Chamber that all Members are expected to respect social distancing, as everybody is doing, but also to wear face coverings while in the Chamber, except when standing to speak—unless, of course, they are medically exempt.

Creative Industries: Covid-19

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Monday 26th April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord is right to raise these points. Absolutely, levelling up should cut across a number of axes, including the one the noble Lord raises. We are working to improve this area. At Budget the Chancellor announced a new approach to apprenticeships in the creative industries, with £7 million of pilot funding to test flexi-job apprenticeships that might suit better the working practices of the creative industries. Over 1,300 creative industry placements are now available via the Department for Work and Pensions Kickstart scheme.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, I recognise the substantial support the Government have given the creative industries and pay tribute to my noble friend the Minister and her officials for all their hard work. When she mentioned apprentices, it reminded me that the BBC has announced that it will employ 1,000 apprentices. Will she join me in recognising the crucial role the BBC and other public service broadcasters play in levelling up, given their increased regional presence? For example, the BBC now makes 60% of its programmes outside London.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

As my noble friend is well aware, the BBC is operationally and editorially independent from government, but I share his warm welcome for the BBC’s recent announcement that it plans to move 60% of network TV commissioning spend and 50% of network radio and music spend outside London.

British Library Board (Power to Borrow) Bill

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 19th March 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, I do not propose to detain your Lordships long. This is a very simple Bill that has been entrusted to me, which runs to the full extent of two clauses. Before I move to the Bill, I refer to my register of interests, including my work for the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society.

This Bill has come from the other place, where it was ably stewarded by Bim Afolami MP. Without wishing to turn this into an Oscars speech, I briefly express my gratitude to Rob Field of the British Library for his help in preparing my remarks as well as to Cheryl Shorter and Mark Hicks at what we must now refer to at length as the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

I am very much looking forward to the speeches from noble Lords, in particular from the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, who was for many years the chair of the British Library when I was a simple junior Minister sitting at her feet, and from my newly ennobled and very old noble friend Lord Hannan, who 30 years ago used to do my photocopying. I say to him that, if he does not have at least three quotes from Shakespeare referring to reading and libraries in his three-minute speech, I will be extremely disappointed.

As I said, this Bill is extremely uncontroversial. Its two clauses simply repeal a provision in the British Library Act 1972—the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, who is also due to speak, was there when it was going through Parliament—which prevents the British Library from borrowing. I am told by officials at DCMS that the reason why the provision was included in the 1972 Act is lost in the mists of time, despite their archaeological work—the noble Lord may be able to shed light on that.

This Bill will put the British Library in the same position as the rest of our national museums. I was lucky enough as Minister for Culture to push forward granting greater freedoms to our national museums. That included the power to borrow and to spend from their reserves and other flexibilities. I was certainly not around at the time—although, again, the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, will recall it—but it is hard to believe that 40 or 50 years ago our museums were treated as subsets of government departments, with huge restrictions. I am pleased to say that, whatever one’s view of different Governments, more and more freedoms have been granted to our museums and they have flourished as a result.

This simple Bill will allow the great British Library to have the same level of freedom as its counterparts. Once the Bill is passed, it will be able to borrow from a Treasury pot of £60 million that is made available annually and has so far been used by seven museums. It is important to stress—I do not think that any of your Lordships would take this view, but it was raised at Second Reading in the other place—that this is not a Trojan horse or some Machiavellian scheme by the Government to allow the British Library to borrow money so that they can cut its grant in future. It simply provides the flexibility and freedom enjoyed by all our other national museums.

I do not want to pre-empt any of the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, but it is safe to say that the British Library is a jewel in our cultural crown. I am pleased to say that it still receives a generous grant from the Government of almost £100 million, but it also generates almost £20 million in commercial income. It provides free access for the public to its treasures gallery and free access for registered readers to its famous reading room. Its treasures go on tour around the country; I remember visiting the Lindisfarne Gospels in County Durham. They will be going on tour again to Newcastle next year and George Eliot’s Middlemarch is going to Coventry, our future capital of culture. It has 150 million physical items, which include 31 million books, almost a million titles, 350,000 manuscripts, almost 5 million maps and 1.5 million music scores. It adds 3 million more items every year; it has 625 kilometres of shelf space and adds 12 kilometres every year.

In this climate of levelling-up, it is also worth remembering that the British Library has a magnificent 42-acre site in Boston Spa in Yorkshire, which employs 550 people and where 70% of its collection is kept. Also, in this digital age, it is worth remembering that 5 million people a year look at items from the British Library online, 5 million people visit its website and 10 million teachers use its learning resources. When I was Culture Minister, I was very pleased to put through Parliament the non-print legal deposit regulations—an inelegant name for an important piece of legislation that has allowed the British Library to start collecting digital items. It now has 7.5 million e-books, 13 billion web items and 1.5 petabytes of data, which is apparently equivalent to 10 billion digital photos.

I am glad that the Government’s support for the British Library continues. In the last Budget, they awarded £13 million to the British Library to support its business and IP centres—again, this is a very important innovation which I think happened when the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, was chair of the British Library—which work with 20 regional and 90 local libraries to support businesses, and 12,000 businesses have taken advantage of this. The majority of those businesses are actually run by women; a third of them are run by people from BAME backgrounds and a fifth of them by people with disabilities. I was also delighted to learn that the National Lottery Heritage Fund has made £25 million available to the British Library to set up a new library in Leeds. The future of the British Library is bright indeed under the able leadership of Dame Carol Black and Roly Keating.

Since I have the Floor for just a few minutes, may I make two general policy points? I am obviously enjoying this moment of pretending that I am a Minister once again. First, I ask my noble friend who is in fact the Minister: could the Government look at the public lending right again? It seems to me such an easy win to increase the funding available for the public lending right. You can call me sad, but I was rereading my late father’s speeches in the House of Lords from when the public lending right was first introduced. We talk often in this place at the moment about freelancers. Authors are the ultimate freelancers, and for a very small amount of money the Government could make a great and dramatic impact on the lives of many authors.

Secondly, I also reveal to the House my complete obsession with museum storage. The Boston Spa site—already a fantastic resource for the British Library and the country—could be made even better if the Government leaned in with the British Library on the digitisation of print items, because that is the way the world is going. It could turn into a fantastic regional resource in Yorkshire with the right amount of investment and imagination.

With those two free hits afforded to me by being able to steward the Bill through this place, I make my points and beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, I am often asked how I am enjoying being a new Member of your Lordships’ House, and when I consider the quality of this afternoon’s debate, which included two former chairmen of the British Library, one current board member, one Paralympian gold medallist, one composer and numerous elected officials, is it any wonder that it is a pleasure and a privilege to be a Member of this great House? There were many distinguished contributions and I do not propose to dwell on them, because they have been ably responded to by my noble friend the Minister.

However, I acknowledge the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, a distinguished former chairman and, until his recent retirement, the longest-serving master of an Oxbridge college, Queens’ College, Cambridge, the alma mater of my late father. His interesting point about UKRI is a rabbit hole into which I could gladly disappear, discussing the place of museums in the Whitehall pantheon. It is very important to remember that museums—I include the British Library—have many different functions. They are not simply visitor attractions and exhibition spaces. They contribute now to cutting-edge research, whether it is the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum or the British Library. The other element that came out in many of the speeches, which I had not mentioned in my opening remarks, is the international role that the British Library plays. When I was a Minister, the British Library was doing some very important work with the Qataris.

I cannot finish without rising, although I know I should not, to the wonderfully provocative speech from my noble friend Lord Hannan. I shall defend the late, great architect Colin St John Wilson, who described the building of the British Library as a 30-year war. My noble friend will be delighted to know that the rather inauspicious site on which the British Library sits was a compromise; the original proposal was to demolish half of Bloomsbury. Wilson had to fight with Whitehall bureaucrats for the budget, and of course our great Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a woman I hugely admire, cut his budget in half, which might explain some of my noble friend’s concerns. I hesitate to draw from his view of the British Library that all public architecture is bad and all private architecture is brilliant. I advise him to take a walking tour with me through the City of London to see some of the monstrosities that private developers have put up.

The other reason why I love being a Member of your Lordships’ House was demonstrated in today’s debate, which ran the spectrum from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, saying that on no account must the British Library pursue any commercial activities, to my noble friend Lord Hannan saying that the British Library should be privatised tomorrow. Of course, we could privatise the British Library; that is a choice, just as we could privatise the British Army and use our defence budget to hire Russian mercenaries to defend us in our hour of need. Politics is about choices and, although I am a Conservative, I still very much believe in the public realm.

I return to my opening remarks: the British Library is a cultural jewel in our public realm, and I commend the Bill to the House.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

Australia: News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Thursday 25th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The Government are not dragging their heels, but, as the noble Lord explained very eloquently, there are a lot of interlocking issues here that our new digital markets unit will seek to address.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con) [V]]

I congratulate the Lord Speaker on his declaration of independence and his remarkable ability to tweet from the Woolsack. I refer to my entries in the register of Members’ interests. Three schemes in the UK currently support local journalism, run by the BBC, Facebook and Google. Would my noble friend the Minister consider creating a forum for publishers and platforms, including, for example, Microsoft, to meet on a regular basis to try to co-ordinate these different activities and give proper, sustained financial support to local newspapers?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am very happy to take my noble friend’s suggestion back to colleagues in the department, but I know that we are in regular discussion with all the groups he mentioned.