Broadcasting: Recent Developments

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

I declare an interest as having worked for all five public service broadcasters, and I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, for procuring this debate.

I will concentrate in my speech on the future of the BBC in developing technology in the public interest. I found the Green Paper’s declaration that the charter should include empowering the BBC as

“a leader in new digital technologies with strategies to maintain its relevance to modern audiences”

to be a central tenet for the future role of the corporation. I have spent so much time in this Chamber and in the Communications and Digital Select Committee listening to the harms created by digital technology. We have all received warnings about the role of AI in destroying our creative industries and much of our workforce. Surely we should harness our world-class broadcaster as a beacon of public service to shape and develop these new technologies in the public interest and not just in the private interest of US tech billionaires.

It is unbelievable that the current charter has removed the BBC’s public purpose to deliver technologies for the benefit of the nation. This has been compounded by the 30% reduction in licence fee income over the past decade, leading to a big decline in the organisation’s spend on research and development. As a result, Sky’s R&D department is massively outspending the BBC. As a listed company that needs to focus on its own interests, Sky’s research has been mainly used to enhance its own customer interaction and improve the technology of Sky Glass TV.

Now, we have a chance to develop digital technology imbued with ethical public service values. The BBC already has a set of AI principles, which are a useful guide to the priorities: namely, to act in the best interests of the public, to prioritise talent, and—one that particularly interests me in the light of the AI copyright debate—to promote transparency. Already, the BBC’s R&D department has rolled out for its own journalists a deepfake identification tool. The corporation is working with Sony as part of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, to establish provenance standards to be integrated into platforms and devices. These will allow users to establish details of content creation and manipulation. They can be made available to help users weave their way through the thicket of fake images on the internet. Reassuringly, at the centre of these tools there is always a human being supervising them.

Public-interest AI could be rolled out across the country to build trust in other services, such as secure age verification, and even as a way to stream government services. We have heard much talk in the last few months about the development of a British sovereign AI, along the lines of that being set up in Switzerland. The BBC could team up with platforms such as Anthropic AI, whose principles embody the UN Declaration of Human Rights, to set up a BBC large language model training session. The need for this research could be fed into the UKRI AI research and innovation programme, as part of the Government’s UK AI strategy.

Imagine a British AI large language model that had at its heart services powered by the BBC’s public service ethos and an ethical source of data training, and that would generate safe information and deliver AI in the public interest. I say to the Minister that surely this would be an amazing riposte from our country to the big US tech firms driven by the attention economy, which are prepared to address harms only when forced by law to do so. Users in this country and across the world would avail themselves of such services, secure in the knowledge that they would not create further harms. This might be a fantasy, but unless action is taken to ensure that the BBC is at the centre of the new AI and digital technological revolution in this country, it will become irrelevant.