Media Bill

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 20th May 2024 Lords Chamber

In its Broadcasting in Wales report, the Welsh Affairs Committee in the other place recommended clamping down on brass-plating and specifically called for the Bill to be the avenue by which this could be achieved. I hope that the Minister replying to this debate will take it on himself to give very serious consideration to this issue. It would gain the Government a resonance in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland—and I suspect in the northern regions of England—which they very much need at this point in time.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests in the register. I am also an officer of the Channel 4 APPG.

I am pleased to have put down my name to Amendments 16 and 17 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser of Craigmaddie. I very much support the principal aim of these amendments, which is to push content commissioning towards the regions and nations. I will also focus my comments on the publicly owned Channel 4.

These amendments complement my amendments in the previous group, which demanded more support for small independent television producers. The majority of SMEs are in the regions and nations, which Channel 4 should support. In doing so, it will support SMEs. These small companies are the lifeblood of the television production industry. They are often in areas where stories and lives are not covered by the mainstream media. It is in these places that the untold stories from an underserved audience will spring. After all, fresh ideas and stories from places overlooked by the metropolitan-based companies are surely central to the PSBs’ remit.

The production base in the nations and regions has come a long way in the last 20 years. With the growth of STV and the establishment of a Channel 4 lifestyle programmes production base in Glasgow, there has been a big increase in the number of people employed in the industry in Scotland, but the regional hubs in Cardiff and Scotland are struggling in the present climate. Now is the time for Channel 4 to play its part in the continued expansion of production talent across the industry.

It is a long-held view by many in the industry that it is expensive to commission from the nations. They say that staff have to be sent up from London, with all the extra costs that incurs. Surely, the response to that is to ensure that Scottish and Welsh independent companies are commissioned. They will employ producers and talent they know and trust, who will most probably be local. They will carry out post-production locally and employ indigenous Scots, Welsh or Yorkshire editors, graders and sound engineers in facilities houses based near them. The aim of these amendments is to build a big enough indigenous talent base that local staff can be employed and their work can go some way to reflect the parts of the United Kingdom they live in.

The present crisis of commissioning in the industry, for both scripted and unscripted programmes, has meant that not just small companies but medium-sized companies are closing. As a result, the Scots, Welsh and regional facilities houses are also closing and struggling. The lack of work has meant that people are leaving the industry, and the promises of expanding production bases in the regions and nations are dying. At this rate, the naysayers in the industry will be right: it will be too expensive to produce programmes in the nations and regions, because talent will have to come from London and the south-east, if not from abroad.

In my speech on the first day in Committee on the need for Channel 4 to focus on commissioning from SMEs, I read out the channel’s submission to Ofcom for licence renewal, which claimed that the smaller scale of the production sector outside London meant that the companies in the regions and nations were not able to develop or realise big ideas. This statement reflects badly on Channel 4’s view of television production in the parts of the country affected by Amendments 16 and 17. Not surprisingly, Scots indies responded that, far from being unable to develop and deliver big ideas, they were capable of making programmes for the biggest streamers and broadcasters in the world. I can say from personal experience of working with American commissioners that they are very demanding. If a company can supply a streamer or an American broadcaster, it can almost certainly supply Channel 4.

However, unfortunately, while those international commissions prove that the indies in the nations have talent and capacity, the revenues generated from them are not sufficient to sustain the production bases. They often pay a straight production fee with little back end, unlike the terms of trade that British channels use when dealing with indies, guaranteeing them the back-end revenue to build their businesses.

The letter by the Scots production companies continued:

“As a publicly owned public service broadcaster with a stated ‘strong commitment to represent the whole of the UK’ and ‘to stand up for diversity across the UK’, Channel 4 must fulfil its remit for the benefit of the UK as a whole and support the sustainable growth of the industry outside of London”.


The CEO of Channel 4, Alex Mahon, responded shortly afterwards, in April this year, when she told the Creative Cities Convention in Bristol that there had been questions about making the quota bigger. She said:

“We will try and do more because we need to think more carefully about how we represent people on air. It is time to make that shift to support companies more sustainably”.


Since then, Channel 4 has issued a statement to me, saying that

“we are announcing that we would support, in principle, a managed timely and carefully considered increase in our commitment to programme making in the nations”.

However, Channel 4 did not go any further on the detail of this proposal, or reveal by how much it would increase its spend in the nations and regions. It is leaving it up to Ofcom to decide the appropriate quota.

Once again, Parliament is leaving an important decision to be made by Ofcom. As Bills pass through this House giving Ofcom increasing power, it is beholden on us parliamentarians to give the regulator guidance. Parliament, not Ofcom, should decide the national and regional quotas for content commissioning. We must do what we can to encourage one of our great public service broadcasters to stand by its chief executive’s words, to support companies more sustainably and to increase the quota to the nations beyond 9%. I ask the Minister to support the figure of a 16% quota in the nations and 50% outside London.

Channel 4 reset itself in 2020, with the slogan “4 All the UK”. At the time, Ofcom increased its quota for the nations from 3% to 9%. However, now is the time to go further. Channel 4 aims its commissioning strategy at fewer, bigger, better programmes. I ask noble Lords to consider where that leaves the middle ground—the hundreds of hours of television annually filled by content with a medium spend. These companies are the backbone of the industry outside London and are suffering from the present commissioning strategy. As one of the leading figures in Scottish television, Alan Clements, who runs the independent production company Two Rivers Media, said:

“If you make your corporate slogan 4 All The UK, then you really need to walk the walk as well as talk the talk”.