BBC News Impartiality: Government's Role

Adam Holloway Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Adam Holloway (Gravesham) (Con)]

I, too, am concerned about the BBC’s persistent failure to fulfil its legal obligation to be impartial. We saw this with Brexit. To give an example, News-watch, which is an independent monitoring organisation run by a former BBC producer, said that, on Europe, there were twice as many remainers as pro-Brexit speakers, with an even greater imbalance in the amount of time people had to speak, at 7:3, or nearly 9,000 words against 4,000 words. No wonder the political elites of this country were stunned by the result of the referendum—they did not see it coming.

[Theresa Villiers]

The BBC, in its language about Brexit, was not impartial, as illustrated by it persistently describing leaving without a deal with the EU as a so-called cliff-edge Brexit. No one wanted that outcome, but the BBC should not have been portraying it as a potential disaster via the terminology it used.

[Adam Holloway]

I wish I had thought of that for my speech. The reality is that the BBC fails to impartially report the multiplicity of viewpoints in the UK. It prides itself on diversity, but it has a real lack of diversity of thought. There is an intellectual homogeneity, which means there is no real balance of opinion among its staff. There is no recognition among those who make the decisions at the BBC that a recruitment policy that broadened its culture would better serve licence fee payers and better reflect the BBC’s viewers and the wider country.

Today the stakes seem very much higher, as we heard in the superb speech by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton North (Sir Michael Ellis). Given that the BBC has these huge resources made available to it via the licence fee, and given the heightened tensions here as a result of the crisis in the middle east, we thought it really could do a bit better. In 2021, colleagues and I wrote to the Prime Minister and urged him to consider directing Ofcom to deal directly with all impartiality events at the BBC, rather than letting the BBC do those itself in the first instance. Of course, that would need to be accompanied by some changes in Ofcom; to deal with complaints impartially and objectively, its contents board needs to change, because it seems to be stuffed with former BBC lifers. I also urge Ministers to consider requiring the BBC to set up an independent unit to monitor bias on an ongoing basis.