Economy: Broadcast Media

Baroness Bakewell Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell (Lab)]

My Lords, I am delighted to join this debate and thank the noble Baroness for introducing it. She and I have spoken in broadcasting debates before and I did therefore wonder where we were going with this one and why. It did not take long for me to appreciate how important and timely such a debate is, because the broadcasting landscape is changing so fast and so significantly in a world obsessed, indeed saturated, with images and sounds. You cannot get away from the plethora of broadcasting. There is almost no arena of human activity that is not now available to be seen, recorded, distributed and repeated on a multitude of platforms, now including Netflix, which is transmitting on the internet. We shall be facing far more of that in the future. It is also interesting that the noble Baroness, Lady Grender, referred to my conducting “Question Time” on a train. Having been marooned in the Midlands by a fire on the track, I was unable to be present in the BBC studio and so, along with another colleague who was absent from the programme, we began tweeting our own “Question Time”. Broadcasting is everywhere.

I shall confine my observations to reports from particular corners of a broadcasting life—my own life—and allow other people to make broader deductions and generalisations. I am involved in programmes made by the independent sector, specifically Sky and Classic FM, and I am involved in television and radio programmes made by the BBC. At close range I can smell the difference, I can sense the mood and I can sense the panic, so I offer a few personal observations. Last night the Commercial Broadcasters Association, CoBA, published its report Building a Global TV Hub. This was an enormously buoyant, upbeat picture of commercial broadcasters’ achievements and gave some indication of the future of a more mixed global economy. The non-PSB sector now accounts for 18% of all investment in UK television commissions. It has doubled its UK employment offer over the past decade. It has increased commissioning of independent producers by nearly 50% in the past year, and this sector is now worth £5 billion in turnover per year. It now invests £623 million pounds a year in UK television content, up nearly 30% over the past three years. I draw noble Lords’ attention to the direction of travel. This is an enormously thrusting and confident sector, striking success after success, at least in its public records, in what it is aiming to achieve and has already achieved so swiftly in such a short time.

My own experience is at Sky, where I find a company committed to its burgeoning channel, Sky Arts. I cite the statistics mentioned by my noble friend Lord Bragg, because again it is the direction of travel that is so impressive. Sky makes a growing contribution to the country’s GDP, a total of £5.9 billion in 2012-13. It has 24,000 employees, 3,700 of whom are working in creative and production roles. That is the bedrock of the creative talent of which so many people have spoken. These enormously buoyant and confident statistics were, I think, compiled before the recent sport contract fell to BT, but there, in BT, is another eager and ambitious newcomer to the broadcasting scene. Sky invests £2.5 billion each year in programming news, sport, entertainment and movies. It is moving towards a target of spending £600 million annually on UK commissioning and production by the end of 2014, an increase of more than 50% since 2011. Again, we should notice the direction of travel.

This year Sky announced a new commitment to British drama, with 20 new plays to be aired before the end of 2014. Currently, I am taking part in a Sky Arts initiative to bring art into people’s lives by holding a series of competitions for the portrait artist of the year. That has travelled to cities around the country, inviting the public, who came in great numbers, to the recordings of the programmes.

However, audiences for Sky remain comparatively small—tiny by any BBC standard. Its most popular channel, Sky Sports, has or had an audience share of just 2%. Compare that to the audience share of the BBC’s most popular channel, BBC1, which is around 20%. My noble friend Lord Sugar drew attention to the fact that we get the BBC for 40p a day. Subscribers to Sky know how much they are paying for far less on offer.

In my experience of these two sectors, the BBC is different. It is a mighty giant of broadcasting, in this country and beyond. Many people have paid tribute to it; I should like to add my word. The sheer length of its existence, the depth of its tradition and the towering level of its achievements make it central to the country’s culture. Its skill base is a lodestar for the entire industry. It sets the benchmark for originality. It is a great beast, but a wounded beast. The BBC is living in a state of fear and anticipation of what the future will hold for it.

The BBC licence fee is £145.50, up by just £10 since 2007, and frozen until 2017. Its income in 2011 was just short of £5 billion: £3.5 billion from that licence fee and almost £1.5 billion from BBC Worldwide, an institution that, to many of us, seemed to take a long time to get going, but which is now, as a wholly owned commercial subsidiary, doing incredible things around the world. However the BBC is suffering the eighth consecutive year of cuts. By the end of the current BBC charter, a further 20% will have been taken from its budget. My experience is that Radio 3, which I know well, is suffering badly.

In the public’s eye, the BBC has been seriously damaged by three things: the wasted digital money, the Savile scandal and those excessive retirement payments. However, those are moving into the past. Not only has the BBC extended its own reach virtually to breaking point with the Salford experiment, BBC Three, BBC Four and many enterprises where the creative people who want to see the organisation expand are reaching out, but it is carrying the burden of many responsibilities that are government-imposed, making demands on its corporate capacity.

In 2010, it took on an extra £340 million of spending commitments, including the move to digital, the funding of the World Service, BBC Monitoring and the Welsh channel S4C. In creative circles within the BBC, budgets are being squeezed and squeezed. Researchers now find their time doled out in half days, working on one programme and then another. Producers draw from their own pockets to provide minimal hospitality, which, as we know, once used to be very generous in the BBC, although that is no longer so. First-class travel is over; chauffeur-driven cars hardly exist. That is fine, but the BBC faces huge decisions about its funding crisis and it needs friends. It has enemies, and those enemies are voluble. James Murdoch, in his MacTaggart lecture, called for the BBC to be dismantled. According to research carried out on behalf of BECTU and the NUJ, it is estimated that the cuts will reduce the BBC’s GVA—gross value added—by around £1.1 billion by 2016. The cuts are damaging.

The BBC is unrivalled as a world brand, it is woven into the identity of the country, and it is part of the flourishing culture that we see all around us and which others have mentioned. The BBC will need friends in the years ahead.