Media Bill

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 28th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome this long-awaited Media Bill and declare an interest as per the register. The children’s television sector is in crisis. Ofcom has identified a dramatic shift in viewing habits among young people, particularly those over the age of seven. This, together with the long-term reduction in commissioning of original UK content for children, has led to a situation in which children and young people are essentially lost to public service broadcasting.

However, this Media Bill does not address these issues. The Media Bill should focus on the spaces where children are watching media now, not the spaces they have deserted. We need to ensure that our children can find public service content in places where they are now spending their screen time, which is on non-child-friendly, unregulated platforms. This crisis largely affects school-age children, where the migration of the audience to online services has reached alarming levels. High-quality, pre-school content is relatively robust, because parents control viewing on on-demand services, such as CBeebies and Channel 5’s “Milkshake!”

For older children, the problem of audience loss becomes acute. Live-action content that reflects the lives and concerns of British children is the hardest hit and is at risk of disappearing from commercial PSBs altogether. The BBC, which is the biggest provider of UK content for school-age children, has decided to focus more resources on animation to win back young viewers lost to streamers and video-sharing sites. The Children’s Media Foundation’s recent consultation revealed that the kids audience is no longer finding relevant, targeted, UK public service content, so is flocking to services such as YouTube and TikTok and watching adult content. Alarmingly, the consultation also showed that this fundamental shift in viewing is likely to be a contributing factor to the post-pandemic crisis of childhood, with severe implications for the personal well-being of a generation of young people. The lack of relevance or connection in the content contributes to a sense of isolation and increases levels of anxiety and mental health challenges.

Over the past 75 years, high-quality UK content for children has been a huge British success story and the envy of the world, but, over the past 20 years, consumption by children of traditional, regulated PSB content has been in freefall. This is partly due to the explosion of choice children have in their hands via new devices and new platforms and to the 2007 ban on advertising HFSS food to children, which saw commercial PSB investment in children’s content decline by 40% over the following decade.

Children have deserted PSB kids’ TV because they easily can, because of the affordability of technology and, crucially, because they have control of their own devices. Added to the mix is the huge rise of unregulated advertising and subscription video-on-demand platforms such as YouTube or TikTok, as well as Netflix and Disney+, where children are watching content aimed at international audiences and dominated by US content. Who do we want to be role models for our children: influencers and extremists on social media or the diverse and inclusive performers and characters on public service children’s television?

What is the answer? One was the powerful and relatively low-cost intervention of the Government’s three-year pilot of the young audiences content fund. This successful fund, which has now ended, supported the creation of quality, distinctive content for audiences up to the age of 18 on public service broadcasters and their online platforms. When I secured more powers for Ofcom in relation to children’s TV programmes in the Digital Economy Act 2017, I was pleased that ITV increased its investment in partnership with this fund. Sadly, that content got relatively small audiences on CITV and ITV Hub because revenue was very limited, partly due to restrictions on the products that can be advertised to children. Ultimately, these pressures led to the recent closure of CITV.

In contrast, YouTube alone takes in around £50 million a year in advertising revenue with unregulated children’s content. It is very difficult for PSB broadcasters to invest in kids’ TV content. They do not have the scale of kids audience or a fraction of the revenue from kids’ content that they once had. This can be addressed only by public funding in one form or another without top-slicing the licence fee, perhaps with enhanced tax incentives, a levy on streamers and online services, Lottery funding or public funding from appropriate sources.

We need regulation to ensure prominence for content rather than services on video-sharing platforms, so the Bill should empower Ofcom to consider the extension of prominence regulation not only to PSB services on streaming on-demand platforms or smart TVs but to video-sharing platforms, using algorithms and recommendation systems. Perhaps the Government should consider a public service algorithm to give prominence to certified regulated content. I will be interested to hear the Minister’s views on this idea.

Let us take this golden opportunity to make the Media Bill more future-focused on our children’s media reality by reflecting what young people are already doing, which needs support and regulation, with a public service system fit for the 21st century. Once the last children have totally abandoned regulated broadcast television for an unregulated media landscape full of content with little relevance to their lives, a vital part of the fabric that contributes to our quality of life in the UK will be irretrievably lost.

Media Bill

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th May 2024 Lords Chamber

Amendment 3 is on “entertain”, in particular the support and stimulation of cultural activity. PSBs, led by the BBC, are the backbone of our world-beating creative industries. The origin of the word “broadcast” is to “sow seed widely”. That is what our PSBs have done. They are pivotal in supporting our creative industries through innovation, skills and training, although, as mentioned in my amendment, work needs be done on diversity. PSB remains essential to UK media. Losing it would leave UK society and democracy worse off. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, said, do not harm it.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 33 in the name of my noble friend Lady Bonham-Carter—I thank her for the name check—which I have put my name to in support. I also support the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, in everything she said in her speech. I declare my interests as set out in the register.

When I started my career in television, more than 50 years ago, diversity and inclusion was not a priority for public service broadcasters. I personally had to break down so many barriers to get diversity on the agenda to where we are today. Thankfully, enormous strides have been taken and the diversity landscape has been transformed, both in front of and behind the camera. Although we have not yet reached what I call “diversity nirvana”, we are well on the way. Broadcasters such as ITV have made huge progress with their diversity and inclusion strategy and should be applauded.

But, talking to people across the industry, the big concern is the redundancies that are sweeping throughout the industry, combined with the slowdown in commissioning, which in turn will lead to many production companies going out of business and will therefore have a negative effect on all the diversity gains over the past few years. As ITV and Channel 4 look for new financial models and tighten their belts, they need to make sure that they do not take their eye off the ball when it comes to diversity and inclusion, because most TV workers are freelancers and work for independent production companies. So perhaps some programme-level data is necessary in order for us to properly see how many of the PSBs’ full-time staff are from under- represented backgrounds and how much of their programming is made by diverse talent from the freelance community.

Adeel Amini, a series producer and the founder of The TV Mindset, said, “While PSBs have certainly been saying all the right things regarding diversity, their impact on the ground level and on the wider industry structure as a whole has been harder to see. In fact, many people from underrepresented backgrounds feel like the industry has gone backwards. Given the current crisis, they feel they are being squeezed out quicker than ever before. This particularly applies to roles at mid and senior level, with not enough representation at decision-making level. It’s important that diversity is seen not as a box-ticking exercise, but something that demands accountability if we are to change the fabric of this industry and make it truly welcoming and inclusive to all”.

Amendment 33 is very much the start of making this process a reality.

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, I shall just slip in on the back of the excellent speech on diversity from the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, because this is a subject very close to my heart. I think Amendment 33, put down by the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, is very telling in calling for public service broadcasters to put forward a diversity strategy.

But I would go behind the amendment and say that, in my experience, it is often the case that public service broadcasters can hide behind a strategy, and a strategy can often be an excuse for inaction. I remember that when I first got involved in the diversity in broadcasting debate, which is now more than a decade ago, I was very struck by the fact that, when we had a meeting with the broadcasters—there were three main broadcasters in play: ITV, BBC and Sky—the BBC came in and said, “We totally get what you’re saying and we’re going to produce a strategy”. ITV came in and said something in between. Sky came in and said “We’re just going to go for 20%”—and it did go for it, in terms of people both in front of and behind the camera. So it is very important that the Minister himself gets very engaged with the broadcasters, because if they simply put strategic documents on his desk, nothing will change.

The other important part of any strategy that is legislated for in this Bill is that it brings forward proper, in-depth statistics about what is happening in broadcasting in terms of diversity and equality. On that point, I would like the Minister to update me on the Diamond network, which was the measurement standard put in place in the mid-2010s in which broadcasters had to report for every production. It gradually included the independent producers, because that was another thing that we discovered made life more difficult, because you then had to go to all the independent production companies and bring them within the system. What has happened to the Diamond system? What kind of statistics is it throwing up that reveal what is actually happening in broadcasting?

I am fully aware that, when one talks about diversity, there may be a small element of the public—perhaps a Venn diagram overlapping with Garrick Club members—who regard talking about diversity as some sort of woke totemic point. But the point is that we live in an extremely diverse country. It is so important—and it really emphasises why this Bill and broadcasting are still so important, no matter how diverse and fragmented broadcasting has become in terms of platforms—that people in this country are able to tell their stories and see themselves represented. Equally, to echo the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, it is not just the people in front of the camera; it is the people making the programmes and making the decisions about what is commissioned. You can have as many diverse people as you like appearing in a television programme but, to be blunt with the Committee, if the people commissioning the programmes are all white, those are the stories that will get told.

As far as the other amendments are concerned, since I am on my feet, I am obviously very much in favour of the principle that the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, put forward about putting back the Reithian principles into broadcasting. But I simply say at the beginning of what will be a mammoth session of days and days of scrutiny of this Bill that I am also very deregulatory minded. It is important for the Committee to be aware as much as possible that broadcasters sit under a plethora of regulations and there must also be a mindset as we debate this Bill that we do not simply put every single issue and principle that we care passionately about—albeit I am now massively contradicting everything I have just said—into the Bill, because technology is changing rapidly, costs are rising, as the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, hinted, and putting a lot of people under pressure, and people need flexibility. To a certain extent we need to trust our broadcasters, for whom quality programme making is to a certain extent embedded.

Media Bill

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I also enthusiastically support Amendment 34 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin.

These are important matters. If the Bill is to look to the future, we must address the issue of what is happening to our children. On Second Reading in the Commons, my honourable friend Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow Secretary of State, said that the Bill is welcome but misses the opportunity to consider how we can secure the future of UK public service media for school-aged children. She echoed the Children’s Media Foundation’s concern that legislators are failing to recognise the realities of young people’s viewing and how this will impact on public service loyalty in the future.

We should thank the Children’s Media Foundation because it has done a huge amount of work on understanding the patterns of media consumption by children and how those patterns might impact on their chances of viewing public service media. If we all agree that public service content is important for adults, we can probably agree that it is equally important, if not more, for our children. Certainly, the high-quality public service content that our public service broadcasters can provide for children has powerful potential. For the last 75 years, it has been the envy of the world. It can promote well-being, give children an understanding of where they live, teach them British values of tolerance, provide entertaining forms of education to supplement their learning at school, and show a diverse range of role models. Ultimately, public service media can encourage children to value culture, crave knowledge and value characteristics of the citizens they have to become in due course.

However, due to several connecting factors, this sort of content is under threat. As technology has rapidly evolved, the children’s content landscape has fundamentally changed for ever. Children as young as toddlers have access to new devices and platforms. They can navigate apps on tablets and choose content they would like to watch. It gives them access not only to video on demand services, such as Netflix and Disney+, but to platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. The popularity of these forms of content are such that Ofcom estimates that less than half of three to 17 year-olds now watch live television. Similarly, of potentially 9 million school-aged viewers for the top-rated programmes on CBBC, there will be as few as 50,000 viewers in any one week. Similar numbers will request that programme on iPlayer. That number is a fraction of what we would hope it to be, given the importance of children’s public service content.

As well as declining viewership, there has arguably also been a decline in the amount of children’s content produced that could genuinely be considered to be public service. It is not that the industry is unaware of the problems surrounding children’s public service content. In 2022, when the Government brought the young audiences content fund to an end, more than 750 creatives and executives from the UK’s children’s content industry signed an open letter and campaigned to extend the fund for another three years. The likes of Channel 5 and Paramount are also working hard to keep their “Milkshake!” offering. They are increasing their year-on-year spend on children’s programming just to keep provision at the same level but, where there is a met need for commercial demand, valuable children’s content will inevitably continue to suffer.

There is almost nothing in the Bill to show that this combination of concerning trends and declining viewership, alongside declining content quality, has been identified. There are no meaningful measures to stop the problem escalating. Children’s content is included in the new, simplified remit in the first clause, but it does little to increase accountability or individual channels’ contribution to creating children’s public service content, or to recognise the changing trends in how children consume their media.

For all those reasons, the Children’s Media Foundation argued that we must urgently accept that children’s public service media are under threat and rethink how we can best protect them as part of the passage of this Bill. As a result, we propose that the Government conduct a review to better understand how we can secure children’s content long into the future. Such a review would be an opportunity to ask bigger questions than the Bill currently allows. For example, do we need to go where children are and broaden our concept of public service media for children, encouraging and promoting such content on the likes of Netflix, YouTube and TikTok? Do we need to learn lessons from the ambitions of the Online Safety Act 2023, and consider how algorithms serve content to young people—perhaps adjusting them to ensure that they promote diversity of thought rather than simply more of the same? Should we target PSBs to hit a number of hours consumed rather than a number of hours produced when it comes to public service media for children?

We do not claim to have the answers to these sorts of questions, but I believe they need to be explored. The UK must address the reality of the matter and accept that a new approach will be needed if we are to ensure that valuable content reaches the eyes and ears of young people across the country. I hope the Minister can acknowledge this, and I look forward to his response. I beg to move.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I fully support Amendment 12 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, to which I have added my name, but I rise to speak to my Amendment 34, which says:

“Within 12 months of the passing of this Act, the Secretary of State must prepare and publish a report on how to ensure that children have access to culturally relevant and age-appropriate original UK … content, and”—


importantly—

“how such content might be funded”.

The Children’s Media Foundation has summed up the two problems with UK children’s content as being about finding and funding, and we need to solve both. This amendment is very important as it is imperative that the Bill looks to the future and reflects what young people are doing now in their viewing, not what they used to do.

I have spoken previously about the crisis we face with respect to children’s media. At a time when our children are struggling to make sense of the world around them, we have allowed public service media for children to wither on the vine. A lack of investment and a failure of regulation have led to the current situation in which children and young people are no longer accessing this sort of age-appropriate and culturally relevant media content that can help them to navigate the challenges of growing up.

As adults, we quite rightly expect to have access to media content that speaks uniquely to us—dramas, factual programming and entertainment that embody the culture, values and concerns of our society. Why is it, then, that we seem prepared to deny our children the same opportunities? How can our children develop and grow to become citizens of this country if we continue to allow a media environment that fails to support or promote similar public media for children?

I am sure the Minister will say that this point has been considered by the Government and that the Bill is designed to ensure that our public service broadcasters will be required to offer the children’s audience appropriate levels of audiovisual content. But I am afraid that misses the point. My amendment would require a review to determine how we can ensure that children can access culturally relevant and age-appropriate, original UK content wherever they are watching or listening. The wording of the proposed new clause deliberately makes no reference to television services or to public service broadcasting, because I am afraid that for children and young people the old PSB system is simply irrelevant. They have no loyalty to our traditional broadcasters and very little interest in their platforms, except for the purposes of family co-viewing, which remains important and valuable.

I am concerned that the Bill in its current form does not address the needs of the children’s audience. When it comes to children’s personal viewing, as reported in great detail by Ofcom, the vast majority of their media content is found on video-sharing platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. That is where we must turn our attention if we hope to create a new public service ecosystem that meets the needs of children.

If we allow the Bill to remain focused solely on the provision of content by public service broadcasters, it will have failed the children’s audience from the outset. We have to ensure that this does not happen. There is a crisis of childhood and this Bill has a part to play in addressing the roots of that crisis. The current media lives of children and young people have impacted on their mental well-being, their engagement with society and culture, and the formation of their values. Some of that is the result of harmful content, and the Online Safety Act will go some way to address this, but surely we must also find a way to provide constructive and life-enhancing content to counteract any negative content that may find a way through to our children.

Here in the UK, we have one of the most creative and child-centred media production sectors in the world. We need a review to consider how to create conditions that will facilitate growth in children’s media production. This new content will, in turn, help our children cope with the unique challenges they face in the 21st century media landscape. But without appropriate funding, there will not be anything to see so it is vital that we find ways of increasing the revenue available for original UK children’s content, now that the Young Audiences Content Fund has, sadly, ended.

My amendment seeks to set in motion a process that will determine how children can once again have access to the same range of culturally relevant, trusted and life-affirming content that was made available to previous generations, in a form and on platforms that reflect the way that children and young people live today. So what are the solutions to finding suitable content? Ofcom has identified a dramatic shift in viewing habits among young people, particularly children over the age of seven. Our young people are now consuming content in so many different ways and via a variety of devices. They are flocking to services such as YouTube and TikTok, and watching content designed for adults. We have to work out how children and young people will find culturally specific and original UK content on those platforms in future.

Regulation could be one solution. It is very difficult for regulated commercial PSB broadcasters to invest in kids’ TV content. They do not have the scale of kids’ audiences, or a fraction of the revenue from kids’ content, that they once had. The ban on HFSS advertising some years ago speeded up the decline. The PSBs have been replaced by services such as YouTube, which alone takes in around £50 million a year in advertising revenue around unregulated children’s content.

If the young audiences fund is not coming back— I think it should—perhaps we need to look for inspiration from other countries which have put levies on streamers. EU rules allow countries to impose investment obligations to support local content and language. In France alone, Netflix has agreed to invest at least €30 million a year, either directly or through contributing to local film funds. I am encouraged by how this type of intervention could be used to help fund original UK children’s content. Interestingly, Australia is currently consulting on a proposal that would require streamers to invest 10% to 30% of their Australian revenue in Australian drama and children’s content.

I also understand that, for the first time, it has been suggested that such an obligation could be imposed on video-sharing platforms such as YouTube. This idea has been floated by the Government in Belgium, which will shortly be taking over the presidency of the Council of the EU, and which may therefore influence future EU policies—hurrah.

It is this type of thinking that we will need if our children are going to see the best UK-originated culturally specific children’s content, as we all did when we were growing up. I ask the Minister: will the Government consider these common-sense interventions at the same time as my amendment and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton? The crisis is upon us and we need to act fast before we reach a point of no return. I look forward to the Minister’s response.