Public Service Broadcasting: BBC Centenary

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Foster for securing this important debate and for his kind remarks. I declare my interests as set out in the register.

Public service broadcasting content is vital nourishment for children and their well-being. It is the perfect way for them to recognise and understand the world that they live in. I have vast experience, knowledge and wisdom of the importance of this because of my 46 years of broadcasting for children, through programmes such as the BBC’s “Play School”. Many say that that programme, where I took them through the arched, round and square windows, shaped their lives, helped them deal with dark moments and gave them unconditional love and confidence to face adversity.

Before we meddle with the future of public service broadcasting, let us think of our children and what we are going to replace it with. Our thinking about the future of public service media must recognise that young people are taking the lead in the adoption of new services and developing loyalty to new platforms. If we ignore that young audience, we risk losing them permanently to a diet of international content that fails to connect them to the UK’s culture, engage them in UK society or reflect them as members of that society. Remember: childhood lasts a lifetime, so if we fail to provide content that has public service purposes at its heart, then public service media will be meaningless to them as they become adults. This is why the media Bill is crucial to ensuring that PSB has prominence, is inclusive and has fair value for its content, and that those broadcasters are able to compete fairly with global streamers and secure fair value for their investment in original UK content, which in turn has clear value for the UK.

Several areas of public policy are impacting on young people right now. First, Ofcom had identified market failure in the provision of children’s television in the UK, mainly associated with the reluctance of the commercial public service broadcasters to commission new content for children and teenagers. So the young audience content fund, which I persuaded the then Digital Minister Margot James to give to children’s production, was a successful pilot which addressed market failure. It disbursed £44 million over three years and provided 50% of the funding needed to generate new content for children and young people on ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. It coincided with the new regulatory powers that Ofcom was granted through the amendment I proposed to what is now the Digital Economy Act 2017. I fought hard for that amendment in this House. At last, Ofcom could insist that public service broadcasters provide programmes for young people. Ofcom worked with broadcasters, allowing them flexibility to run content on their dedicated children’s channels or online. It was a perfect carrot and stick approach.

However, the fund was abruptly brought to a halt when the DCMS did a deal with the BBC in the current licence fee settlement to abandon contestable funding. This was the death-knell for the young audience fund—for broadcasters, producers and the audience, who benefited from the dozens of new projects that it generated. This was a successful new way of tackling market failure. It addressed the issue of “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it”. For a child to truly aspire—for a child to feel welcome in their own culture and the broader culture of the country in which they live—they need to be included in the media they consume. The fund achieved this. We urgently need to create a successor to the fund to support a plural system of public service provision, such as through levies or lottery funding, not by top-slicing the licence fee.

The second policy impact on the children’s audience is the BBC children’s department. It is currently focusing on animation, which is expensive and will impact on the amount of commissioning of live-action content for kids. But Ofcom must not roll back the requirement for the BBC to commission content for children in a variety of genres, and at a reasonable number of hours per year. We know that the BBC plans to place all CBBC content on the iPlayer in the long term. While positioning BBC content on platforms such as YouTube could be a way of recapturing the lost audience, this should not be done at the expense of independent producers, who currently hold the rights to exploit their content on digital platforms. Clearly, there is pressure on the finance for children’s content at the BBC, so we need to ensure that the BBC is funded securely and in a fair manner. Without secure and adequate funding, the BBC will short-change the children’s audience and continue to lose them to YouTube, TikTok and the streamers.

Another important aspect of public service broadcasting is that it provides something for everyone. Channel 4 is currently helping the UK fulfil that promise through its commitment to 13 to 16-year-olds. A fully commercial Channel 4 would be highly unlikely to serve this niche group. Once again, public policy decisions will impact heavily on this audience. A privatised Channel 4 would not serve the young children’s audience well. I am frightened to say that as a result of public policy decisions, market failure is back with a vengeance. Will the Government commit to finding new methods of funding competitive, trusted public service content for children and young people? They are the future; please, let us not fail them.