King’s Speech (4th Day)

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak about the crisis in children’s television. I declare an interest as per the register. But first, I congratulate the noble Lords on their maiden speeches, and the new Government. I want to highlight the urgent work that is needed to address the challenges facing children and young people. I hope to work closely and constructively with the Government, along with the children’s charity Barnardo’s—I declare an interest as its vice-president—to ensure that children grow up feeling safe, happy, healthy and hopeful about their future.

For years I have been calling for a Cabinet-level Minister for Children, so I welcome the Government’s new ministerial task force on child poverty, with a unit in the Cabinet Office. Cross-government collaboration is crucial to deliver change and opportunities for all children.

I was encouraged to see plans to strengthen children’s social care regulations and measures to address children’s health inequalities. However, research by Barnardo’s has shown that, as a result of the two-child limit and the cost of living crisis, families are struggling to prioritise essentials. If the existing child benefit policy is not reformed, an additional 670,000 children will be affected by the end of this Parliament, so, alongside much-needed legislative change, the Government need to prioritise investing more of our national wealth in improving children’s lives, especially early intervention and prevention. Economic growth is important, but I urge the Government to take bold action in the autumn spending review to lift children out of poverty and invest in the future health and well-being of the children who have faced difficult and challenging starts to their lives. The moral and financial cost of doing nothing is too high.

It was a shame that the Windrush compensation scheme was not mentioned in the King’s Speech, but I hope the Government will find ways to end this outrageous scandal. The money has been allocated to do so.

During the debates on the previous Government’s Media Bill, amendments were proposed which called for the start of an urgent review into the way our children access content on unregulated online services such as YouTube and TikTok, in huge numbers compared with the dwindling audiences and migration from public service broadcasters. Will this new Government—whose Minister, like me, proposed such amendments calling for the review—now stand by their word and instruct Ofcom to undertake an in-depth analysis of the implications of this huge change in viewing habits and its effect on the children’s media industry? YouTube, which has a giant slice of the children’s audience, shares very little of its advertising revenue with producers and does nothing to make public service content prominent.

We need to find new ways of regulating these largely unregulated platforms so that they become responsible providers, not just providers of content designed to generate maximum revenue for shareholders, with no thought given to the young people they are serving, which has a detrimental effect on children’s well-being and on children’s media practitioners. There are also concerns about how high-quality public service children’s content is going to be funded, where it is going to be found and how children are going to view it, as highlighted at the children’s media conference.

Children do not have a vote or a voice, but they are massively affected by policies. So, on their behalf and on behalf of those in the media industry, I ask the Government to consider policies that will be beneficial to them: first, to raise the tax credit for animation and television from 22.5% to 40% to match that for independent films, to address the market failure in the kids’ area. Also, they should look at ways of implementing a private/public investment fund to invest in companies and content and to allow producers to retain the rights to their work.

The scale of the challenge facing children and young people cannot be overestimated. But I am an optimist, and ready to work with the Government to change children’s lives so that they grow up happy, contented and influenced and inspired in a positive way—because childhood lasts a lifetime.