BBC Charter Review (Communications Committee Report)

Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury Excerpts

Thursday 21st April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury (LD)]

I am afraid that the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, is not the last.

I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Best. I sit on the committee and he has been an admirable chair. Picking up on the all too accurate description of the toil and sweat given by the noble Lord, Lord Sherbourne, he has also been an admirably patient chair, and patience was needed. Patience was also exhibited by the team: the clerk, Anna Murphy, the policy analyst, Helena Peacock, the committee assistant, Rita Logan, and our special adviser, Jacquie Hughes.

I sat on the Communications Committee with the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, and, not for the first time, I am going to disagree with him because I commend the noble Lord, Lord Hart, for what I think is an excellent title for our report: Reith not Revolution. That is what the British public—the licence fee payers—want. According to the BBC Trust, 85% of the public support the BBC’s main mission to inform, educate and entertain.

What I did not realise until today is that the noble Lord, Lord Hart, and I share an appreciation of Ballet Shoes as well as the BBC. What a rounded man he is.

We welcome the fact that the elusive White Paper will be published next month, and, as I understand it, the Minister has confirmed that the Government intend to hold debates on that in both Houses. We are disappointed that she could not confirm that there will be approval Motions, but perhaps she can today.

The process of charter renewal has confirmed that the British public overwhelmingly support the BBC. Over 80% of people responding to the Green Paper believe that the BBC is effectively serving audiences, around 75% support the licence fee, and almost three-quarters believe that BBC services are truly distinctive and that it has a positive wider impact on the market. As the summary of responses document says, it was one of the largest ever received to a government consultation, highlighting that the future of the BBC is an important issue to a great many people.

Despite this, the Secretary of State seemed to suggest that the involvement of the organisation 38 Degrees has somehow distorted the responses. Replying to an Oral Question in January, he said:

“That does not mean they are not valid expressions of opinion; it just means that perhaps they are not wholly representative of public opinion at large”. —[Official Report, Commons, 21/1/16; col. 1536.]

No surprise, then, that a recent YouGov poll found that 53% of voters do not trust the Government’s intentions where the BBC is concerned, rising to 62% among the over-60s. What is clear is that despite what you read in certain newspapers, and despite such reservations expressed by the Secretary of State, public opinion at large does support the BBC. It is clear that across Britain people use the BBC’s services every day and very happily, because it serves them well. So what fuels the negativity—something that the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, questioned? We seem, as Armando Iannucci said in his MacTaggart Lecture, to be in some artificially concocted zone of outrage.

The public largely support the licence fee, and why not? At 40p per day, the BBC is tremendous value for the consumer, but it is also great for the UK economy, generating the equivalent of £2 for every £1 of licence fee—in other words, it doubles its money and is a crucial pillar of our very successful creative economy. Sir Peter Bazalgette, chair of Arts Council England, when giving evidence to the committee, said that:

“One of the justifications for the intervention in the marketplace that is the BBC is the value of the creative industries democratically, culturally, socially and economically”.

What we do not support, along with so many other speakers today, is how the licence fee is set. As our report says, a new process must be established to set the level of our licence fee in a transparent way. The covert way in which the Chancellor negotiated the BBC taking on the cost of funding free TV licences for the over-75s was inappropriate, to say the least. Will the Minister agree with so many of the participants in this debate that the process in future should be transparent and, as our report says, that the level should be recommended by the new regulatory body?

As was pointed out, our report did not address governance, but we on these Benches agree with Sir David Clementi’s recommendation that a strong unitary BBC board matched by a strong external regulator is the right model for running and overseeing the BBC. However—I am going to repeat what everyone has said, but I have to say it too—it is absolutely vital that the Government ensure the appointment of a genuinely independent chair and non-executive directors. The Secretary of State’s plan to give the Government power to appoint most members of the new board is not acceptable. The BBC is a public broadcaster, not a state broadcaster. It must be independent to do its job, and must be seen to be independent. Does the Minister agree that there should be a transparent and independent process for appointing a BBC unitary board, starting with the Commissioner for Public Appointments, and then a wholly independent appointments panel, as my noble friend Lord Lester said? Also on independence, does she agree, as our report has recommended, that the next BBC royal charter should last for 11 years so as to decouple the charter review process from the general election cycle, and thereafter that charters should last for 10 years? The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, with her experience, pointed to how this would provide stability for the BBC.

Another recently published report on the BBC was titled, An Assessment of Market Impact and Distinctiveness. On market impact, crowding out, there seems to be a particular concern in the area of online news. As the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, said, BBC news has a higher level of trust than any other news source. In what Sir Peter Bazalgette referred to in evidence as,

“the Klondike mayhem of the internet world”,

it is surely more important than ever that it has an online presence. There was a fascinating “Start the Week” on Radio 4 this Monday about journalism in the digital age and the struggle to sort out the abundance of information and misinformation—I think that this addresses the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Maxton—and how new technology is increasingly manipulated in certain parts of the world by those who exert power. Images being circulated in Syrian refugee camps, for example, of Sunnis decapitating Shias were actually footage of members of a Latin American drug cartel murdering their rivals. I quote Sir Peter again when he said in evidence that,

“yes, it—

that is, the BBC—

“does compete and it is a market intervention, but if it is to have an impartial and independent news and information service for the country—if we believe in that—it has to have an online iteration”.

Our concern about BBC news as expressed in the report—the noble Lord, Lord Best, referred to this—is different: the downward trend in investment in current affairs, noted by Ofcom in the last review of PSB. It is vital that the BBC maintain both quality and quantity in this genre.

Then, there is the matter of a word very much in the ether—distinctiveness, which I think has somehow replaced scale and scope. The Oliver and Ohlbaum report called in particular for BBC1 to be more distinctive, echoed by the Secretary of State, which is odd considering the channel comes out top in Ofcom’s distinctiveness measure. There is a Trojan horse element to this request, alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, and identified by the actor and writer, David Mitchell, who said:

“An overt challenge to the corporation’s existence remains politically unfeasible—the public would miss it too much. The first step, then, is to turn it into something that fewer people would miss—and eventually, over time, to make it so distinctive that hardly anyone likes it at all”.

As many have said, there are of course areas where the BBC’s choices and behaviour have been far from perfect. The “officer class”, as the noble Lord, Lord Hall, refers to them, has on occasion been out of step, and there are still too many layers of them, as well as bureaucracy, referred to so eloquently by the noble Lord, Lord Best. We therefore welcome the appointment of one head of TV channels, Charlotte Moore, and her very plain pledge that:

“Life’s going to be simpler”.

The BBC must learn to understand the true definition of partnership and to do so, as we say in our report,

“in an open and generous manner”.

Here, I echo the noble Baronesses, Lady Benjamin and Lady Healy, the noble Lords, Lord Macdonald and Lord Hart, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford. If the BBC is properly to reflect the country, it has to address the problem of a lack of diversity. We need diversity at production and management level, as well as on screen. As Idris Elba said here in Parliament, there is a disconnect between people who make TV and people who watch TV. Charlotte Moore has personally committed to champion and drive diversity, but this must be delivered on, because in the past, as so many of your Lordships have said, there have been too many commitments and too little action.

I end as I did in the last debate, with the words of Terry Wogan, because I feel that their pertinence bears repeating. My first job at the BBC was working for him. He was a great man who certainly knew how to entertain, but also how to inform and educate. I wonder, would he be distinct enough if seeking a job under the world of Whittingdale? He said of the BBC:

“The BBC is the greatest broadcaster in the world. It is the standard that everyone measures themselves against. If we lose the BBC it won’t be quite as bad as losing the Royal family but an integral part of this country will have gone”.

Before then, many of us here will be marching with the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, because once the BBC has gone, it is never coming back.