BBC Charter

Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury (LD)]

My Lords, we on these Benches welcome this debate and the words of the new Secretary of State when introducing the draft BBC charter—that she wants a strong, distinctive, independent BBC. We all do. As the Minister mentioned, the consultation process leading up to the BBC White Paper confirmed that that is what the British public also overwhelmingly want. So, despite the huffing and puffing of the last Secretary of State and the threats that he was going to blow the house down, it did not happen. Indeed, this draft charter further underpins that great institution, the BBC, and we on these Benches are grateful to the Government for listening and responding to some, if not all, of our concerns. I give personal thanks, too, to the Minister for arranging to meet me and my colleagues.

We welcome the decoupling of the charter review process from the election cycle. We welcome that the mid-term review will now come after the next licence fee settlement, and we also welcome the new unitary board, with Ofcom as regulator. However, although the appointments procedure is a considerable improvement, we on these Benches believe that all non-executives to the board should be independently appointed and that none should be government appointees. As a government statement published in March made clear, in the case of such appointments Ministers will,

“make the final decision on merit and must of course be free to reject advice from the panel on the merit of candidates”.

We do not think that that is appropriate for a body which will oversee the BBC’s day-to-day editorial and strategic decisions, including issues around political programming.

We welcome the fact that there will be no top-slicing of BBC revenue, and that index-linking of the licence fee will stay and will cover people using catch-up on iPlayer. However, we are still concerned about the process by which the funding settlement is negotiated. The covert way in which, last time, the Chancellor ensured that the BBC took on the costs of funding free TV licences for the over-75s was not appropriate. The licence fee is not public money but the public’s money. Will the Minister agree that there must be no more raids? Does he not also agree with the House of Lords Communications Committee report that:

“A new process must be established to set the level of the licence fee in a transparent way”,

and that there should be a requirement for public involvement and scrutiny?

We very much welcome the inclusion in the draft charter of a new public purpose to,

“reflect, represent and serve the diverse communities of all of the UK’s nations and regions”.

I know that my noble friend Lady Benjamin will be talking more about that. I take the opportunity here to express the gratitude of these Benches for the work that Ed Vaizey did in this area when he was Culture Minister.

Last week was one of mixed messages in this area. The diverse talent on show in the London Film Festival’s opening film, “A United Kingdom”, was cause for celebration. However, the BFI’s survey revealing that nearly 60% of the British films made over the previous decade had no black actors was clearly not. While representation on and off screen is not just the responsibility of the BBC, its reach and size means that it is key, so it must hit its own target of achieving,

“a workforce at least as diverse, if not more so, than any other in the industry”,

by 2020, because—as I am sure the Minister agrees—it is achievements that we need, not simply ambitions. So we welcome that Ofcom has indicated that its approach in monitoring this area will have a “harder edge”.

We would like to see Ofcom apply the same harder edge to the BBC’s training obligations, given its vital contribution to the development of talent and skills across the UK’s creative media industries and in journalism. Does the Minister not agree that talent and skills in the creative industries are an area we cannot afford to ignore? Their development is crucial and the BBC is a crucial part, and we believe that training and skills should be made one of its core public purposes.

Although we welcome the National Audit Office’s involvement in auditing the BBC, we are concerned that this will extend to commercial subsidiaries such as BBC Worldwide, which do not receive public funding. Why, when the NAO’s own website states:

“Profit making companies will remain responsible for the appointment of their auditors”,

is this part of the draft framework agreement?

Then there is the matter of the BBC’s independence as programme maker. While paragraph 55(7) clearly states that editorial and creative judgments should not be part of the value-for-money examination, this is seriously undermined by paragraph 55(8), which allows the comptroller to determine what this exemption means in practice. Can the Minister assure the House that he will review this anomaly, which seems to challenge the BBC’s editorial independence?

Then there is the thorny matter of distinctiveness. My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones will be going into detail on our concerns in this area, so I will confine my comments to the obvious: the BBC must be allowed the creative freedom to inform, educate and make popular entertainment programmes. “Distinct” is a weasel word—too distinct appeals to too few.

I found myself agreeing with the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, who in his conference speech described the BBC as the,

“single greatest and most effective ambassador for our culture and our values”,

and as a crucial contributor to Britain’s role as a “soft power superpower”.

We have come a long way since the beginning of the year, when rumours of the demise of the BBC, as we know it, swirled through certain editorials and opinion pieces, and when, as Armando Iannucci put it, we seemed to be,

“in some artificially-concocted zone of outrage”.

It was clear what the public wanted and the Government have to a large degree responded, for which, as I said earlier, we are grateful. But this of course is a draft charter and a draft agreement, and I end by asking the Minister to continue listening. The BBC, as Sir David Attenborough says, is one of the most precious things we have.