Media Bill

Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 20th May 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie]

16: Clause 14, page 16, line 43, at end insert—
“(4A) After subsection (6) insert—“(6A) When determining the number of hours OFCOM consider appropriate under subsections (1) and (3), they must ensure that the number of hours would result in at least 50% of programmes broadcast, measured both by hours and expenditure, being made outside of London and 16% from the nations of the United Kingdom other than England, in proportion to their relative populations.””

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[Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 16 and 17 in my name and in doing so I declare my interests as laid out in the register as a board member of Creative Scotland. The noble Baroness, Lady Foster of Aghadrumsee, who has added her name, has asked me to apologise to the House as she cannot be here in time today due to a prior engagement in Northern Ireland, but she wanted me to indicate that the points I will be making have her strong support from a Northern Irish perspective. I also thank the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle for their support, which is greatly appreciated.

Never before have I stood up in this House and felt such a weight of responsibility on my shoulders. My amendments have the backing of all three devolved Administrations, the screen agencies of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, industry bodies from across the nations and regions as well as countless numbers of independent production companies. The noise outside this Chamber and outside London is deafening, and it is united.

The Media Bill is to be welcomed, and I know the Minister and the Secretary of State—and, indeed, all of us—wish it to pass quickly. However, if it passes unamended, it will have ignored the vibrant but delicately balanced screen ecologies in the nations and regions of the UK, and it risks removing the foundations upon which those thriving screen sectors have been able to build: namely, commissions from PSBs, the very channels for whom representing the lives and experiences of the nations and regions of the UK should be at their heart.

According to the Office for National Statistics, around 68 million people currently live in the UK. About 10 million people live within the M25, but, like much of our politics, our media can often be seen as being too London-centric. My amendments seek to ensure that public service broadcasters provide a suitable range of programmes for the roughly 58 million people who do not live in London, and that a proportionate share of those programmes are made outside London by the talented people who live and work all across the UK. That these should be measured by both hours and expenditure would ensure that PSBs did not simply fulfil their regional quotas with low-value daytime live discussions.

Section 287 of the Communications Act 2003 required Channel 3 to provide a sufficient amount and a suitable range of regional programmes, including news and current affairs, regulated by Ofcom quotas obligated by its licence. If it were not for those quotas then the plurality of news in the nations and regions provided by ITV and STV, in addition to that of the BBC, would be lost. Equivalent requirements and national and regional quotas apply to the BBC under the BBC framework agreement.

The BBC and Channel 4 have already responded to criticism that they do not reflect the public they serve by moving part of their workforce outside of London to regional centres in Salford, Leeds, Bristol and Glasgow. During the debate around the proposed privatisation of Channel 4, its chief executive, Alex Mahon, speaking at the opening of the channel’s new studios in Leeds, argued that privatisation would inhibit the channel’s plans to expand outside London and help the levelling-up agenda. Ms Mahon led a campaign against privatisation by declaring that Channel 4 was “for all the UK”, and regional producers in the nations and regions stepped up to support it. However, as soon as privatisation was taken off the table, Channel 4 abruptly stopped developing its commissioning capacity outside London, recently making its most senior commissioner in Leeds redundant and losing one of its small Glasgow-based commissioning team.

Ofcom requires that the BBC must ensure that in each calendar year at least 16% of the hours of network programmes made in the UK are made outside England, and at least 16% of the BBC’s expenditure on new network programmes is applied across Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which is in line with the three home nations’ share of the population. My amendments would simply extend those requirements to all public service broadcasters, ensuring that these public assets deliver fairly for all the UK.

If we do not have such regional quotas then we risk not having any of the production centres of which we are so rightly proud, and in that case Amendment 54 from the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, becomes somewhat academic. As much as I wish to support him in requiring Ofcom to ensure that the out of London nations and regions production criteria support inward investment in regional production centres, while encouraging the pipeline of talent from across the UK to thrive, without national and regional quotas the only option to fulfil any regional out of London production would be by brass-plating.

Channel 4 is a commercially funded but publicly owned PSB. It does not produce regional news content as ITV and STV do, but to date it has played an extremely important role in the success of the UK’s creative industries, pioneering innovation in, investing in and stimulating the production sector and acting as a world-leading accelerator. However, despite Channel 4’s “for all the UK” campaign, it has had to be dragged kicking and screaming by Ofcom into accepting the rise of its out of England quota to only 9% in 2020, and it has recently argued for that 9% minimum to sustain across the next decade, on the basis that producers outside London are too small.

This Bill will remove the existing publisher/broadcaster restriction and give Channel 4 valuable new flexibility to make some of its own content. While I understand the Government’s desire to ensure that Channel 4 is able to grow and better compete in the age of streaming giants, they are giving away the very thing that makes Channel 4 unique among PSBs, at no cost to the taxpayer but of considerable importance to the regional creative economy and independent production sectors. They are doing so without demanding anything in return. As a publicly owned PSB with its own stated strong commitment to represent the whole of the UK and to stand up for diversity across the UK, surely the Government must ensure that Channel 4 fulfils this remit for the benefit of the UK as a whole, supporting the sustainable growth of the industry outside London and across all four home nations.

My amendments do nothing other than echo the voluntary commitments that Channel 4’s chairman and chief executive have already made. In November last year, Sir Ian Cheshire issued a statement saying:

“Channel 4 remains entirely committed to its presence, programme-making and impact across the Nations and Regions. This includes its commitment to regional producers, voluntary investing 50% of its commissioning budget outside of London”.


I am asking the Minister therefore to write this voluntary commitment into the Bill, along with a separate nations’ quota in line with that of the BBC. According to the independent producers’ industry body, PACT, increasing these quotas to 50% outside London and 16% outside England would cost Channel 4 only an additional £136 million over 10 years—just over 2% of its anticipated budget for new programmes across the next decade. The benefit to the creative economy across all the UK, to British audiences and to Channel 4 itself would be significantly higher.

Channel 4’s resistance to increasing national and regional quotas to match the BBC’s has caused what I can only describe as a real stushie among the independent producers, the freelance TV talent, the devolved Administrations and the screen agencies in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, all of whom have written to Ofcom—and I am delighted to see its chairman in his place—and made public their desire for national and regional quotas and their support of my amendments. I am grateful to the three screen agencies—Screen Scotland, Northern Ireland Screen and Creative Wales—and PACT, as well as the many independent producers who have engaged with me and many other noble Lords in preparation for this debate, and who recently felt so strongly about this that they made the effort to come to the House to brief us in person. I can only apologise to them that voting on the safety of Rwanda rather truncated our discussions on that day.

The independent producers who recently wrote a public letter to Ofcom, urging it to reconsider the lifting of the current production 91% “made in England” production quota for Channel 4, are long-term, trusted suppliers of Channel 4, ITV and the BBC, as well as Netflix, Disney+, Sky, Amazon and National Geographic among many others. They cannot be dismissed as being “too small” for the PSB broadcasters to work with. The key to fostering and safeguarding the regional TV production sector lies in securing network commissions, not just ad hoc regional talent and skills schemes.

Quotas work. Both the BBC and Channel 4 have met them regularly and this has fostered significant economic and creative growth across the UK since 2003. Quotas are critical to ensuring that the infrastructure of the thriving creative industries that have been so successfully built up over the last two decades is maintained and not jettisoned. Quotas are essential to ensuring that our PSBs truly reflect, on-screen, the voices and stories of the people they serve throughout the different parts of our United Kingdom. This is in the best long-term interests of those broadcasters. If the Minister is not minded to accept my amendments as tabled today, I ask him and his team to work with me and the regional agencies to ensure that the commitment to representation throughout the UK for public service broadcasting is reflected robustly within the provisions of this Bill.

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[Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie (Con)]

My Lord, I thank everybody from around the Committee who contributed to this debate. As the noble Lord, Lord McNally, said, I think we have given due warning of trouble ahead to the Minister. I am grateful for that. The noble Viscount, Lord Colville, reminded the Minister of the very strong feelings in the sector across the nations and the regions. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, said, despite the rosy picture we may be able to paint, there are marked inequalities in the system. To ensure that this moves in the right direction we need intentionality, as the right reverend Prelate mentioned.

I note that the Minister mentioned figures up to 2022 and the creative hubs in the regions, but they are no good if the commissioning relationships are not made from those hubs. I put to my noble friend that that is what the sector has been concerned about since 2022. Frankly, Channel 4 sees quotas as a target, not as a minimum—the figures from PACT show that it is just making it, year on year—so they do work and it is important that we build on what is there and do not jettison it.

I am very grateful to the Minister for his offer of further discussions with us and Ofcom, but I am mindful of the question from the noble Lord, Lord Bassam: where is the parliamentary scrutiny and where are we setting this? We have heard the strength of feeling. Do we really want to leave it to Ofcom yet again? As many Peers said, we need to ensure that the spirit, not just the letter, is setting the right direction. I thank the Minister for his offer of further talks. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw.

Amendment 16 withdrawn.