Media Bill

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th May 2024 Lords Chamber

We live in a world where our current Government have, for the last few years, frequently stood at the Dispatch Box and talked—usually when they were slightly on the back foot—about how we are world-leading, world-beating, et cetera. In all my experience of giving praise, praise is at its most effective when it is given to us by other parties. If you go around the world and ask people what they think about our public sector broadcasters, they say they are genuinely world-beating and set the pace for the world. For once, can we accept praise and believe what the rest of the world is telling us, rather than thinking that we can reinvent truth—and do it in a way that may lose what we have? I quoted Joni Mitchell at Second Reading. She did not talk about the baby going out with the bath-water—they use showers in California—but you get my point.

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register, primarily as chair of Peers for the Planet. I rise to speak to Amendment 8 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, who very much regrets that she cannot be here this afternoon.

After listening to the contributions on the first four amendments in this group, I hope—it does not always happen in Committee—that my comments on Amendment 8 will continue the conversation that has been started about overarching principles. This amendment reflects two of the enduring principles which have underpinned our world-class—my noble friend used the phrase “world-beating”—PSB regime: discoverability and trust. Ensuring prominence for public service broadcasters in a digital world is a welcome reform in this Bill. In ensuring that PSB content is discoverable, we need to do what we can to maintain and strengthen public trust in the content that is discovered. I am particularly grateful to the Royal Society for its support for Amendment 8. Its briefing recognises the importance of science and scientific credibility in our national broadcasting framework. It also recognises the risks posed by concerning trends in misinformation.

Amendment 8 would amend the Communications Act 2003 to require Ofcom, in carrying out its functions, to report on the provision by public service broadcasters of accurate and timely science-based public information, and of countering misinformation, including—but not exclusively—on matters such as public health, climate and the environment, which reflect key existential threats of our time.

The effect of Amendment 8 is cross-cutting; it is not genre specific—that is a debate we will have later in Committee. It emphasises the important of good science and the need to tackle misinformation across the totality of PSB output, a theme that has already emerged. It sits alongside a number of other strategic objectives in Clause 1(5) of the Bill, which encapsulate important outputs of the PSB regime, such as “facilitating … well-informed debate”, reflecting diverse cultural concerns and traditions, and the concerns of children and young people, as well as original and regional production.

The need for this amendment is well documented. In its recent report Trusted Voices, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee notes the rise of information on public health issues such as Covid-19, water fluoridation and 5G, alongside climate change. It states:

“The Covid-19 pandemic made clear just how vital it is to be able to access authoritative information. In February 2020, the World Health Organisation warned that, alongside the outbreak of COVID-19, the world faced an ‘infodemic’, an unprecedented overabundance of information—both accurate and false—that prevented people from accessing authoritative, reliable guidance about the virus”.


In this context, the committee emphasised the importance of trusted voices from the scientific community and the role of the media in providing those trusted voices. Recent research from Ofcom further underlines why those trusted voices matter: it found that adults and children “overestimate” their ability to spot misinformation, with “only two in 10” adults being

“able to correctly identify the tell-tale signs of a genuine”

social media post. Worryingly, there is a similar pattern among children.

The damage caused by misinformation in relation to health issues is also well documented. A 2022 study covered in the bulletin of the World Health Organization found that:

“Incorrect interpretations of health information, which increase during outbreaks and disasters, often negatively impact people’s mental health and increase vaccine hesitancy, and can delay the provision of health care”.


This year, a Lancet study indicates that infodemics create damage beyond the negative outcomes for any specific health epidemic,

“such as reduction of public trust in health institutions and economic burden due to increased morbidity and mortality, including costs that take away resources from other public health activities”.

Damage caused by misinformation on climate change is similarly concerning. The Global Risks Report 2024 by the World Economic Forum ranked misinformation as the biggest short-term risk to human society, and extreme weather events as the top long-term risk. Those two findings underline that one of the greatest risks to society is obscuring the facts on climate change. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report in 2022 was very clear:

“Rhetoric and misinformation on climate change and the deliberate undermining of science have contributed to misperceptions of the scientific consensus, uncertainty, disregarded risk and urgency, and dissent”.


It also found that misinformation, in turn, is impacting on climate policy decisions.

Everyone agrees that, since the PSB regime was last reviewed, the world has changed. We are now, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, said, to look to the future and the effects of that infodemic. The evidence on the level of, and the damage caused by, scientific misinformation is deeply troubling. Some of it can be measured in data, but much of it is much more insidious. Surely the roles of the media regulator and the PSBs in the coming years become more, rather than less, important in responding to this challenge.

Amendment 8 is a proportionate and workable amendment to future-proof the PSB regime. It provides a clear strategic steer on the responsibility of the media sector and its regulator, without being overly prescriptive. The crucial role of science in our cultural and public discourse is something on which most of us agree. If we want a powerful regulator such as Ofcom to take into account the importance of science, and the clear dangers of scientific misinformation, we need to tell it to do so, and we need our public service broadcasters to support trusted voices and be trusted themselves.

I hope the Government will give this amendment serious consideration.