Broadcast General Election Debates (Communications Committee Report)

Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill Excerpts

Wednesday 21st January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, on securing this debate at such an apposite time. I also thank him for his excellent chairmanship of the Communications Committee, on which I served, which produced this important report into broadcast general election debates.

Our wide-ranging report, published a year before the 2015 general election, was conducted in a much cooler climate, where the advantages and possible disadvantages could be weighed up. We found that the broadcast general election debates helped to energise and engage the public in the electoral process, with the most striking impact being on the young and relatively disengaged. Now the climate has become more heated and who will participate in these proposed TV debates is a subject for endless speculation in the media and in Parliament.

As our report stated,

“we are persuaded that they served the public interest by increasing engagement with the electoral process and perhaps contributed to a higher voter turnout”.

At a time of apparent public alienation from mainstream political activity, any effort to re-engage the electorate must be of value to a parliamentary democracy. Turnout among 18 to 25 year-olds increased by seven percentage points in 2010, which was three points higher than the average increase in turnout compared with 2005. My party recently revealed that one million voters have disappeared from the electoral register and we know from the Electoral Commission that there are an estimated 7.5 million eligible voters who are not registered. I would argue that any means by which more people become interested in the outcome of the next general election and take the opportunity to register to vote by 20 April will be a good thing for society, and television debates could have a valuable role to play.

Our report highlighted the public’s expectation that the debates should happen again. But we warned:

“The road to broadcast general election debates in 2015 is unlikely to be smooth. Experience from 2010 suggests that there will be disputes and these will be hottest on the question of participation: who is invited by the broadcasters to debate?”.

This is the key to our report. The debates are first and foremost television programmes, and as such it is up to the broadcasters to invite participants. It is not up to politicians to decide whether the debates should happen.

Today’s debate is an opportunity calmly to assess the pros and cons of broadcast general election debates and to look at the factors that need to be taken into account. We can leave the name-calling to others. The 2010 debates took place within a framework of codes, statements and guidelines which constituted the legal and regulatory framework and ensured that all political parties were given due weight across the patchwork of coverage laid on by the broadcasters during an election period. Televised debates took place not only between the leaders in the running to become Prime Minister, but also between the leaders of the main parties in the devolved nations, in the midst of which there was a whole range of other programming in which smaller UK-wide parties also gained coverage. As in the run-up to the 2010 debates, there is much misunderstanding as to how participants are decided, as other noble Lords have made clear. However, it is not a matter for politicians to decide.

The key point I wish to make is that more than 22 million people watched these debates in 2010 and, although the jury may still be out on whether voting intentions were changed by them, it cannot be denied that people were better informed having watched them. That is not to say that the format and presentations were perfect and cannot be improved upon, as my noble friend Lord Dubs said. Indeed, we made strong suggestions to the broadcasters to consider the balance of gender and ethnic diversity among the moderators and to make more of the opportunity to inform voters and encourage the public to be interested in the electoral process. Although we did not support the US system of an independent commission on debates—the CPD—we found a number of very positive lessons to be learnt from the way in which the commission approaches its work around the debates, including a whole range of activities related to voter information and encouraging the public to be interested in the electoral process. As its chief executive Janet Brown told the inquiry, the CPD’s objective,

“around the debates is to try to use them as vehicles not only to educate voters about the candidates, the parties and the issues but particularly to get young people involved in understanding why this matters”.

Of course, there is no compulsion for politicians to appear even if they rashly determine to withstand public expectations, now made even more compelling by the debates having taken place in 2010, but it is worth noting that our report finds that it would be far from certain that this would necessarily mean that the debates could not proceed while remaining compliant with the broadcasters’ legal and regulatory obligations. As the report said:

“We only note that we cannot suppose that the political parties will deem it is in their best interests to find out by withdrawing, against a backdrop of wide public support and manifest expectation that the debates do take place again”.

The questions of whether the debates will go ahead and who will participate are, I suggest, awaited with almost the same anticipation as the results of the 2015 election itself.