All 1 Baroness Young of Old Scone contributions to the Digital Economy Act 2017

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Wed 29th Mar 2017
Digital Economy Bill
Lords Chamber

Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords

Digital Economy Bill Debate

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Baroness Young of Old Scone

Main Page: Baroness Young of Old Scone (Labour - Life peer)

Digital Economy Bill

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts
Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 29th March 2017

(7 years, 8 months ago)

Lords Chamber
Read Full debate Digital Economy Act 2017 Read Hansard Text Amendment Paper: HL Bill 102-III(Further Rev) Further revised third marshalled list for Report (PDF, 183KB) - (27 Mar 2017)
Baroness Young of Old Scone Portrait Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)
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My Lords, I declare an interest as a past deputy chairman of the BBC. Public service broadcasting has been vital to our national broadcasting ecosystem in terms of raising quality and sustaining the mixed economy that has made our public service broadcasting admired across the world and indeed a player across the world. The amendment is important in particular for children’s programmes, which sometimes lurk in the weeds, as I think my noble friend said. I do not think that some of these programmes lurk in the weeds at all; you have to scroll through vast quantities of channels that want to flog you jewellery or soft porn before you can get to some of them, on some of the platforms. It is interesting to see that both the BBC and the commercial public service broadcasters are of the same mind, as is Ofcom, and we owe it to them and to the public investment that the licence fee represents that they are given prominence on all platforms. I hope that the Government will seriously consider the amendment.

Lord Birt Portrait Lord Birt
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My Lords, some time in the mid-1990s, I drove to west London to Sky’s warehouse-style offices to be given the first privileged sighting to an outsider of the then embryonic Sky guide and set-top box. I was enormously impressed. In simpler times, it was very innovative and very helpful to the television viewer. Some decades later, not only Sky’s but other guides appear frankly antiquated, and the whole EPG needs modernising very fundamentally. It is not of the digital age; it is hard to navigate and is miserably slow to search. You cannot personalise it, and the Channel 4 and ITV channels are not bundled together conveniently. I have tried very hard to remember where BBC1 HD is, but I have completely failed; I search for it endlessly and spend many wasteful minutes before I find it.

In an ideal world, we would have competing EPGs, and we would have contemporary innovation if we did. We need a much faster user interface than the clunky one that we have now. Plainly, it is no longer right to have EPG providers also being the main channel and service providers themselves. There is a conflict of interest; others have spoken of this. It is not right and at some point it should be ended. I favour a much more fundamental review of EPGs than is being discussed now—but, in this less than ideal world, we simply must protect the PSBs, and I support the amendment.