TV Licence Fee

Damian Collins Excerpts

Monday 20th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mr Campbell]

Indeed, but why has that not been happening for years? Why did the BBC have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into revealing presenters’ salaries? When we discovered those salaries, there was outrage at the disparity between men and women, but was the BBC asked when it would lower the salaries of male presenters? No, it was asked when it would raise the salaries of female presenters. The BBC has a lot of questions to answer. I hope that it is moving, slowly but inexorably, towards greater transparency. If so, that is a very good thing.

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

May I introduce a note of hope? As the hon. Gentleman knows, the BBC now makes a declaration of talent pay, following a recommendation made by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, accepted by the Government and included in the charter. That shows that when we clearly voice the reform we want, it is possible to get it.

[Mr Campbell]

I am glad that has happened. Some of us have been campaigning on the issue for many years, so I am glad that there has been some success.

I have raised commissioning many times, privately and publicly, within the BBC and externally. As hon. Members are probably aware, there is a commissioning process in the BBC’s regions, under which independent media companies—small or large—are entitled to apply for commissions; so are people who work for the BBC, many of whose applications are successful. I have endeavoured to find out whether having worked for the BBC for some time gives people an unfair advantage because they know their way around the system—how the sound people work, how the video cameras work and so on—but once again I have found it difficult to get answers. Why do private companies find it difficult to get on commissioning shortlists, while internal BBC companies and individuals seem to get on them frequently? Can we have more openness and transparency about that? Will the BBC explain it? When I have complained to the BBC about the nature of commissioning, I have been told repeatedly that it has a robust and transparent internal process.

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[Mr Campbell]

I agree totally. If a political party in this House were in receipt of public money from a variety of sources for commissioning opinion polls and so on, and the BBC said, “We would like to question you about your spending of public money, because there seems to be a lack of transparency,” just imagine its response if the party replied that it had robust internal mechanisms to ensure that the money was spent appropriately! Yet that is what the BBC tells me about its internal commissioning process and the complaints engendered by it: “Leave it to us; we know how to spend public money, and we have very efficient internal employees to ensure that it is accounted for.” That is not good enough.

[Damian Collins]

The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful case on commissioning, but does he accept that, apart from news programmes, all BBC programmes, whether new or repeats, require competition in the commissioning process? In fact, since the changes in the royal charter, the highest profile recommissioning case has been that of “Songs of Praise”, which the BBC has lost to a commercial competitor.

[Mr Campbell]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point, but I come back to this one: whenever we complain about a commissioning process, it would be infinitely preferable if the BBC opened up its system. If it has a fully accountable and transparent system for assessing the commissioning process, we will be able to see it. We can analyse it, we can look at it and we can say, “Is that value for money for the licence fee payer, or is there something else at work?” I do not know that there is something else at work, but I know that there have been complaints and that there needs to be greater transparency.

In short, and to conclude, the BBC used to be a wonderfully independent and impartial public service broadcaster. I want to see it return to those days, because I think that it has fallen short in recent days—I had a debate in this Chamber only recently along similar lines. We need to keep pressing the BBC. We also need a wider debate: were we to move away from the licence fee, what would be a better way of doing things? I fully concede there are no simple, easy solutions, but we need accountability and transparency for almost £4 billion of public money.

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[Peter Heaton-Jones]

There is sometimes a tendency, I think, for BBC managers not to be front and centre or, when they are, if they appear on a programme like “Feedback” or “Points of View”, the defensive attitude is the one that comes to the fore. What we need sometimes, just sometimes, is for the BBC to say, “We got this wrong. We didn’t do it right and we’re gonna do it differently next time”. I do not see enough of that.

When I worked for the BBC as an editor, and then again as a programme presenter, my manager would come to me once a week with a spreadsheet of the complaints I had received. He used to say, “As long as I’m getting about equal numbers of complaints, Peter, from either side in politics, you’re probably getting it about right.” That is probably as good a yardstick as any. The BBC does get stick from all sides.

The BBC is an organisation that gets a lot of our money and we need more analysis of how it chooses to spend it. There is one particular area of the BBC that I know best, and that is radio, particularly local radio, as that is where I worked. After all, I have the perfect face for radio. As has been mentioned, regional telly and local radio—in my area, BBC Radio Devon and “Spotlight”—do a fantastic job of covering news, which no other broadcaster would be able to do without that public service funding input. That is why I welcome the recent announcements by the BBC director-general at the Gillard awards, which celebrate local radio broadcasting. The first of the two main decisions he announced was that the £10 million of funding cuts he had asked the BBC to find from local radio will not now have to happen. He has found that funding from other sources, and I welcome that. Secondly, the national shared evening programme that local radio has had to have for three years now will be scrapped and local services restored. That is an example of the BBC listening, doing the right thing and saying, “We understand we have all this money and that we’ve got to spend it in a way that benefits the majority of licence fee payers”.

The alternatives do not stack up. Subscription or advertising would be extraordinarily retrograde steps. If we allow the BBC to take advertising, not only do we immediately raise questions about impartiality and neutrality but, frankly, come midnight most nights we will have a live roulette wheel, which is exactly what we have on ITV most nights.

On subscription services, I have been undertaking a text conversation with a constituent of mine in North Devon ever since I said I would be taking part in this debate. He said, “Netflix costs me half as much as the BBC and has five times the content”. Here is what Netflix does not have: radio, regional broadcasting, news and current affairs, and huge educational programmes. It does not put computers into schools or cover live sport. It does not have the huge community events that bring the country together, like Children in Need, which raised £50 million last Friday. That is what Netflix does not give us.

[Damian Collins]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. On advertising revenue, does he agree that, as brands have a finite amount of money to spend, if the BBC were fully commercial and accepted advertising it would be the biggest commercial hammer blow to independent television and radio in this country?

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

That is another perfectly good reason why we should not move to, or even consider, an advertising model for the funding of the BBC.

I will conclude with the animated conversation I was having with my constituent. Two programmes in particular have been mentioned in the debate—“The Blue Planet” and “Peaky Blinders”—and my constituent said he could watch them both on Netflix. Yes, but someone has to make them in the first place and, in my opinion, the only way they will ever be made is through a public service broadcaster being funded in the way the BBC is.

We are in a position where there is quite rightly debate about the funding of the BBC. It is right that we are having that discussion but, I believe, having worked for the organisation for 17 years and having looked closely at some of the alternatives, that the licence fee is the least worst option. That phrase was used earlier and it is absolutely right. If we try to move beyond that, we find ourselves opening up a hornet’s nest that could lead, as my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe said, to advertising or subscription, to a model that will not be the one we want the BBC to be.

I will say a couple of things in conclusion. I pay tribute to the Government and to the arrangement they have reached with the BBC for its charter renewal settlement. It is absolutely right that the BBC has been given a guarantee of income, and that it will rise with inflation. That is good and positive. The Government need to look further, as I know they are doing, at ways in which those who find it hard to pay the licence fee are able to do so, and I look forward to their working with the BBC on that. I have a great deal of sympathy with the concern that has been raised about some of the tactics used by those who collect the licence fee, about some of the letters that are far too threatening in the first instance. If someone does not have a television, that is their right, and they should not get threatening letters through the post because of it.

The licence fee and the BBC are, however, intrinsically linked and there is no viable funding alternative for our public service broadcaster. The BBC is a brilliant organisation but it has to be paid for and the licence fee is, in my estimation, the best way to do that. The BBC is known colloquially as Auntie. We have to hug Auntie close. She may be slightly eccentric but she needs to be fed. If we do not feed her, we will soon regret it, and we will miss her when she has gone.

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[Kevin Brennan]

That may explain why the hon. Gentleman’s wife agreed with the decision not to have a TV licence.

The hon. Member for Eastleigh (Mims Davies) made an excellent speech and highlighted her previous career both in the BBC and in commercial local radio. I completely agreed with the point she made about BBC local radio. In fact, as you will be aware, Mrs Moon, there is a programme late at night on BBC Radio Wales presented by Chris Needs, which I think ought to be funded by the NHS or social services, because it draws in people late at night who might be lonely and have no one else to talk to. It is an extraordinary service to the nation. Sometimes we forget about the role of radio in bringing comfort and companionship to lonely people.

The hon. Lady also advocated flexibility around the TV licence. I understand the point she makes, but there is a danger that if we unpick the simplicity of the licence concept we could get into difficulties. It is already costly to collect. The more we complicate it, the more difficult it will probably be to collect, and that might undermine the whole principle in a way that she would not intend. We should beware of unintended consequences to a suggestion that she makes with the best of intentions.

My hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) rightly condemned both the far left and the far right for their attacks on journalism and on individual BBC journalists. I endorse everything he said. He told us that he had watched “Pobol y Cwm”, the Welsh language soap opera that appears on S4C. He might be aware that the news on S4C is produced by the BBC. It is not parochial news only about Wales; it is an international news programme produced in the Welsh language by the BBC. It does not seek in any way to present the news in a narrow parochial way.

The hon. Member for Solihull (Julian Knight) described his childhood trauma at being the only Julian brought up on his estate. He said that to abolish the BBC would be an act of “cultural vandalism”. I completely endorse that phrase and those remarks. He said there had been a tendency towards “despite Brexit” coverage on the BBC around the time of the referendum, but there was a time when one could not turn on the BBC without Nigel Farage’s visage appearing at every turn. It is a debatable point whether the BBC has been unfair on that particular topic. However, the hon. Gentleman made a good point about Ofcom’s oversight, which I agree is to be welcomed.

The hon. Gentleman made a point about the value of the back catalogue in potentially raising more funds for the BBC. That is a valid point, but licence fee payers have already paid for the back catalogue, so people would be charged twice if they were asked to pay again to access the back catalogue. There is a fine line to be drawn between making public service broadcasting available to people in this country who have already paid for it through the licence fee, and being able to commercialise it in an appropriate manner, perhaps on an international basis.

[Damian Collins]

There is some BBC content that has gone off the iPlayer because the original transmission was too long ago, but that can be watched through paying a subscription to Netflix or Amazon Prime, or through going out and buying a DVD. The principle that older content from the back catalogue that is not being broadcast must be paid for has always been there. In a new technological age, should there not be a “BBC Plus” subscription service that allows someone to buy that content directly from the BBC, as they would a DVD, rather than via an intermediary such as Netflix?

[Kevin Brennan]

I do not deny that, but I must say that I hugely enjoy being able to access things such as the BBC “In Concert” series from the 1970s via YouTube. There is, of course, an element of advertising to watch that content, albeit a very small one in the case of YouTube. I am arguing only that the right balance needs to be drawn. The hon. Gentleman is right that the BBC needs to raise funds through other means than the licence fee, and some initiatives have been happening in recent years. For example, the BBC is a 50% owner of UKTV, which includes the channel Dave, on which I have appeared from time to time on “Unspun with Matt Forde”—I may be declaring an interest by saying that. My point is that sometimes people do not realise the extent to which the BBC seeks to raise funds—over £1 billion, as was mentioned in the debate.

The hon. Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell) has been a long-term critic of the BBC. He made similar points the last time we debated the BBC, in this room not so long ago. He knows that I agree with him on the issue of transparency, particularly with regard to salaries. I think it has been proved that that information is in the public interest and should have been revealed. I commend the Culture, Media and Sport Committee for recommending that that should happen, and I agree with the Government’s decision to include it in the charter review. In an intervention, it was pointed out that the BBC had lost “Songs of Praise” during the commissioning process. It reminded me of the great Welsh hymn, Mrs Moon, “Cwm Rhondda”, with the words:

“Songs of praises, songs of praises

I will ever give to thee.”

“Songs of Praise” has unfortunately been lost to the BBC, but it will still air on Sunday evenings for us all to see.

The hon. Member for North Devon (Peter Heaton-Jones) spoke about how he had worked for the BBC in his previous career. I have to say, for an allegedly lefty organisation, the BBC seems to produce an awful lot of Conservative Members of Parliament, as evidenced by the line-up in today’s debate. They are all excellent Members of Parliament; clearly a BBC career is not a hindrance to a career in politics on the Conservative Benches. The hon. Gentleman said that in his judgment, and from his experience working on the opposite side of the world, the licence fee system is the best system and we should maintain it.

I am pleased to respond on behalf of the Opposition this evening. I will not repeat much of what has been said during the debate, because hon. Members spoke very well. We on the Opposition Front Bench understand the concerns that have been expressed in these e-petitions. It is probably true that if we were to design a public service broadcaster from scratch in today’s media environment, we would probably not come up with a licence fee system. As my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North pointed out in response to an intervention, it is rather like what Winston Churchill said about democracy: it is the worst system, except for all the others. It seems to me that the charge against the licence fee probably boils down to people saying that it works in practice, but not in theory. That is the wrong way round, in a sense; it is things that work in theory but not in practice that we should be concerned about. The fact that the BBC licence fee is a bad idea in theory does not mean that we should abolish it. It is actually a practical and pragmatic way to fund our main public service broadcaster, in a world where other public service broadcasters are funded by alternative means.

We should remember what the licence fee supports and pays for. The BBC is the most used media provider among people of all ages, and in all parts of the United Kingdom. As well as creating content, it creates jobs and often serves as a creative centre of gravity in the communities in which it is based. I have to say to my colleague from the Scottish National party, the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O'Hara), that the extra funding that has gone into Scotland provides a real opportunity. I moaned about it, because we in Wales did not get as much as Scotland out of that particular deal. We will always have those arguments, but it presents a real opportunity to create the kind of centre of excellence that we have created in Wales—for example, in Cardiff around the drama village. There was not a very good drama service there a few years ago.