BBC: Government Support

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, it is a thrill to take part in this debate, and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, on calling it. I praise the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool for his wonderful maiden speech, and I am glad to be the warm-up act for the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, who is one of the best discoveries that I have made since I joined your Lordships’ House.

I love debates about the BBC, mainly because we all suffer from “Strictly” syndrome—all our speeches descend very quickly into the programmes that we like or dislike on the BBC, and from that we extrapolate some grand stratagem about its future, but I want to concentrate a bit more on its structures because I am a critical friend of the BBC. In fact, the excellent speech of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, teed me up quite nicely, because as a Back-Bench MP I actually campaigned against the BBC’s education services and succeeded in closing some of them down. I did this because, as an Oxfordshire MP, I had a lot of publishing companies and education companies coming to me and saying, “We are private companies, and we employ hundreds of people in your constituency. We cannot compete against ‘free’”. That is why we now have the market-access test for the BBC’s new services, because sometimes the BBC, despite the much greater media world that we now live in, ends up stamping on the commercial sector.

I once found myself on the front page of the Sunday Times because I had mused to a journalist—thinking that I was in a seminar and not having an on-the-record drink—that perhaps Radio 1 could be privatised. The point is that we forget that Radio 1 was established in the 1960s to combat pirate radio. We now have Radio 1, Radio 2 and 6 Music, all existing in a highly competitive and commercial popular music environment. It is legitimate to ask these kinds of questions. I always start from the premise that it is important to ask these questions, just as it is important to ask the question about whether Channel 4 should be privatised. I do not know what the right answer is, but we should not shy away from these kinds of questions.

I was the Minister who froze the licence fee when we came into government in 2010. Again, I have always wondered—it sounds like a dinner party one-liner; it is a dinner party one-liner—whether it would be interesting to have a director-general who came into office saying, “My ambition over the next five years is to cut the licence fee by 10% without having to have a fight with the Government.” These are the sorts of questions that I feel we should be asking about the BBC. I share the sentiment of this debate, which is that the BBC is a national treasure that we should support, but we should also ask critical questions of it.

There are three or four points that I want to make as I wrap up. The first is that the BBC never thinks enough about how it can support the wider commercial sector. For example, commercial radio companies complain to me that they do not want to go on BBC Sounds, because it is called “BBC Sounds”. The BBC has created an amazing radio digital platform that the commercial sector cannot work with. If one talks to the commercial sector about how easy it is to work with the BBC, they all say that it is impossible; similarly with the iPlayer. I would love to have the BBC see as one of its aims support for the wider commercial sector.

The absolutely core reason why we should support the BBC is precisely because of what we talk about when we mention companies such as Netflix, Amazon and Disney. The clue, of course, is in their names. These are huge, global, US companies. We need to find a way to preserve—and I make no apology for saying this—UK content for UK audiences, and to have a quality anchor for our broadcasting landscape.

The BBC must support market failure, and this where I part company with my noble friend Lord Hannan’s brilliant speech. BBC local radio is a vital service that we do not talk enough about. I do not think that anyone else apart from the BBC can really provide the local radio that I still believe is vital.

Finally, the BBC should be there—in a complicated media world that is now rife with disinformation—as a trusted source of news. That has never been more important than it is today. Moreover, the BBC should—and I welcome the remarks made by the noble Baroness, Lady Jay—do the kinds of things that are difficult to do: really push in the area of diversity and people from diverse backgrounds, as was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Young, when he, like all of us, succumbed to “Strictly” syndrome.