BBC

Greg Mulholland Excerpts

Tuesday 10th July 2012 Westminster Hall

[Sir Roger Gale (in the Chair)]

Order. There are, I think, nine hon. Members present. No doubt all of them wish to rise to extol the virtues of their local BBC radio stations, all of which are on a par of excellence with BBC Radio Kent. The fact of the matter is that we are short of time. I propose to call those on the Front Bench at 10.40. To be as helpful as I can to hon. Members, I do not propose to impose a time limit, but you can do the maths for yourselves. I will call first those who have written in to Mr Speaker to indicate a desire to speak. The batting order is: Mr McDonnell, Mr Foster, Andy Slaughter, Sheryll Murray and Glyn Davies. I have noted that Mr Mulholland, Thérèse Coffey, Alun Cairns and Jim Shannon are all in the Chamber and wish to speak, and your names are a matter of record. If you do not wish to participate in the debate, or feel that you might not get called, you are free to intervene if any hon. Member wishes to give way.

[Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD)]

On a point of order, Sir Roger. I wrote in yesterday, so that letter should have been received.

[Sir Roger Gale (in the Chair)]

The point of order is noted, but the letter is not on file. We will do the best we can. If all hon. Members exercise self-restraint, we should be able to get everybody in.

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[Mr Don Foster (Bath) (LD)]

Sir Roger, BBC Radio Bristol is excellent.

As chairman of the all-party group on the BBC, I have to say that we are critical friends of the BBC. We believe that it is the best public service broadcaster in the world, and that that is helped by competition from some other excellent broadcasters in the UK. We accept that, as the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) has rightly pointed out, there are a number of areas where the BBC does not get things right. He gave some examples, and others could include the Jonathan Ross affair or, more recently, the dire coverage of the jubilee celebrations, which my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski)—I, too, congratulate him on securing this debate—mentioned.

Generally, however, the BBC is an excellent organisation. It is now enjoying the highest level of customer satisfaction since records began; it is more trusted than ever before; its news service is the most trusted of all news services within the UK; and as the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington said, it gives very good value for money to the economy of the UK. Not only does the BBC invest £1 billion directly into the creative economy—helping freelancers and small companies, including independent production companies—overall, it brings more than £8 billion into our economy. That means that for every £1 of licence fee, we are getting £2 into the economy. So the BBC is brilliant for the economy, and it is great for cultural activities and sporting activities. Also, let us just think of what is about to happen: the Olympics are about to start and the BBC, as the main broadcaster, will be providing 2,500 hours of coverage. For the first time ever, it will cover every single sport in the games on a variety of different platforms.

[Greg Mulholland]

My right hon. Friend is right to highlight sport. However, does he recognise the very real concerns that still exist about the coverage of sport below the national level—below competitions such as the premier league, the Guinness premiership and rugby league’s super league? Such coverage will suffer under current proposals.

[Mr Foster]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We know that television coverage of any sport can massively increase participation and involvement in it, and far too many of the so-called “minority sports” are not receiving the level of coverage I would like them to receive.

Given that there is very limited time, I want to pick up on a few of the points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham. First, he says that there should be more transparency in terms of executive pay. Frankly, I do not know what he means by that. If he goes to the BBC website, he will be able to find the precise salaries of all the senior executives. Indeed, he will be able to see not only that information but all the expenses of senior executives, produced on a quarterly basis. I am sure he will be very pleased to see that those expenses are down 35% year on year over the last couple of years.

However, if my hon. Friend is not satisfied with that information and wants more than just senior BBC executives’ salaries to be revealed, he can look further down the BBC website, where he will see the salaries of a further 462 senior and not-so-senior BBC managers; I checked the website myself a few seconds ago and saw that information for myself. Again, he will doubtless be pleased to see that the pay bill of those managers has gone down by 13.6% and their number has gone down by 8.5%. Also, as has been referred to by the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington, further work is ongoing to reduce costs, with a 25% pay bill cut and a 20% cut in headcount. So, the call for more transparency is unnecessary; there already is transparency.

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[Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) on securing this debate, and I thank right hon. and hon. Members for being brief in order to allow us all to speak. It is much appreciated.

I rise to give an update on the campaign, led by the all-party parliamentary rugby league group and supported by all the other sporting groups in Parliament, to save BBC local radio’s hugely important role in promoting all our sports. The issue goes back to the decision to freeze the licence fee until 2017, and the difficult choices that we all acknowledge the BBC has had to make. The BBC published its proposals for changes in “Delivering quality first”, but it also published proposals for BBC local radio at the same time, which got little coverage and achieved virtually no real understanding even among the major sporting associations. The proposals will mean a loss of local programmes on BBC local radio on weekday afternoons and of all local programming between 7 and 10, which of course means the loss of any sports magazine shows, discussions or programmes about sport, as well as the significant loss of live commentary and a reduction in the number of games covered in all sorts of sports.

If I may be so bold as to correct something said by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Mr Foster), this is absolutely not about minority sports; it is about all sports. BBC local radio does a wonderful job of supporting smaller sports that are not covered anywhere else, but I am talking about this country’s four main team sports: football, cricket, rugby league and rugby union. They would be affected by the proposals. We—those of us who are English, at least—have all bemoaned our disappointing performance in Euro 2012. How can our team not perform better when we have the best league in the world? We must recognise that in order to compete, we need to encourage people at grass-roots level to take up sport in the first place, and that is what is being threatened.

We were delighted to host a meeting on 13 December of all-party sports groups. We got the BBC in front of us and launched a campaign to get members of the public—fans of all the sports—to write to the BBC. I am delighted to say that that campaign received a record response from the public, who then responded to the consultation on local radio. A significant proportion were rugby league fans, but other sports were also represented.

We were delighted when, on 25 January this year, Lord Patten announced that he had indeed listened and instructed the BBC to review his proposals for local radio. He was clear and specific to those making the decision that his instruction arose from the undue effect on sport and local sport. In particular, the BBC Trust asked the BBC to review three key areas: scaling back plans for local radio to share programmes in the afternoon; ensuring that local radio stations have adequately staffed newsrooms; protecting specialist content outside peak times.

The changes were announced on 16 May. We were absolutely delighted that the savings would be £8 million rather than the original £15 million, that the impact on stations’ content had decreased to £2.1 million from £8.5 million and that the majority of staff would retain their own afternoon programmes. However, it remains a key concern that there will be common national output between 7 and 10 o’clock. We ask the BBC to reconsider that proposal, which will continue to damage local sports. We are delighted that the BBC Trust has listened so far, but it must go further. We want to keep working with it. The rugby league group and other groups in Parliament will continue to press the BBC Trust and work with it to face local challenges without creating a detrimental effect on local and grass-roots sport throughout the country.

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[Mr Vaizey]

I gather that that was an inauspicious debut for the new director-general. I join my right hon. Friend in saying that I, too, am a fan of the BBC. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire for highlighting additional work the BBC does under the radar. For example, in Wales, the BBC supports the orchestra—an important reminder of its wide-ranging work. When we focus on aspects that we do not like or that merit criticism, we should remember the many wonderful things the BBC does.

I was unfortunate not to see the BBC’s jubilee coverage—I watched the event live—so I cannot comment on its quality, but perhaps I can use this moment to congratulate Lord Sterling, the chairman of the National Maritime Museum, on commissioning Gloriana, the wonderful barge that sailed down the Thames as a tribute to Her Majesty’s diamond jubilee. I recently visited the BBC headquarters in Scotland. It was a useful reminder of the BBC’s important presence in the regions—not just in Scotland or Wales, but in Salford and other cities in England. Of course, I bow to no one in my praise of the excellent quality of the output of BBC Radio Oxford.

[Greg Mulholland]

I just want to put on record that, although the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) has every right to defend, and bemoan the loss of, services in White City, his comment about the media city in Salford was utterly ignorant and nonsensical. I have visited that wonderful complex, and it is linked by a matter of minutes to Manchester city centre and from there to other cities in the north of England.

[Mr Vaizey]

Forgive me for the use of the vernacular, Sir Roger, but it appears that things are really kicking off now, and we have only seven minutes of the debate left. If the hon. Member for Hammersmith would like to come back on that point, I will of course give way.

Let me deal with some of the issues that were raised, particularly by my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham who secured the debate. I do not think that the BBC lacks innovation—one only has to look at iPlayer or the Space. The BBC innovates as much as any other public broadcaster. I do not believe that it pulls back from competing. In fact, most criticism from other media companies about the BBC is that it is too competitive. Nor do I think that the BBC is uncommercial. BBC Worldwide, headed by an excellent chief executive, John Smith, now commands sales of more than £1 billion a year and returns almost £200 million in profit.

The salaries issue is vexed and constantly exercises hon. Members. We should recognise that the new director-general of the BBC will be paid approximately a third less than his predecessor, with the salary reducing from £671,000 to £450,000. That is still a lot of money by anybody’s standards, but we should recognise that he will be running an organisation that employs 22,000 people and has an income of £3.5 billion a year.