Cairncross Review

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

Tuesday 12th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Wright]

I agree with my right hon. Friend. A large part of the answer is, as he says, to ensure that there are more professional journalists in the right places at the right times to provide the scrutiny that we all agree is important and necessary. As he has heard me say, the local democracy reporting scheme is a good example of how that might be achieved in the times that we currently live in. I should like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to my right hon. Friend for the part that he played in bringing that scheme into existence in conjunction with the BBC. It is a good thing, but he is right to say that there is scope for further expansion, as Dame Frances Cairncross has also pointed out. That expansion must be paid for, and I will certainly look into his suggestion and pursue further how we might persuade those who are benefiting from the current arrangements to ensure that their worst excesses are mitigated.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

I should like to join the Secretary of State and others in paying tribute to Gordon Banks. The sporting world has indeed lost a giant. In Scotland, we lost another sporting giant yesterday. Kat Lindner was 39, and her untimely death has shocked everyone across the sporting community in Scotland, particularly at Glasgow City where she was formerly a player. She moved to Scotland in 2005 from Germany, and she won every domestic trophy with City. She appeared for the team 173 times and scored 128 goals, helping the club to five league titles, two Scottish cups and two league cups. She is survived by her partner of 16 years, Laura Montgomery. She was not just an athlete but a well respected academic at my own alma mater, the University of Stirling. I am sure that the Secretary of State will join me in marking her sad and untimely death.

We on these Benches—I am a little isolated here today—very much welcome the Cairncross review, and I pay tribute to Frances Cairncross and to Enders Analysis, which supported her work. The review comes at an important moment for our democracy. After the mess of the Vote Leave campaign, the scandal of Cambridge Analytica, the death of Molly Russell and the huge damage that online harm is doing to our young people, the public expect more. My team and I met representatives of the NSPCC recently, and they gave us some statistics. One in seven children between 11 and 18 have been asked to send self-generated images, and 7% of 11 to 16-year-olds have sent naked or semi-naked images. It is so important that we get this right and that we do the necessary work on self-harm. The recommendations to create a better balance between publishers and platforms, and to persuade online platforms to act in a more responsible way, are hugely important.

The issue of fake news has been mentioned, and I am sure that many people believe that it is damaging our democracy and, indeed, the reputation of the tech companies that have a duopoly in this area, as the shadow Secretary of State said. We must take this very seriously. I hope that the Secretary of State will not simply kick the can down the road in regard to the Competition and Markets Authority, and that he will consider adopting as many of the recommendations as possible.

I absolutely agree that the BBC’s local democracy initiative has been very positive. However, we have before us the huge issue of the licence fee—a tax on the elderly. I know that that is not a mess of the Secretary of State’s making, and I say gently to him that his predecessors appear to have held the BBC to ransom over this issue. That is unacceptable, and I want to work with him and colleagues across the House to ensure that the BBC can be properly funded and that our over-75s get to keep their free licences.

Does the right hon. and learned Gentleman share my concern over the report’s finding that the number of frontline journalists has dropped in the past 10 years from 23,000 to 17,000, at a time when we are so in need of good-quality journalism both at home and abroad? The report’s recommendations on this are important. Cairncross highlights the fact that although news can be found on television and radio, written journalism supplies the largest quantity of journalism and is most at risk. That has never been more apparent than it is now. I commend to the Secretary of State Lindsey Hilsum’s book, “In Extremis”, about the late Marie Colvin, who was unlawfully killed by the Assad regime in 2012. As she once said, we have to bear witness in order to make a difference. We rely on our foreign correspondents to bear witness to atrocities and crimes that none of us could ever imagine or bear witness to, and I am sure that we all pay tribute to Marie and her family.

The duopoly of the big tech companies, Facebook and Google, and the behaviour of Mark Zuckerberg have been mentioned. We must pay tribute to the work of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee on this, but criminal sanctions must be put in place. These tech companies cannot continue to get away with the kind of things that they have got away with. What measures does the Secretary of State believe will be necessary to bring those companies on board with these proposals? Their response could well be that they will regulate their own content and not submit to any external regulator, so what more does he believe we can do make those changes and put in place the excellent recommendations that Frances Cairncross has presented?

[Jeremy Wright]

I agree entirely with what the hon. Lady has said about Kat Lindner. Her death is clearly a great tragedy, not just for her family, friends and partner but for all those who have been inspired by her success in the sport that she pursued.

The hon. Lady made reference to a number of aspects of the Cairncross review. She is right to say that we should insist on the platforms taking responsibility for what they can do. One thing they can do is to ensure that the issue of so-called fake news, misinformation and disinformation is addressed robustly. They have the capacity to do that, and as Dame Frances recognises in the review, some good work has been done by the platforms on this, but there is clearly a great deal more that they could achieve. The hon. Lady is also right to say that it is in the interests of the online companies to do that. If they do not do so, they will cause ongoing damage to their reputations, and I know that they will want to take that very seriously.

The hon. Lady mentioned the licence fee concession and its impact on the BBC. She will forgive me if we do not engage in that debate at this point, but I would say that what we expect and hope for from the BBC is something that can be delivered, irrespective of the debate that goes on about the licence fee concession. I know that the BBC is keen to follow up on some of the recommendations in this review and to see how it can help further. The hon. Lady is also right to say that we should pay tribute at every opportunity to those brave journalists who bear witness to what happens not only in this country but around the world, and who, at considerable risk to themselves, take the chance to deliver those messages and bear that witness for our benefit. Marie Colvin and others deserve our thanks.

The hon. Lady rightly picked up the fact that the Cairncross review refers to the possibility of an independent regulator taking responsibility for some of the things that Dame Frances has described. That is something that we are considering in the context of the online harms White Paper, and it might well be that some of the recommendations in this review are best dealt with when bringing forward that White Paper. There will be a Government response, which I think will come in tranches. Some of it will come very quickly, some will be brought into the online harms White Paper, and some will take a little longer.