TV Licence Fee

Julian Knight Excerpts

Monday 20th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Helen Jones]

The hon. Gentleman is right. It is a bit like Churchill’s saying that democracy is the worst possible system we could have—until we look at all the others.

Some people say that the BBC should become a streaming service, but that would not allow it to fund the programmes it is required to—for minority interests, for the regions, for different language services and so on. There is also advertising, which I will come to in a moment, but I make the point now that funding programmes through advertising is not free, as many people seem to think; it is actually added to the cost of everything we buy. As such, it is the most regressive tax possible. I do not watch much ITV, for example, but I am willing to pay for it because I believe in diversity in the media. I pay for it when I purchase goods in the shops.

I think that the difficulty of finding an alternative to the licence fee has actually helped to increase support for it over the years. A recent BBC consultation showed that 75% of people were in favour of retaining the licence fee. Of course, that is from a self-selecting group—people who are interested in the BBC and respond to its consultations—but other polls have also shown a majority in favour. A recent Ipsos MORI poll from this year showed that 49% of people are in favour of funding the BBC through the licence fee, compared with 27% who want it funded by advertising and 23% who want it to be a subscription service.

It is true that a poll in The Daily Telegraph a few years ago—in 2013, I think—showed 70% in favour of either abolishing or reducing the licence fee, but that conflates two things and is not a reasonable guide. If asked, most of us would like the cost of anything we pay for to be reduced, and would say so. In fact, other polls show support for the licence fee actually rising over time—it was at 28% in 1989, 32% in 2004, and 49% this year.

The problem with suggesting that the BBC should be funded by advertising is that it would be fishing in the same pool as the commercial broadcasters. There is only a limited amount of money available, especially as more advertising moves online, and I very much doubt that the revenue would be there to fund the kinds of programmes we have now. Another important point is that advertisers—quite reasonably, from their point of view—want spots during shows that are guaranteed to be popular, but a public sector broadcaster such as the BBC has to do more than that; it has to be free to experiment and to produce programmes for minority interests. That broad sweep of BBC programmes is probably the reason why 95% of people in this country watch it at some point or another. Indeed, despite the competition, it is still the largest media provider for adults, including, very surprisingly, young adults.

There are many programmes that I do not think would even be made without public service broadcasting. I cannot see a commercial company producing, for instance, a cycle of Shakespeare’s history plays, as the BBC did, or providing broadcasts of opera or ballet. I am reluctant to offend the Opposition Chief Whip, my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East (Mr Brown), who is a noted opera buff, but opera is still a minority interest. No commercial broadcaster would organise and broadcast the Proms, which is the largest classical music festival in the world.

The BBC has to be able to innovate, whether in developing the iPlayer or producing different kinds of programmes. Some of those programmes will fail, and I and other Members here will not like some others, but they are an important part of maintaining diversity in the media. Indeed, if we do not want bland uniformity, an organisation that can encompass Radio 4 and Radio 6 Music and make programmes varying from “EastEnders” to “The Sky at Night” is an important thing to preserve.

Another important point about the licence fee is that it helps to preserve BBC independence. It protects the BBC—most of the time, at least—from political interference and stops it being subject to the demands of advertisers or of an overweening proprietor; colleagues can name their own media mogul.

That is particularly important when it comes to news. The BBC is the most watched news provider in the country, with 77% of adults watching BBC News at least once a week. In a time when trust in institutions is declining, it is still the most trusted news provider— 57% of people trust it, and the nearest rival is on 11%. It maintains a network of correspondents all around the world and is trusted not just in this country but abroad. Many people trust BBC News. The BBC World Service, which is largely funded by the licence fee, does an enormous amount to bolster the prestige of this country abroad.

People ask whether I have criticisms of BBC News. Of course I do. I think far too much time is spent on interviewers repeating things. We hear something from someone in the studio, then they go to someone standing outside in the cold, and the handover of, “What more can you tell us?” is usually met in my house by a shout of, “Nothing at all!” It is far too London-centric. It still operates as if a problem on a London rail line is of interest to the whole country, or a few flakes of snow falling on the capital constitutes a national disaster. More importantly, it has gone to believing that balance means just interviewing two people of different views. There is not enough probing of those people to try to get at the facts.

Having said that, at least I know when I am watching BBC News that they are trying to get to the truth, however imperfectly. In an age of Fox News and alternative facts, that is worth having. Moreover, in the times in which we live, when there are attempts to intervene in and influence votes—a lot of it coming from Russia and other providers—having an independent news provider is essential to a functioning democracy. I would pay my licence fee for that alone, frankly. At 40p a day, which is what it works out at, I do not think it can be considered onerous.

The BBC is now doing an enormous amount to boost creative industries in the regions. Cardiff has the Drama Village, and Media City in Salford has been a great success.

[Julian Knight (Solihull) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is making a really forthright and excellent speech. She mentioned BBC spend across the regions and its investment. One area where I think the BBC is failing is the west midlands, where we have seen an average spend of £12.50 for each licence fee. Although I know things look rosier from Warrington North and Manchester, there is still a feeling of a deficit in areas such as my own.

[Helen Jones]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. There is much more to do, and I will come to that in a moment.

Media City has been a huge success and has boosted other creative industries in the region, although it took some time to convince certain people that there are nice places to live that are not in London and that northerners do not keep coal in the bath and ferrets up their trousers.

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[Helen Jones]

The hon. Gentleman is right; we need continually to scrutinise the BBC and what it offers.

The BBC needs to have much more programming coming from the regions and to do much more to increase the diversity of its staff. I am very pleased when the BBC tells me that its apprentices in engineering, media and production come overwhelmingly from families where the parents have not been to university, but there are only 230 of them. More needs to be done to ensure that its journalists, presenters and, most of all, its producers and commissioning editors reflect the diversity of this country, and to break the charmed circle where people go from Oxford and Cambridge to the BBC; and not because those are bad people, but because a national broadcaster has to reflect the different experiences, ways of looking at things and outlooks of people in the regions and nations of this country.

When the BBC says that it has reduced management costs, I am pleased to hear it, but we also know that it has a real problem with the gender pay gap, which needs to be addressed. Even more importantly, pay at the bottom of the BBC pyramid is often very low. People who want to move into broadcasting need to be able to do so without having to rely on families for support, so that they can make a career and so that people from different backgrounds can begin a career at the BBC.

Nevertheless, I still think that the licence fee presents value for money. Strides have been made in ensuring that more of it is collected. A National Audit Office report earlier this year showed that the amount of money collected had gone up and that complaints had halved since 2010, but let us be clear that it is still expensive to collect. That is why the hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Bill Grant) is right to say that we have to keep examining it and looking at alternatives.

Some £162 million was spent on collection in 2014, despite the fact that the licence fee remained static between 2010 and 2016. Evasion is running at between 6.2% and 7.2%. That costs the rest of us between £250 million and £290 million a year. Because of that, there are people who argue quite passionately that not paying the licence fee should be decriminalised. I thought long and hard about this before coming to the debate. I think, on balance, that I would not support that, because it is simply likely to increase evasion. Indeed, when David Perry QC reviewed this, he said that it

“carries the risk of an increase in evasion and would involve significant cost to the taxpayer and those who pay the licence fee.”

I do not want people who do pay their dues to be penalised because of those who do not. People who worry about the criminalisation of not paying the licence fee are often more worried about sentencing for it, which is a different issue. I do not—nor, I suspect, does anyone else—want to see very poor people jailed for not paying their licence fee.

[Julian Knight]

The hon. Lady is making more excellent points. One thing that people have a difficulty with is the fact that licence fees take up a great deal of court time. How does she think we could get around that?

[Helen Jones]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point, but it would be an argument for never prosecuting anyone for anything, because everything uses up court time. I am not sure that it is a real argument. I am much more convinced by the costs that people who do pay would incur if evasion went up. That already costs people quite a lot of money.

The fundamental question in all this is whether we believe in public service broadcasting. I do. I think it is a public good, and we finance many things because they are a public good. Some people do not want to pay for them. I remember a gentleman who told me during the election campaign that he did not see why he should pay taxes for the education system, because he did not have any children. “They pay your pension,” is the answer to that one. We get such comments all the time.

I think that we get a good service from the BBC. We think that our television is terrible, until we go abroad and look at what is provided there. We do not realise how good the BBC camera operatives are, until we try to watch rugby or football from somewhere else, where they are not as good, and we miss the goals because they are up at the other end of the pitch. We think that BBC News has its problems, until we are trapped somewhere where the only English language service available is CNN, which seems to be designed for people with the attention span of a gnat.

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[Julian Knight (Solihull) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon. Thank you for your forbearance; I was playing a bit of hokey cokey when it came to whether to speak. I congratulate the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) on a good-natured debate rooted in her top-class opening speech, which elaborated on the benefits of the BBC to this country.

I spent five joyous years at BBC News, working in the economic and business centre. The hon. Lady mentioned diversity; I met some of the best and most intelligent people—people whom I consider lifelong friends—in that place, and it was an absolutely fantastic experience, but it was not perhaps the most diverse of places. My name is Julian. That name was quite unusual on my council estate in the north of England, in Chester; I am named after a Catholic saint. I had never met another Julian until I got to the BBC, and when I got there, it turned out that there were five of them working on my floor. I was like a meerkat every time I heard the name “Julian”; it was so unusual to hear that I would look up.

It was probably not the most diverse of places, but my word, what a superb repository of talent. We see that in the international respect in which the BBC is held. It is known around the world. When one travels around the world and sees other TV, radio and media offerings, one sees that the BBC is absolutely first-class. We have all mentioned programmes that we believe are worth the licence fee; mine, personally, is “Test Match Special”. Do not tell the BBC, but I would pay double the licence fee for it.

The BBC is an absolutely fantastic institution. If, as a result of this debate, we were to abolish the licence fee, hamstringing the BBC at a stroke, it would be nothing short of an act of cultural vandalism and would have enormous effects on the GDP and cultural aspects of this country, damaging our reputation. If we considered doing that, we would be making a serious error.

Over the past 20 years, the BBC has moved successfully from being a medium-sized European broadcaster—it is difficult to think of it in that way—to being a genuine global player among the top two or three in news media, content production and branding. It has done so through the expansion undertaken by Greg Dyke, with the tacit support of the Labour party, then in government. That involved a major expansion of the cost of the licence fee; I think that it was above inflation. It was a deliberate policy. The BBC launched new channels and new means of expression, using the licence fee to stake out new territory seemingly on a daily basis. That has led to its huge global success.

It has had other, less positive impacts as well. I am thinking of the BBC News website, which we must agree is in many respects excellent in content, but which has at times had a devastating effect on the commercial sector. We do not know how strong and vibrant an online commercial news offering we would have if not for the BBC. The Guardian website gives us a bit of an idea. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, The Guardian was a massive player in that space, and although it is still a major player, it has perhaps not grown to the extent that it would have if it had not been for the enormous impact of the BBC News website.

I come from Chester originally, but I represent the west midlands and live happily in my constituency of Solihull. In the west midlands, we have seen another impact of the BBC’s major expansion as it has become a bipolar organisation between London and Media City in Manchester. Although Media City can be deemed a success as a cluster of production, it has drawn away the financing and investment that we used to see in the nations and regions. Growing up, I remember a BBC news studio in Chester on Lower Bridge Street, which the hon. Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) spoke well about. Bob Smithies used to offer his pearls of wisdom, and we got regional and very local news. The impact of the bipolar BBC is that in the west midlands, for example, we get £12.50 from every licence fee, so we feel disenfranchised. Many parts of the country feel like that, which is why we are pushing so strongly for the relocation of Channel 4, to help bring back the essence of regional diversity and rootedness in our communities that the BBC has lost to a certain extent as part of the drive to scale up, which it had to do to achieve its goals.

On the licence fee itself, the hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown) referred to a pretty ominous and unpleasant letter. If Capita is sending out such letters, that is poor form. We should also look at the fact that people effectively have to pay their direct debit six months in advance, which is a disincentive for them to sign up. Often, direct debits are the best way for people on lower incomes to budget. I know that system is effectively set by parliamentary statute, but I have always thought that it is a negative.

The hon. Member for Warrington North responded to the point about licence fee prosecution, but it is not quite the same as not prosecuting other crimes. There is a huge backlog in court time for rulings. It is another negative—a real downside—but, frankly, I cannot see any other way of doing it without abandoning prosecution full stop and decriminalising the offence, which would be a mistake at this stage. We should try to find quicker and more efficient means by which to bring about the result we all want—people paying what they are asked to pay on time or having a sympathetic hearing if they cannot manage to pay that sum.

BBC bias has been mentioned today. I have never believed that anyone has a meeting at the BBC and says, “We are going to be biased today”. No one ever does that. It is below the line—it is a cultural thing, because there are people with similar mindsets and from similar backgrounds. I remember in news meetings being struck that the two newspapers on offer were The Guardian and the Financial Times, and that was it. They were the news sources and leads for the day. I did not ever quite get the idea of story generation coming from a newspaper; it seemed behind the times, particularly in a 24-hour news environment. The hon. Member for City of Chester said the BBC was “full of lefties”, but there were some right wingers, some Tories, in there—I was one. We had to keep it rather quiet and sometimes meet by the coffee machines to whisper our disapproval at certain news lines.

There is a real longer-term difficulty with BBC impartiality, which it is reviewing right now as part of its producer guidelines. It is important that it does not over-editorialise and bring in too much comment. We have seen the way that it is trying to reach out, and many of the accidents that happen come from that effort, for example the appearance of “The Canary” on “Question Time”. I found the disgraceful story about Laura Kuenssberg that followed deeply alarming and unpleasant, and I raised it on the Floor of the House.

There is also what I call the “despite Brexit” coverage of economics stories. That does not come from people thinking that they need to do whatever they can to frustrate the will of the British people—that is not the way it has been thought about. Many people in the organisation felt a certain way about the referendum. Quite rightly, they realised that they needed to double down on impartiality at election and referendum times, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) mentioned, particularly after the criticism that they had following the Scottish referendum. They made a point of being utterly straight. I think many felt a sort of collective guilt that at the time of the referendum, they could have explained the difficulties that would ensue from areas such as our trading relationships or the differences between the single market, the customs union and things such as European Free Trade Association, but did not explain them enough. That guilt came across in the “despite Brexit” coverage that we had for several months. I have seen a bit of a turning of the dial on that recently. From conversations I have had with people at the BBC, I think they were aware that it was happening but they did not quite know how to pull it back. They have done so now, and it has improved considerably.

The wasting of the licence fee on multiple broadcasts has been mentioned. There is a degree of competition at the BBC. The opponents are never Sky News but the 1 o’clock, 6 o’clock and 10 o’clock news. When the people there are at their desks, all they have on is their own news channel. It is amazing, but they do not watch the other side, they watch their own side and compete in that way. That is why we end up with stories of three or four different news gathering operations going out to the same parts of the world.

I welcome Ofcom oversight. People in the BBC will feel uncomfortable at the culture shock, but they will also welcome it—it will bed down. Ofcom may be too big an institution—too big a quango, now—but the BBC can have a positive relationship with it. There will be bumps in the road, but it can do it. Let us monitor that closely and see where it goes.

Is the licence fee, that guaranteed form of income, holding the BBC back to an extent? There are things that can be made commercially for the BBC. For instance, what a fantastic back catalogue it has. Is that being exploited to the extent that it could be? In 2003, the BBC looked at putting it online almost universally and offering it free to use. That was under Ashley Highfield, who was also involved in the iPlayer. The back catalogue is a huge source of potential wealth for the BBC that can be effectively rebated to licence fee payers down the line for better investment. There is an idea of “iPlayer plus”, which would have a subscription element if someone wanted extra services.

As we come to the break point in the current charter very shortly, we should look at how the BBC is exploiting such commercial revenues. Is it getting ready for the challenge ahead? That challenge, as has been mentioned, is that very few people are consuming their news and broadcast media in the traditional way that perhaps we in this room do. That will hole the BBC below the water line. I want a BBC that is ongoing, strong and unafraid, and that is beginning to adapt to those changes at a pace that will allow it to reduce its reliance on the licence fee over time. The reality is that we are moving away from that model, whether we like it or not.

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[Julian Knight]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point about internal processes. Has he found that sometimes the BBC’s knee-jerk response is to defend, rather than to be absolutely transparent?

[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.

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[Peter Heaton-Jones]

I thank the hon. Gentleman—he did do the maths. That is a lot of money, and the BBC needs to be held to account for it. I do not, for one minute, stand here and say that everything about the BBC is perfect. We absolutely need more transparency and more accountability, and the hon. Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell) made that point extraordinarily well. It frustrates me that the BBC seems to show an extraordinarily defensive attitude whenever complaints are made about it. Whenever a member of the public or, indeed, a Member of this House, raises a perfectly reasonable concern about something the BBC has done—how it has covered a story or how it has spent public money, for example—its first thought is defence: “Fold the arms and try to pretend it didn’t happen”.

[Julian Knight]

Does my hon. Friend think that the BBC sometimes co-opts its talent in its defence, so to speak? Is that really the right way to go about things, rather than with the openness and transparency he rightly talks about?

[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.