Monday 20th November 2017

(6 years, 4 months ago)

Westminster Hall
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Peter Heaton-Jones Portrait Peter Heaton-Jones (North Devon) (Con)
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It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) on leading this debate and the Petitions Committee on organising it.

This debate is on an extraordinarily important issue that we need to discuss, for the very reason that many tens of thousands of our constituents have signed these two petitions, which is as good a reason as any to debate it.

Before I go any further, I must declare an interest, as many colleagues have done in the past. I worked for the BBC for 17 years, so I probably hold the record among colleagues here for longest service with the BBC. That was from 1986 to 1997, and then from 2000 to 2006. There was a gap, and I shall come on to that gap in a minute, because it feeds into what I want to say about one of the alternative methods of funding the BBC as opposed to the licence fee. That was where I worked at the time.

Having said that, it is vital that we discuss what the petitioners say in the two petitions. I will just look at the wording of a couple of the sentences. Petition 170931 says that the BBC licence fee should be abolished, and states:

“It should be included through your provider for free.”

The difficulty with that phrase is that it completely misses the point that someone has to pay for the BBC. What it seems to suggest is that the petitioners believe that their provider—whether Sky, BT or Virgin—should somehow pay the licence fee, even though the petitioners still want to watch BBC services. Those services have to be paid for; I do not think that anyone will find a model that works whereby Sky, BT or Virgin will pay the BBC licence fee.

Petition 200239 says of the licence fee:

“It is unfair that one should hold one to watch Freeview channels.”

However, the Freeview channels include BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, BBC4, CBBC, CBeebies, the BBC News channel and the BBC Parliament channel which, of course, is worth the entire licence fee on its own.

How do people believe that those BBC Freeview channels will be paid for? They still seem to want to watch them but without thinking that we need to fund them. I have scratched my head for some time; I am not the brightest guy in the world, but I cannot see how that would work.

The two petitions are our starting point; I believe that there are two very important issues that we need to consider: first, how the BBC is funded and, secondly, what the BBC spends its money on. The hon. Member for Warrington North quite rightly began to look at alternative models around the world for how public service broadcasters are financed. I have looked into those models. I have worked for one of them; that is where the mystery three-year gap comes in, which I am sure the Chamber is agog to discover more about. In my view, there is not another model of public service broadcast funding around the world that works as well as the BBC licence fee. In Germany, as has been mentioned, there is a broadcasting levy on every household. It is an incredibly blunt instrument and incredibly regressive. In Finland, the model is funded through personal taxation, and the same could be said of it.

However, I want to discuss the Australian model, which is where I worked for those missing three years; I worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in both Sydney and Melbourne. The system under which the ABC is funded in Australia is something that we must avoid at all costs. The funding comes out of direct taxation, then every three years the ABC goes cap in hand to the Government and says, “Can we have some money, please?” To me, that seems to be a one-way route to bias, and to too much political interference and meddling with the output of a public service broadcasting organisation.

I worked for the ABC when we had to do that cap-in-hand exercise. It is not a pretty thing to watch. They say there are two things that people should not know how they are made—laws and sausages. The funding of the ABC is the third thing; nobody wants to be involved with that. We talk about political interference, which brings me to the issue of bias, because petition 200239 specifically mentions the question of bias. In fact, it says that there should be alternative methods of funding the BBC

“particularly as it is commonly felt there is a high level of bias.”

I start to twitch rather nervously at the conflation of those two concepts—how the BBC is funded and the issue of whether or not it is biased. I do so for this reason: the BBC should not be biased, however it is funded. We should not question a method of funding just because we believe that the BBC might or might not be biased. The BBC, as a public service broadcaster, should not be biased.

Let me give hon. Members, looking at the clock, “The Six Minutes Past Six News”. The headline is, “Having worked as a journalist at the BBC for 17 years, I know that the BBC is not biased.” It is not institutionally biased and it does not deliberately set out to give one editorial line over another. I know that for two reasons. First, in all the years I worked at the BBC—first, as a junior journalist—not once did a senior editorial manager put any pressure on me to take a particular line in a news story, to include a particular guest on an interview programme or to write a news story in a particular way. Not once did any of those things happen. Secondly, years later I had moved up the greasy pole, and I am living proof of the BBC axiom that someone always gets promoted to just beyond the level of their ability. When I was at that level, not once did I dream of saying to any of the reporters working for me, “I want you to cover this story in a particular way”.

There is no bias institutionally in the BBC. I have sympathy for the view that has been expressed here that there is perhaps a cultural problem with the slightly narrow pool from which the BBC recruits its talent and its journalists. The BBC absolutely needs to be more diverse, and to look far more closely at where it recruits its journalists, reporters and editors, as they are from a slightly elite group. It is getting better, but it is not good enough.

There is another reason—I say this only slightly tongue in cheek—why I am sure that the BBC is not institutionally biased and does not deliberately set out to give a party line. That would suggest the BBC is capable of a level of organisation that, in my experience, it is not. I can tell Members from personal experience that it is nigh-on impossible to get one programme in the news department to talk to another, even on the simplest of issues, let alone, as a large corporation that puts out hundreds of hours of news broadcasting daily, be capable of organising itself to put out a particular editorial line. Oh no, it is not; of course not.

I have a story for you, Mrs Moon. When I was in charge of a programme at Radio 5 Live, I needed a particular piece of music to illustrate a news story. I was told by the BBC’s internal systems that it would take three days and cost my programme budget £15 to borrow that CD from the BBC’s gramophone library. I sent a reporter to the HMV store on Oxford Street and we bought the CD for £9.99. That is not an organisation that is able to arrange institutional bias. It does not do that. When people, like the petitioners, accuse the BBC of bias, what they have seen is a politician they agree with being given a hard time or a politician they disagree with merely being given the right to reply. That is not bias. There is another word for it: journalism. That is what the BBC does extraordinarily well. It does journalism, and we need to protect it, because that costs money. As has been said by other right hon. and hon. Members, the BBC gets an awful lot of that money—£3.78 billion this year—from the licence fee. If we add to that this year’s commercial revenue of about £1.16 billion—do the maths—that is nearly—

Peter Heaton-Jones Portrait Peter Heaton-Jones
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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”.

--- Later in debate ---
Kevin Brennan Portrait Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
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It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon. The debate has been excellent, with a significant degree of cross-party consensus on the licence fee and the BBC. I join others in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) and her Committee on presenting this debate for our discussion today.

My hon. Friend made an excellent speech at the outset of the debate, for which many Members have rightly paid tribute to her. She set out very clearly the terms of the debate and told us how other countries fund their public services. She pointed out right at the outset an issue that the Chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins), raised later in an intervention, which is that there is a limited pool of advertising available if the BBC were to move to an advertising model. She also pointed out how the licence fee helps to preserve the independence of the BBC, although it is expensive to collect.

I disagree with my hon. Friend on one point, though. She was rather harsh about CNN in her remarks. In fact, CNN makes some excellent programmes here in the UK, including one of its new shows, which is on at lunchtime, called “CNN Talk”. I recommend it to hon. Members—I think it is on on a Friday. No, I am not on it and I am not being paid for saying that. I simply want to point out that the BBC exerts a positive gravitational pull on other organisations such as CNN in this country. It gives them the incentive to produce good programmes such as “CNN Talk”, which is a new programme that links up well with social media and is about British politics. We should welcome such quality programming being made here in the UK. It is significant to compare that with Fox News, which had to withdraw from the United Kingdom because it could not meet the standards that Ofcom requires for impartiality in our news programming, whereas channels such as CNN and CNN International were able to do so.

The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) told us how much he loves “Mrs Brown’s Boys” as well as “Blue Planet”. I was mentioned on “Michael McIntyre’s Big Show” on the BBC on Saturday night—fame at last. The hon. Gentleman made an interesting point about the growing use of pundits and political commentators in programmes, and I absolutely agree with him: why not simply ask us politicians on a bit more to give our opinions if people really want to know what is going on in politics?

The hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown) does not watch the BBC any more, which is a pity because I always enjoy watching him—along with dozens of other people—on the BBC Parliament channel. He is also missing out on the excellent rugby coverage on BBC Alba, the Gaelic language television service that covers the PRO14 rugby very well indeed. I frequently watch that. I hope he chips in towards the cost of his parents’ TV licence, since he seems to go round there fairly frequently to watch the BBC safely outside his own home.

Alan Brown Portrait Alan Brown
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The hon. Gentleman mentioned the Parliament channel, and certainly many people in Scotland watch that. It is another advantage my wife sees in not having a licence fee, because she is not subject to having to watch BBC Parliament to catch me on it, so it certainly frees up a lot more time for her as well.

Kevin Brennan Portrait Kevin Brennan
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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 Portrait Damian Collins
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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 Portrait Kevin Brennan
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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.

Brendan O'Hara Portrait Brendan O'Hara
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Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, as I said, achieving high standards and quality costs money? I congratulate the Welsh on securing 95% of the funding received from fees in Wales, compared with barely 55% in Scotland. That anomaly is a real hurdle, which cannot be overcome without funding.

Kevin Brennan Portrait Kevin Brennan
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If the shoe were on the other foot, the hon. Gentleman would say, “It’s because we have an SNP Government in Scotland. That’s why we’re doing so well.” I am not going to say that we are doing so well in BBC funding in Wales because we have a Welsh Labour Government in Cardiff, because that would be quite wrong. The BBC is independent and would not respond to that kind of political pressure.

There are excellent hubs around the country, whether it is Media City in Salford, in Greater Manchester, or the drama village that I mentioned in my own city of Cardiff. Those hubs create tremendous opportunities for people across the UK, with around £450 million going into small creative and independent businesses each year. With the creative industries urging further development of creative clusters across the country, the BBC provides a positive example, and a catalyst for the kind of success that the creative cluster approach can have. Through the diverse range of public service broadcasters that we have in this country, people can see others like themselves creating content, and telling stories they can identify with and relate to.

The stability of the licence fee model means that, as hon. Members have pointed out, the BBC does not have to rely on ratings for advertising, and is therefore freer to make content that is difficult for other broadcasters to produce. It is an advantage of our system that each of our public service broadcasters is funded differently, because it means that they are each distinctive, meet different challenges, and make different types of content. Some 95% of the licence fee goes towards creating content for licence fee payers, and only 5% is used for running the organisation of the BBC itself. Some 82% of households feel that the BBC informs, educates and entertains them successfully.

I will not go on much longer, you will be pleased to know, Mrs Moon, but I want to say one or two things about children’s content. We have already seen concerns about what can happen when a funding gap appears in a particular part of the broadcasting landscape. In recent years that has happened in children’s television, as was mentioned in the debate. The relaxation of the obligations on producing children’s TV has meant that spend on TV content for children has seen an almost 50% drop this century. As a result, children in the UK today are watching significantly less home-grown content. When the Digital Economy Act 2017 was passing through Parliament, Labour pressed for an amendment to give Ofcom the power to assign the commercial public service broadcasters, such as Channel 4, Channel 5 and ITV, quotas on children’s content. As I understand it, Ofcom is currently consulting on that topic, and I look forward to hearing its findings.

That experience should serve as a warning of what could happen to public service broadcasters at large if we neglect the importance of continuing to fund the BBC in an appropriate way. We need to future-proof these precious public assets. I have quoted this before, but as Joni Mitchell once said:

“You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

That is certainly true of the BBC.