Public Service Broadcasting (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I went through this report desperately looking to find something I seriously disagreed with. I failed miserably. I have then come to the conclusion that I do not disagree very much with anything anybody has said in this debate. We have a problem here: we are debating something which came out in 2019. As someone who predominantly watched the BBC as a child and is still something of a fan of “Doctor Who”, I feel that the TARDIS has come and missed out a bit of our history. It has taken it away and pulled us back through.

The pandemic has displayed many of the BBC’s merits. The fact is that it backed up the education system and helped with entertainment, which is something I do not think any other body could have done. If ever something has been damaged by the pandemic it is the education system, and the BBC stepped in. It did not replace teaching in classrooms, but it did not do a bad job of making sure that there was a decent sticking plaster. I cannot see any other body ever doing that—unless you get something that is free to air and publicly funded—or having any incentive to do that without going through a commissioning process that would make PPE look like a simple task. You have to have something that will act, and the BBC fulfilled its role.

Then you look at Lord Dyson’s report on the Bashir fiasco. It is not so much that the mistake was made, but that it seems to have been ignored and that the whistleblower was persecuted. This must be looked at and identified so that it can never happen again. It may be too much to hope that we will never make that initial mistake again, but we must make sure that whistleblowers are protected. We have a right to expect that from an organisation which we fund.

Going back to the footballs that were in play in 2019—and probably still are—on the licence fee, the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, has probably done it justice, but the fact of the matter is that, if you expect the BBC to provide good content, you have to give it the money to provide the content. I have had conversations with people who say, “I want my licence fee back,” and I say, “What are you going to cut?” They reply, “What do you mean cut?” I say, “Well, it’s money. Production costs money. What do you want to cut?” He—it was a gentleman—then muffled through this process of going down, “Well, I’d get rid of X and Y that I don’t watch”, to which his wife said, “But your grandchildren watch that.” We will always have a real challenge here. If we want broadcasting to do all this stuff, we have to fund it—and fund it by the licence fee. I do not think we want this to be part of a Budget and something that is paid for out of income tax, to be perfectly honest. Can you imagine the rows then? It is almost unimaginable that there would be any continuity to go on.

I will not go on at any length about the BBC, because I am not a great expert, but what about the World Service? If ever there was an extension of soft power for Great Britain, it has to be that. It just is—it is all over the world and touches the rest of the world. We are lucky that English is one of the universal languages of the day, and we have a way of going forward. But once again, it must be seen to be reliable and truthful, at least to the best of its ability. The fact is that, when foreign powers stop challenging what the BBC says, we should worry. When Russia stops challenging, then worry.

I end with one other thing that public service broadcasting has a wonderful record on, and that is educating the world on sport and making sport available. There has been a massive improvement in the growth of women’s football on TV. The universal medicine—the wonder drug—is exercise. People do not take exercise because it is good for them; generally speaking, they take it because it is fun. Playing sport is one of the ways forward. We must also bear in mind what Channel 4 has done with the Paralympics and how it has carried forward that work. At its best, public service broadcasting has the ability to entertain and educate at the same time. We need to look at the way it has made different aspects of sport available.

All of us who have access to video-on-demand services know that they are great—they are wonderful—but we are looking into a closed room with one closed set of information coming in. The fact that you can find your old TV series, fall asleep and when it comes on again you recognise both episodes is great. But the fact is that you are talking in your own little echo chamber. Public service broadcasting does not do that, and more power to its elbow because of that. We all need to be shaken up just a little bit.

Finally, if there is political bias in public service broadcasting, I hope that the party opposite realises that it has been in power for most of the time that it has been going on, so it is not that successful. It is the job of public service broadcasting to have a go at those who are in power. We all have the scars to show for that.