BBC Charter Review (Communications Committee Report)

Lord Archbishop of York Excerpts

Thursday 21st April 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford]

My Lords, I too speak as a member of the Select Committee that produced this report. I must declare an interest as a co-chair of the multi-faith standing conference of the BBC on religion and ethics, and related to that work I want to talk about the place of faith in public service broadcasting, and indeed to speak for all the faith communities in these islands.

It has been said that if a mission statement is more than two or three words long, it either means that the organisation does not really know its purpose, or even if it does, no one else will. Let me give a few examples: glasnost, girl power, flower power, New Labour and the big society; I will not go on. Consequently, if a mission statement is going to work, it has to be pithy and memorable. Lord Reith’s “inform, educate and entertain” does the job, and has done it very effectively for a long time—everyone knows it. When the last charter renewal process landed the BBC with six rather wordy and worthy public purposes, it was not necessarily doing it a favour. As the committee took evidence on those six public purposes, it was clear that the people who came to talk about them did not really know them very well themselves. I noticed that each person came with a crib sheet to remind themselves of what the purposes were about: they had clearly failed the memorability test. I also noted that while the new purposes are in some senses impossible to disagree with, the word “entertain”, which is surely a first base requirement for someone actually paying the licence fee, does not appear at all, and hence the title of the report: Reith not Revolution.

As we look forward to the forthcoming charter renewal, it is our strong view that the BBC should regroup around this historic vocation. We also want to say that it is good for the BBC to be entertaining. We do not want public service broadcasting relegated to just those bits of the output that a free market will not deliver. In this country we are rightly proud of the BBC and its place in our national life, its wider mission through the World Service, and its key contribution as part of a vibrant mixed economy of broadcasting in this country—one that is the envy of many other countries.

But we are not without criticism. To those three words that so admirably sum up the whole point of public service broadcasting, we tentatively add a fourth—the noble Lord, Lord Best, already mentioned it: “reflect”. It is to this recommendation that I will speak and limit what I say. Just as the BBC is called to educate, inform and entertain the nation, surely it must reflect the nation as well. This reflection must be more than merely regional. It is not just about sprinkling the airwaves with Yorkshire, scouse, Essex or Scottish accents. The UK is still a family of nations and, within that, a network of regions, each with its own culture and identity, but 21st-century Britain is also a network of communities. Many of these communities find their identity in ethnic origin and religious faith much more than geographic location. This is certainly the case in the East End of London where I serve as a bishop—one of the most multicultural and multifaith places in the whole of Europe. Having returned yesterday from the 16th meeting of the worldwide Anglican Consultative Council in Lusaka, where we discussed with Christians from all around the world what it means to be Christian in a world of great diversity and difference, we should also remember that multifaith and multiculturalism in Britain today also means significant Christian communities from around the world practising their faith here, as well as the presence of other faith communities. The BBC needs to work harder at being better at reflecting this new multiracial and multifaith face of Britain. In particular, religious broadcasting needs to be given a much higher priority in educating, informing and, yes, entertaining us with the beauty and challenges of this diversity.

However, across the public service broadcasting sector, religious broadcasting has been in decline for quite a long while. Contrary to the assumptions of a largely secular media, religion is not a just a private matter—a sort of “add-on” to the rest of life for people who like that sort of thing. Faith is not a leisure activity. Rather, for those of us who live by faith, religious belief is essential and formational—a prime motivator of individuals and communities, shaping their world view and inspiring and informing their political, economic, ethical and social behaviour. Our whole nation needs to wake up to this, and if the BBC is to be the broadcaster of the nation and reflect our national life, it must do too.

That being so, it is hard to comprehend why the BBC has never appointed a religion editor in the same way that it has an editor—an “interpreter”—for business, economics, politics, the arts, sports, et cetera. In July 2015, Ofcom voiced similar misgivings. Its Third Review of Public Service Broadcasting identified religious broadcasting as an area of immediate concern. The BBC is still the dominant provider of religious programmes and many of these are excellent. For this I give thanks, but it remains the case that the BBC downgraded the post of head of religion in January 2015 so that the postholder no longer has authority to commission programmes. Commissioning is where the power really lies. This now sits with non-subject specialists in multigenre commissioning, in a team of history, science, business and religion. This makes strategic decisions about commissioning almost impossible to make and limits the BBC’s ability to fulfil its mission.

This is a time where it is nigh on impossible to understand the world, what is going on in it and how best to find solutions so that we can live in peace, without an understanding of religion. Those who care about our democracy, as well as those who care about faith, need to press the BBC to answer this question: who has overall responsibility for the range, quantity and quality of religious programming? Since our report also voices concerns over the “downward trend” in spending on current affairs, it is not difficult to see how the BBC needs to strengthen its commitment to these areas of broadcasting. Hence the expectation in our report that the BBC maintain its commitment to religious broadcasting and increases its commitment to current affairs and the arts—my personal hope is that this is improved upon—and the following recommendation: that,

“the BBC, as the recipient of the universal licence fee”,

meets,

“its duty to serve all the diverse communities of the UK”,

and that,

“this obligation should be incorporated into any future accountability framework”.