Lord Best
Main Page: Lord Best (Crossbench - Life peer)BBC Charter Review (Communications Committee Report)
Lord Best Excerpts
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, I am delighted to open this debate on the report BBC Charter Review: Reith not Revolution from the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications, which I have the honour to chair. The only interest that I must declare is that my son, Will Best, is the presenter of a BBC children’s programme on CBBC.
I am very grateful to my fellow committee members for their input into this report. They represent different perspectives within your Lordships’ House and I think it significant that so much unanimity was achieved on our conclusions and recommendations. Our thanks go to our clerk, Anna Murphy, our policy analyst, Helena Peacock, and our specialist adviser, Jacquie Hughes, and to all those who made submissions to the committee, particularly the 43 witnesses who presented oral evidence.
As a trailer for today’s debate, the lunch-break session held by the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, on 10 March attracted some 20 speakers but with contributions limited to just one minute. Today, with even more speakers but with a sensible timetable, I hope that we can do rather more justice to a subject which affects virtually every single man, woman and child in the United Kingdom. I thank in advance all those who will be speaking in the debate.
The Secretary of State told our committee that, rather than respond separately to our report, the Government will take it into account in preparing the White Paper on renewal of the BBC’s charter. We now know that the White Paper will be published in late May. This means that our debate today is well timed to feed into the final stages of the White Paper’s contents, but once it has been released it will be important for this House to be given an opportunity to consider it fully. Can the Minister reassure us that time will be allocated on the Floor of the House to debate the proposals set out in this important White Paper?
The title of our report on BBC charter renewal, Reith not Revolution, for which we are indebted to our committee member, the noble Lord, Lord Hart, sums up the position we have taken. We put our faith in a BBC which respects and appreciates its founding principles, established by the first director-general, Lord Reith, and we rejected calls for radical, fundamental change in the underlying purpose of the BBC or its scale or scope. Speaking personally, I was aware at the outset of our inquiry of a lot of background noise about the possibilities of dramatic change for the BBC. Of course, there had been the Jimmy Savile scandal, criticisms of salaries for executives, accusations of political bias and so on, but, as the evidence rolled in, it became clear to me that mostly the fuss—the call for the BBC to be cut down to size or opened up to commercial competition and the rest—was coming from the Westminster village, not from the world outside. Broadly, we discovered that the public at large were strongly in favour of “their” BBC and would be greatly opposed to radical change.
We recognised that with a limited timescale we could not cover every aspect of the BBC’s future, so we deliberately excluded the topics of the governance and management of the corporation, not least because these areas were considered by our sister committee in the other place, and because in September last year the Government announced that Sir David Clementi would carry out a review into the governance and regulation of the BBC. In the event, I do not think the committee would have any disagreement with either the DCMS Select Committee’s views or Sir David’s recommendations on the creation of a new unitary board for the BBC, with the abolition of the BBC Trust and regulation by Ofcom.
The areas that we did tackle in our eight-month inquiry covered: first, the underlying purpose of the BBC; secondly, the BBC’s scale and scope; thirdly, the process for setting the licence fee; and, finally, the timing of the charter—how many years it should run before renewal.
The charter states that the BBC’s main objective is the promotion of certain public purposes. We decided to examine the six official public purposes in some depth but, as we ventured further into their detail, it became increasingly apparent—as was voiced most forcibly by the noble Earl, Lord Arran—that the purposes framework, comprising a mission statement, six public purposes, purpose remits, purpose priorities and very detailed service licences, was far too complex. When the director-general came before the committee, we were shown the huge stack of forms and submissions that the BBC must complete to fulfil these multiple requirements. All this complexity, we concluded, makes practical assessment of the BBC’s performance more difficult.
We recommended a much simpler and more transparent approach. We liked the distillation of the BBC’s objectives as set out by Lord Reith—to inform, educate and entertain—and we recommend that the status of these Reithian principles should be reaffirmed as the BBC’s overarching mission. We recommended scrapping the current six public purposes and felt, instead, that the BBC should adopt the four general public service broadcaster purposes that apply to all PSBs—that is, to ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, as well as the BBC—but with the BBC setting the gold standard among them. Its special status and its funding through a universal licence fee gives the BBC, we maintained, unique obligations to its audience. It should reflect the different opinions, lifestyles, beliefs and values of the UK’s nations, regions and diverse communities. Indeed, we dared to suggest a fourth dimension to the Reithian mission so that this might become “to inform, educate, entertain and reflect”.
We went on to propose the abolition of the cumbersome purpose remits and purpose priorities, and we recommended a full review of the service licences by the independent regulator of the BBC—most likely to be Ofcom—with a view to these being simplified and strengthened, defining clearly what is expected of each service while still encouraging creativity. We were not letting the BBC off the hook. We felt it should be firmly held to account for any non-compliance with the service licences and that these should be reviewed more frequently than the current five-yearly review.
To assist this process, we were clear that the independent regulator should be provided with a comprehensive account of the BBC’s spending by genre—for children’s programmes, news, drama, current affairs, et cetera. This information was made available to the committee but because of its commercial sensitivity could not be published more widely. In looking at this and other evidence, we expressed some concern at the downward trend in the BBC’s investment in current affairs. Spurred on by the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, we underlined the importance of the BBC continuing to fund adequately its output as the leader in the field of children’s programmes. We noted with concern a decrease in spending on the arts, and we emphasised the important role of the BBC in stimulating creativity and cultural excellence, particularly in the field of music and drama, and through training and developing talent.
We noted the criticism that the BBC was too London-centric, and commended the steps taken to address this by moving production to other cities. We were impressed by the impact of the BBC’s investment in Salford’s MediaCity, which we visited. However, we heard from a number of witnesses, particularly a panel of young people, that the BBC did not sufficiently reflect their lives, the lives of those with disabilities or those in BAME communities. However, we noted that the BBC recognised its deficiencies here and we expect to see marked improvement.
We also heard concerns about the decline across broadcasting in religious programming, which the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford may mention today. We agreed that the BBC, as the dominant provider, should maintain the quality and content of its output in that genre.
Noble Lords will not be surprised to note that we welcomed additional government funding for the World Service. We endorsed the crucial role that the BBC plays in the UK’s cultural influence and soft power on the world stage.
Turning to our second area of interest, the BBC’s scale and scope, it is true that the BBC has already had to cut back and find significant savings. We noted that in today’s global economy, the BBC is really quite small compared in particular to American players such as Amazon and Netflix. We heard no convincing case for a significant reduction in the scale or scope of the BBC, nor did we accept arguments that the BBC should be restricted to remedying gaps for which the commercial market does not provide. We were clear that its outputs should bring benefits to all licence fee payers and that it should continue to be a universal broadcaster providing programmes that do not simply inform and educate but also entertain, as Lord Reith believed.
In the changing world of the digital age, we recognised that the BBC had an important role as a non-commercial contributor to developing innovative technologies such as the iPlayer, and also to delivering its content online.
When we came to our third theme, the process for setting the level of the licence fee, strong views were expressed to us about the deal struck behind closed doors in July 2015. Most of the evidence was highly critical of the Government’s proposal and the BBC’s acceptance that the cost of funding free television licences for the over-75s should come out of cuts to other spending by the BBC. We recommended instead that, in future, the process should be out in the open, with widespread consultation before any such deals are done. We spelled out a detailed process for setting the licence fee, or indeed a household levy, if that were introduced. The independent regulator would make an evidence-based recommendation to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. The Secretary of State would have an obligation to accept this or to publish their reasons for not doing so. The regulator, presumably Ofcom, would be allowed to submit an amended recommendation, but not a third one. The Secretary of State would have the final say and, as now, Parliament would be asked to approve a statutory instrument.
Finally, on the timing of the charter review process, we recommended a decoupling from the five-year general election cycle. The present timings could lead to overhasty decision-making soon after an election. We also noted that the impartiality and independence of the BBC could be compromised by a short charter period: there would be a sword of Damocles hanging over the BBC with the ever-present threat of an imminent new charter. Moreover, we recognised the considerable financial and management burden of more frequent charter reviews. We were persuaded, therefore, that the charter period should be no shorter than the current 10 years, which provides the BBC, and the wider creative industries that depend upon it, with the necessary stability for longer-term planning. However, to avoid coinciding with the cycle of general elections, we recommended that the next charter should be for 11 years, with a 10-year period thereafter.
We did not shirk from recommending an enhanced framework of accountability for the BBC, and I think it sits well with the recommendations from the Clementi review and the DCMS committee for new governance and regulation. We were unanimously opposed to a diminution in the scale and scope of the BBC and its position in our national life. We wanted a new, transparent system for setting the licence fee and an 11-year charter period next time. However, while noting valid criticisms of some aspects of the BBC’s behaviour in the past, our report was overwhelmingly supportive and appreciative of the BBC. It is indeed a national treasure: an institution from which all of us gain so much and about which we can rightly feel a genuine sense of national pride. I beg to move the Motion.
Lord Best
My Lords, six hours on, I am deeply grateful to everybody for their contributions. I feel privileged to have been part of a succession of contributions from some of the country’s wisest and most experienced politicians and public servants, along with some of our most senior lawyers and most successful and well-known broadcasters, with their unlimited knowledge of the BBC. Together, we have created a collection of essays that will probably be the standard text for students, politicians and policymakers for years to come. We have covered the BBC’s successes: from the Proms and “War and Peace” to “The Great British Bake Off”, from “Panorama” on the Panama papers to murder in “The Archers”, and from the BBC’s Korean service to Larry the Lamb. Almost unanimously, your Lordships have supported and endorsed the conclusions and recommendations of your Communications Committee, for which I am deeply grateful.
It took us until speakers 21 and 22 for the noble Lords, Lord Desai and Lord Maxton, to add a little note of dissent. I will make one comment on the remarks they made. We felt that if the licence fee is to be replaced by a household levy, which may be a better way of collecting the resources needed, that should follow the same transparent and open process in being set as we were recommending for the licence fee itself. It might be a better system but we thought that the process should be the same.
The debate has drawn out some continuing unease that the new unitary board, if that is what emerges from the White Paper, will not be truly independent if the non-executive members are seen as creatures of the Secretary of State, and we will need to watch that very carefully. I am grateful to the Minister for reassuring us to some extent on that, and we await our debate on the White Paper, when we will be able to have a go at that.
We noted also that the report of the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, is coming out in June. The noble Lord, Lord Lester, may well be bringing before us a Private Member’s Bill to put the BBC on a statutory footing and end what he regards as a ministerial charter. The noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, reminded us that a digital economy Bill is also coming, and that is an opportunity for us to comment further on some of these matters. But the White Paper debate itself will be significant, and we look forward to that.
The House has sent out a very clear message to any politician not to meddle or interfere with, micromanage or diminish the BBC. Long may the BBC reflect all the diversity of our nation as it informs, educates and, indeed, entertains us so brilliantly. I beg to move.