Economy: Broadcast Media

Lord Bragg Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bragg (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury, for securing this important debate on the media and the economy. Her own contribution in this area was considerable and at the coalface. I declare an interest in that I work for the BBC and Sky Arts, although as an independent and not an employee, and in the recent past I was employed by ITV. I intend to concentrate on those three organisations. Some of what I say will overlap with what the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, said and what others will say. A feature of these debates is that we tend to share the same statistics.

Overall, I suggest that any fair observer would agree that the UK’s broadcasting media are in very good shape. Their contribution to the economy, across the waterfront, is strong and widely enriching, and there is no sign of a retreat. Perhaps it would not be too bold to suggest that their combination of skills, talent, traditions, grasp of modern technological developments, and success both national and global, sets something of an example to the rest. Broadcasters—part of the creative economy—are big hitters now.

In 2012, the UK television industry generated, directly, £12.3 billion in revenue, with a further £1.2 billion from radio. The sector employs 132,000 people, often with highly specialised skills which are in demand all over the world. More tens of thousands work in dependent industries. Broadcasting alone accounts for more than 6% of the gross added value of the UK economy, and the figure is still growing—and that is without the arts, publishing and advertising.

ITV invests about £1 billion a year in programming, most of it on original UK content. It is understandably at pains to point out that its programmes are provided free to viewers. It is expanding impressively at the moment and, in the global market, is now one of the five biggest indie producers in the United States. ITV has concerns about a legislative framework that it sees as overregulated and overburdening. However, its main story is strong and progressive. Despite the difficult competitive market in the USA and in the UK, where the two big beasts—the BBC and Sky—exercise such a powerful presence, ITV has shrugged off the critics who recently wrote its obituary and is steaming ahead in commercial terms, while still holding to some of its public service values and producing fine television; lately, for instance, outstanding drama.

The BBC is a different case, and so it should be. It is our national template and is in the grain of the country. Despite its current turbulence, it shows good signs under the noble Lord, Lord Hall, of rediscovering its values and its equilibrium, which promises well for its long-term future. I certainly hope so and intend to support it in seeking a secure future. It is not easy to fit the BBC into the framework suggested by the title of this Motion. Profit and public service are not always happy bedfellows, and the BBC is not there to act like a City bank or a FTSE 100 company. The BBC is there to serve the country, which, at its best, it still does superbly well.

It also offers figures that can inform this debate. In 2011-12, the BBC invested more than £1.1 billion of its £2.5 billion content spend in the UK creative sector, including almost £0.5 billion with independent production companies. Almost half of that investment was outside London. I was very glad that the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, referred to the Salford experiment, which is already an enormous success.

The BBC is the largest commissioner of new music and new writing in the UK. The corporation plausibly claims that its global services substantially increase the positive feeling that people around the world enjoy of this country. To underline that, BBC Worldwide grew faster than India, with a 5.4% revenue growth in 2011-12. While not strictly comparable with commercial companies, its economic impact is still substantial.

So we come to Sky. Oxford Economics estimates that in 2012-13, Sky contributed a total of £5.9 billion to UK GDP, and that 76% of this revenue was retained in the UK. Sky is one of the country’s largest employers, with more than 24,000 employees. Its activities support 120,000 jobs across the UK. There are 3,700 people in creative and production roles and 3,800 in technology.

From my own experience, I will mention the initiatives that Sky Arts is energetically pursuing on its two channels. It is remarkably ambitious to set up channels devoted solely to the arts, and in a country such as ours the prospects look good. This public service incentive continues in the building of skills studios in four UK cities for young people in our schools; in scholarship schemes to provide mentoring and substantial financial support for young talent in the arts as well as sport; and on television itself. The Sky Academy for sport and the arts, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, is now powering into literally thousands of schools, which benefit greatly from this direct contact with practitioners in the field, especially as it is happening in areas that are increasingly underresourced by government.

In short, broadcasting is one of the most serious, successful and ebullient businesses that we have. But behind all this, to make it happen, we have to nurture our start-up talent. At the moment we do: in many sports, as proved in the Olympics; in the sciences, where in the list of original contributions to world scientific papers we come second only to America and are comfortably ahead of China, which is third; and in the arts, where London vies with any other capital for the crown of the cultural cauldron of the world; and in the rest of the country, until very recently, a thousand flowers bloomed.

In all these examples and more, we prove that we can act with intelligence and distinction. All of them are based on available early disciplines, opportunities and guidance. I would also suggest that the quality of many of the television and radio programmes that we make feeds on our consistently high standards in films, musicals, literature and all the other arts. There is at present a flourishing virtuous circle. It is tempting to think that this is because we have some God-given gift of creativity in the British genes. Not so, I am afraid. What we have had, and still just have, are exceptionally good traditional learning colleges, designated schools and teachers, and several ways of training young people to a high level so that, once well nurtured, their own nature and talent can and do enable them to compete with the best in the world and to prosper, as so many of them are doing.

However, this bedrock, this essential preparatory phase, is threatened by the recent diminution in funding for the arts and the cutting of broadcasting. This funding, initially ushered in by a Labour Government after the Second World War, given great depth by the introduction of the Open University by Jennie Lee in the 1960s and extended lavishly by Administrations both Tory and Labour—especially the previous Labour Government—is now in jeopardy. Grants are being slashed, especially locally, where they are seen as a soft cut. They are often the hardest cut of all. The great drive of music-making in schools has stalled. The pursuit of literature for its own sake among young people, from which so many of our writers benefited, is also at risk in the new curriculum.

We are currently chopping away at the roots and, if we are not careful, there will soon be less and less fruit on the trees. Various broadcasting initiatives, as I have indicated, are seeking to address this, but it is a change in the cast of thought of the Government that is most needed. Only by enabling imagination to be ready for take-off can the creative economy, in which the broadcasting economy plays such a major part, maintain the strong surge that has made it so successful over the past few decades. This has to be done quickly and with vigour. Without the teaching of fundamental techniques, this vibrant part of our economic, cultural and personal life will begin to deteriorate. We must not let that happen—we must not see another great British industry be allowed, for lack of fundamental attention, to sink into decline.