BSkyB

Lord Foster of Bath Excerpts

Thursday 30th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I am quite bemused by what the shadow Culture Secretary is saying. He has said that the phone-hacking issue is not linked to the BSkyB merger. Those were his words. Now he is telling the House that there is a link. He says that I could have chosen to refer this to the Competition Commission but have chosen not to. Would he have chosen to refer it to the Competition Commission, because he has not said so? If he is now saying so, that is a big change in the Labour party’s position. Let me tell him that it is the Enterprise Act 2002, introduced by the last Labour Government, that gives the Secretary of State the right to accept undertakings in lieu instead of a referral to the Competition Commission. I am following precisely the process that was set up in law by his Government. I am doing so after expert, independent advice by regulators who understand the market extremely well—Ofcom and the Office of Fair Trading—and I am publishing that advice so that people can see the basis on which I have made the decision.

The hon. Gentleman also raised issues of the dependency of the new company on News Corp for its funding. He is right: the financial resilience of Sky News is central to the sustainability of the deal. That is why, as part of the undertakings, we have reached agreement on a carriage agreement, which will give financial security to the new company for a 10-year period, which addresses those concerns. The company is able to develop its business outside Sky during that period, which will make it less financially dependent on Sky, but even if it does not do that, it has the security of a 10-year funding agreement, which is considerably greater than that of the BBC, for example, in the licence fee settlement.

I am publishing more advice than any Secretary of State has ever published on any comparable deal. We are being completely transparent about the processes because we want to ensure that the public have confidence, and it would be good if the shadow Culture Secretary could at least acknowledge that transparency.

[Mr Don Foster (Bath) (LD)]

The Secretary of State has rightly said that this is an issue about plurality in news and current affairs. Does he recall that in 2002 the Labour Government opposed a general plurality test, and that it was only because of the efforts of Lord Puttnam and others in another place that one was included in the Enterprise Act? Given that that was a watered-down test, does he believe that the time is now right to set up an independent commission on plurality so that it can inform the future communications Bill?

[Mr Hunt]

My right hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. The process that we have gone through has revealed that both he and I would like to make sure that there are better protections for media plurality, not in situations such as this—we have a process that involves exhaustive public scrutiny—but where someone might develop a dominant position in the media, and the public might not be as protected as they should be. That is why the coalition Government have said that we want to do something that the last Labour Government did not do: look at whether plurality protection can be strengthened, which we will do in the new communications Bill that we will be putting to the House in the second half of this Parliament.