Queen’s Speech

Lord Foster of Bath Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths. I share many of his concerns about the Government’s plans for academies, but I noted that he described the gracious Speech as a bouquet. Sadly, it is a bouquet with relatively few flowers, very many of them quite old, for relatively little is new in the gracious Speech. The soft-drinks sugar tax and plans to allow local councils to retain business rates were in the Autumn Statement. The British Bill of Rights first appeared a year ago in last year’s Queen’s Speech—incidentally, I believe that it was a wrong idea then and it is wrong idea now.

One has to go back even further for the first mention of the creation of a criminal offence for assisting in tax evasion—that was first announced by my right honourable friend Danny Alexander during the coalition —and further back still, to two years ago, for the first mention of the better markets Bill, which was announced by my other right honourable friend Ed Davey. Much of the Queen’s Speech has been heard before, but sadly, and rather bizarrely, lots of things were not mentioned, not least the deficit.

Not even small but important matters got a look-in. There was no mention, for example, of any plans to tackle the crack cocaine of gambling, the fixed-odds betting terminals. Perhaps when the Minister winds up she can tell us when the Government will carry out the much-delayed triennial review of stakes and prizes for gaming machines so that they can consider reducing the stake for FOBTs to £2 to help to protect young unemployed men in particular from the misery that they bring. I hope that your Lordships’ House will support the Private Member’s Bill on this matter, which is proposed by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, although I note that he came 43rd out of 51 in the Private Member’s Bill ballot today. I came only 48th out of 51.

There are, of course, some genuinely new measures in the Queen’s Speech. Some of them, such as plans to speed up adoption, are very welcome, but, sadly, many lack ambition. Legislation to provide the infrastructure that business needs in order to grow must, of course, be accompanied by serious investment, yet realistic levels of investment in housing, roads, rail and digital infrastructure are constrained by the Government’s own spending plans. No wonder the OECD has urged increases in infrastructure spending.

Nowhere is this need more apparent than in the lack of ambition for broadband. We have some of the best creative industries in the world. They create jobs and help to drive exports. As a proportion of GDP, we have the largest digital economy of the G20 countries, but that position will be put at risk unless we have ambitious plans for broadband. To be world leaders, we surely have to have more than a universal service obligation of just 10 megabits per second. As my noble friend Lady Burt pointed out, if we are going to do this, we have to stop relying on out-of-date copper-wire technology and invest in the rollout of fibre-optic cabling to our homes.

We should also pay much more attention to demand stimulation. If more people and more businesses see the benefits of truly high-speed broadband, the higher take-up will reduce unit costs. The BBC iPlayer has already played a critical role in demand stimulation. Forty-three per cent of broadband users claim that it was one of the reasons why they got broadband in the first place. Certainly if we are going to drive up high-speed broadband demand in our homes, more needs to be done to help content creators such as the public service broadcasters, and more needs to be done to provide greater protection for legal online content.

Notwithstanding the fact that, after the US and Germany, the UK ranks third in the world in the number of legal digital music services available, it is still estimated that 26% of UK users have accessed music content illegally. I therefore hope that the Minister will assure us that the digital economy Bill will include domestic measures to act against illegal sites and that we will work with our EU partners to take effective cross-border action to block such sites, including by replacing notice and take down with notice and stay down, which is technologically easy for hosting sites to implement and reduces the need for copyright owners to keep checking to see whether an illegal site has re-emerged.

The digital economy Bill will occupy a great deal of time for the already busy Mr Whittingdale and the Minister, so I hope they will not waste time seeking to part-privatise Channel 4, which would be economic and creative madness, but I do hope they will have time to address the concerns of many in your Lordships’ House about the future of the BBC, following the White Paper. My noble friend Lady Bonham-Carter, the noble Lords, Lord Fowler and Lord Cashman, and others have already expressed their concerns, and I will not repeat in detail what I said in your Lordships’ House last Thursday, but having carefully studied the White Paper I remain firmly of the view that the independence of the BBC is now threatened.

It is threatened because, despite the possibility that the proposed unitary BBC board could influence editorial scheduling and creative decisions, the Government are insisting on appointing six members to it—creating the impression of a state, and not a public, broadcaster. Like my noble friend on the Front Bench, I believe that all non-executives should be appointed by an independent body. It is threatened because of the mid-term so-called health check, which I believe could lead to the unpicking of bits of the charter itself, which would undermine the security of planning and investment for the BBC, and the creative industries allied to it, which was meant to be the purpose of an 11-year charter period. It is threatened because so far, the Minister has not answered the question I asked her last Thursday, which was raised again by my noble friend Lady Benjamin. Can she therefore give a categorical assurance that the licence fee will not be raided to pay for the continuation of the proposed contestable fund when the £20 million runs out? Unless she can, the financial independence of the BBC is put at risk.

Finally, BBC independence could be at risk because of the intention, as the Secretary of State put it, to ensure that the BBC’s,

“services are clearly differentiated from the rest of the market”.—[Official Report, Commons, 12/5/16; col. 730.]

Despite assurances, that increasingly looks like the Government want gradually to curtail the BBC’s creative freedom to make popular programmes. The BBC is the best and most trusted broadcaster in the world. Threatening its independence will put that at risk. Trust in the BBC will evaporate, and I hope many in your Lordships’ House will resists any attempts by the Government to do so.

Rather like that spaghetti western, the gracious Speech has the good, the bad and the ugly, some of which, like the movie, is oft repeated. However, whatever we think of the measures included in, and those omitted from the gracious Speech, the biggest threat to our nation will come, not from this Queen’s Speech, but from a leave vote in the referendum. Resisting that is surely our biggest challenge.