BBC Governance and Regulation: Communications Committee Report

Lord Grade of Yarmouth Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grade of Yarmouth]

My Lords, in the limited time available, perhaps I may offer some recent historical context before commenting briefly on some recommendations of this excellent report of the Select Committee on Communications. As chairman of the BBC governors at the time, I was, so to speak, in the delivery room when the BBC Trust was born as the successor to the long-standing BBC board of governors.

The midwife in attendance, then Secretary of State Tessa Jowell, was not short of advice, but all were in agreement that the governors structure was no longer fit for purpose. Most took the fallout from the Hutton inquiry as a sign of governance failure. In my clear view, it was not, but that is another story.

The fault lay elsewhere. The traditional governance had failed to keep pace with the structural changes in the sector, which the noble Lord, Lord Birt, has so ably referred to. There was a failure to police the border with the private sector. The BBC regarded its licence-fee payers as somehow not the same people as those who consumed and enjoyed a wide choice of media, public and private. It failed, therefore, to understand that if the publicly funded BBC expanded in any way that damaged the private sector, it risked depriving its own licence-fee payers of the wider choice that they valued.

Additionally, and perhaps most damaging to the status quo then, the information and data on which governors had to rely for their decision-making were carefully prepared for them by the executive management, who naturally put the most weight on those arguments and facts which best suited the outcome that they desired—usually expansion. The same applied when there were complaints. This was always a recipe for mistrust, both inside and outside the BBC. That is the headline background.

Finding a new model for this sui generis institution was more contentious but throughout the wide debate I was always clear that the governance of the BBC had to remain inside the corporation. Only by being inside could a sovereign board effectively take the ultimate responsibility for the public’s money—£2.5 billion of it in those days. You cannot effect and direct value for money after the money has been spent. I was mighty relieved when this argument eventually won the day and the required separation between management and the lay board was enshrined as the BBC Trust, operating from within the corporation.

Is it perfect? Absolutely not, as the excellent report we are debating today suggests. However, that is the wrong question. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Birt, put it better: is it an improvement on what went before? I agree with him that it is, absolutely. The evidence clearly shows that the border skirmishes with the private sector have diminished in their number and intensity, and the trust has never flinched from criticising and directing management publicly when merited on the basis of its own gathered information.

The third vital role of any sovereign body with responsibility for the BBC is to guard its independence. I see no sign that the present arrangements have done anything but strengthen the BBC’s ability to defend its independence.

So, to my noble friend’s report and his committee. I agree wholeheartedly that the BBC’s complaints procedures are deficient, and we have heard plenty of evidence to that effect today. Since leaving the BBC, as I told the committee, I have had two reasons to complain. After months and months and hours of hard labour at the word processor, in the first case the management was eventually overruled by the trust and in the second case, after a shameful attempt to bury the apology on a major news day—the day the Chilean miners were saved—we managed to extract fulsome apologies for editorial lapses on air. It was, believe me, an exhausting process. If I, as a recent chairman of the BBC who knew his way through the system intimately and the people involved, had such difficulty extracting an appropriate apology, what chance has an outsider? Another recent example concerned Primark. It took the company three years to get the BBC to admit that it might have faked some film in a report on its manufacturing practices in India.

I believe that central to any new complaints procedure is that BBC executive involvement in it has to be removed from the complaints process—other than obviously providing evidence—as it has singularly failed to demonstrate that it understands that it is a sign of strength to concede fault, not a sign of weakness.

The report suggests giving all complaints to Ofcom. Others suggest an ombudsman solution. However, if Ofcom is the answer, we need to remember that it is a statutory body, open to judicial review. Its processes are therefore necessarily legally meticulous and necessarily protracted. With most complaints, people are looking for speedy redress. It took Ofcom many months to reach its conclusion on the infamous Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross horror. The trust was able to summon the director-general in the week after the incident became public and it issued its condemnation and the actions to be taken as a result within a couple of weeks. If complaints move outside the BBC, the trust must not be constrained from intervening in the event of widespread public disquiet.

Should complaints about journalistic impartiality and accuracy be left with the trust? I would much prefer that they remained in that domain. One must understand that impartiality is usually a matter of subjectivity, and it is not difficult to imagine a situation where Ofcom could come to one conclusion and the BBC Trust, in defending the independence of the BBC, might come to another. I think that that would lead to further confusion.

I shall not detain your Lordships with further comments on the recommendations in the report, as they do not seem to me to undermine the principles for good governance of the BBC that I have described. However, I cannot let this opportunity pass without placing on record my undying admiration for the corporation. It is easy to criticise the BBC—and sometimes it makes it easier for you to do so—but it is a very great British institution and one of the defining and positive components that makes Great Britain somehow different. One must also not forget that, in among all the wonderful programmes and wonderful journalism, the BBC was—thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Birt—the first to spot the communications revolution and set off on its own down the digital highway. It was truly a visionary legacy on which his successors as director-general have all built, giving us Freeview—the first effective competition to Sky—then the iPlayer, and then YouView, the clever successor to the Freeview box.

BBC journalism holds an ever more important role in our democracy, at a time when our newspapers are, as we have heard, in intensive care in more senses than just the economic one. It is not hard to imagine that, in years to come, the BBC will find itself as the last bastion of fully funded, independent and impartial news. It needs to ensure that its journalism always measures up to that responsibility, to remain trustworthy and trusted. It means resisting any temptation to follow the glib, lazy and often partisan narratives that develop in other media. To take one example, in the coverage of the BP Gulf oil spill the BBC piled in with the rest of the world’s media, pronouncing ecological catastrophe, long-term damage et cetera. A few months ago, however, Steve Hewlett presented a most refreshing programme on BBC Radio 4 which revisited the media coverage of that incident and concluded that that conclusion was not justified by the facts. The damage was much more contained than reported; the clean up was very efficient; and the fishermen were back in the Gulf waters finding plentiful stocks in months rather than the years that the media predicted. This was BBC journalism of the highest standard. One might have wished that the original coverage had been so even-handed and less a slave to the general doom-laden narrative of other media.

Let me conclude by formally congratulating my noble friend Lord Patten of Barnes on his appointment as chairman of the BBC Trust. I wish him well and know that he will lead this great institution to further success and esteem while being a champion of the interests of the licence-fee payers. I also commend my noble friend Lord Inglewood and his important committee on a marvellous report. The debate may be late, but the report remains very relevant. In the light of the agenda which the noble Lord, Lord Birt, laid out in his speech for the regulatory issues facing this country, the idea that this committee should become ad hoc would seem to me to be a retrograde step.