BBC: Finance and Independence

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, I make no apology for concentrating the whole of my remarks today on the BBC’s World Service and its vernacular services, which, since the coalition Government’s decision, are now fully funded from the resources available to the BBC. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, for having introduced such a timely debate and for giving me an opportunity to speak about this.

This House’s point of departure, I suggest, must surely be our own relatively recent report on the UK’s soft power, which found that the BBC’s overseas work was a crucial and immensely valuable soft-power asset. I doubt whether anyone disputes that conclusion; indeed, the Government seemed to share it when they responded to the report. However, the time has now come to move from warm words to specifics, and I hope that the Minister will do just that.

To rate the BBC’s overseas work so highly is not, I suggest, to fall into the trap of suggesting that soft-power assets can be a substitute for hard power but, as this country’s hard-power capability is constrained by the rise of others and by financial limits, it is all the more important to make the best use of and promote our principal soft-power assets, which were recently recognised in a private analysis as putting Britain at the head of a global league table. The BBC was a key part of that conclusion.

First, on the issue of wider consultation about the BBC’s future, I wonder whether the Minister has anything more to add to the cautiously positive response that she gave to my Question on 16 July about the desirability of finding a way of assessing the BBC’s worldwide audience’s attitudes, which, after all, represent a rather larger number of people than our domestic audience, and to bring them into some kind of consultative process. The evidence of the importance of the World Service and the BBC’s vernacular services, particularly in countries that do not have press freedom or access to unbiased reporting on world events, is scattered through innumerable historical accounts of the last century’s troubled history. Those views of the UK’s overseas audience need to be heard and to be taken fully account of before any decisions are taken.

When the responsibility for financing the World Service and the vernacular services was switched from the FCO to the BBC, many of us argued that the safeguards available to the Government to protect those services were entirely inadequate, particularly in the event of the BBC’s overall resources being further squeezed, as is now the case. I am not suggesting that that decision should be reversed or reopened but this review surely provides an opportunity which needs to be seized to give the Government as a whole a greater say in the oversight of these resources for the BBC’s work, its scope and its basic direction—but not of course of its content. The Foreign Secretary’s current powers to approve any major shift in the vernacular programmes, either to increase or to reduce them, is, I suggest, far short of what is needed and far too limited for the period ahead. So will the Minister tell the House that consideration of the strengthening of these safeguards will be a central part of the review?

While much of this debate no doubt will be, and has been, about the BBC’s domestic services and their financing—and rightly so—I hope that we are not going to lose sight of the significance for our future role in world affairs of the overseas services. Throughout my diplomatic career, I benefited enormously from the BBC’s overseas work and the esteem in which it was held. It is something of which we should be proud and it is something which we should spare no effort to sustain and promote.