Public Service Broadcasting (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, this is an important debate on a valuable report and I welcome it, perhaps as much despite the tribulations currently facing the BBC as because of them. That is because the noise that that scandal generates may drown out other, at least as important questions which need consideration. Before proceeding, I declare that I am a director of Full Fact and the Public Interest News Foundation.

I first became engaged with the question of public service broadcasting in 1995, when, unexpectedly—to me at least—I became the Minister for Broadcasting in the last chapter of the John Major Government. Before then, it was not a topic with which I had had serious political engagement. The title of this report would have been as apt then as now, and the document under its banner could equally have been written at that time. However, thanks to technology, the world about which it would have been written would have been more or less entirely different.

Of course, unless you are establishing radio and television from scratch, you are always caught by the hangover from the immediate past. Paradoxically, therefore, while the political case is strong for public service broadcasting in some form at the inception of radio and television services with monopoly characteristics, it may, superficially, at least, appear to be weaker as the number of channels increase. Is that right, and what should the response be?

As we all know, one of the revolutionary changes in recent years is that the means for transferring information, including the media, have been transformed. The constraints imposed by spectrum scarcity have more or less disappeared, and broadcasting, which in simple terms at one point was a multipoint service, has evolved into a whole series of varying versions and combinations of point-to-point, point-to-multipoint, multipoint-to-multipoint, on-demand and mobile services. This is a revolution and, I suggest, a beneficial one which has been life-enhancing and life-improving for many people. The effect of all this is that we have in the most general sense moved from a world of scarcity to one of abundance—some might say excessive abundance—which of course poses problems, just as scarcity does.

Having ended my much-enjoyed stint as chairman of the Communications Committee in 2004, because I believe that when one gives something up one should walk away, I deliberately took a step back from engagement in the politics of the media. However, I did not leave my interest in it behind, and my involvement with the wider media world continued in some respects. It is this change from scarcity to abundance which strikes me so strongly. During the whole of this period, public service broadcasting has been at the heart of UK media thinking, and, while things keep evolving, it has remained there while being consistently challenged.

We must be clear that public service broadcasting is not only what used to be known as television; it is also radio, and, as has been mentioned, it is not only the BBC but Channel 4, ITV and Channel 5. Together, they comprise our public service broadcasters; equally, each is an interconnected part of the whole, and they should not be wantonly and rashly reverse-engineered or disaggregated. In a world of information overload, they together provide a kind of datum point at the centre of what is on offer more widely.

In recent years and months, the incidence of fake news and its younger brother, dodgy information, has been at the heart of political debate in this country, both as a phenomenon but also as an influencer of voter behaviour. In my view, public sector broadcasters’ role is to provide an accessible gauge against which people can look at these wider media offerings. Because public service broadcasting is plural in its suppliers, there is no monopoly in its source, something which is very dangerous in a free society.

Our society has a number of national services with which everyone can engage if they feel the need to do so—that is the way we do these things in the 21st century. Of these, perhaps the National Health Service is the most obvious. Public service broadcasting in some ways—but only some—is similar, in that it is available to all. Just as the NHS relates to health, ultimately, public service broadcasting, given its plural character, provides guidance and commentary on the accuracy, truth, relevance and quality of material which is so important to the political and wider social health of the nation. It is available to all and compulsory for none.

Our country, it is said, is in an unhappy political state. I believe that public service broadcasting can and does contribute to resolving some of the differences and tensions across the United Kingdom, in a way that the simple dialectic of competition in the market will not do by itself. We have inherited public service broadcasting and, as has already been mentioned, I do not suppose that anybody would invent it in its present form now. However, it is a reality and I believe it is serving a valuable purpose. We just have to remember, in the well-known words of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in The Leopard, that it is necessary that things must change for things to remain the same.