BBC Governance and Regulation: Communications Committee Report

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, I am not nor have I ever been a member of the Communications Committee, which may add a little force when I add my voice to those who have congratulated the authors of the report and insisted that any attempt by the House fuddy-duddies to kill it off must be resisted to the last. To single me out even more in this debate, I have never been a member of the staff of the BBC. I have tried a few times but was not good enough, which may be part of the reason why the BBC remains a world-class institution—and, as many speakers in the debate have said, a world-class institution it is.

One of the characteristics of most such institutions is that they tend to a certain small “c” conservatism. Your Lordships may reflect on that sentiment in view of the difficulty of getting even the smallest change in the workings of this place—which I happen to believe also does a pretty good job for the country. It can at times make the BBC appear almost comical.

I have to reflect on the great tale of the National Audit Office, as it now emerges from the report. Those of us who are veterans of the Communications Act debates will remember the frightful struggle to get any NAO involvement whatever in the BBC over the root-and-branch insistence by the corporation and its spokespeople that this would be the end of the BBC’s independence. It happened, subject to it having to report to the trust. I have checked once or twice and the BBC now greatly welcomes the involvement of the NAO in ensuring that the taxpayer is getting good value for money. In a few years’ time, the NAO will report to Parliament on the BBC. No damage will be done to the BBC's independence, but a huge struggle will have gone on in the mean time. That is not necessarily a bad thing, because conservatism can be good in an institution that is basically sound.

This leads me to my central point. If one looks for logic—certainly if one looks for perfect logic—in the governance arrangements of the BBC, one will not find it. When the current arrangements were first advanced by the Government, I was one of the few people who were reasonably sympathetic toward them. However, I never claimed that they were logical. In a logical world, we would go down the road recommended by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, and have a clear-cut system of that sort. The trouble would come with the collateral damage that we would do in getting there. If the BBC considered the NAO poking about in its accounts a threat to its fundamental independence, what would it think of a reorganisation of that kind? Instead of getting on with its main job of making programmes, and its secondary job of making sure that the public are properly represented and consulted, the BBC would be involved in lengthy trench warfare with the Government, Parliament and the independent television sector. We would miss the main point. As has been said, the governance of the BBC is not perfect—but it is not bad. It can be made to work, and that is a virtue not to be swiftly cast aside.

I will make a further point on this matter. Governance arrangements exist on pieces of paper, but the workings of the arrangements depend very much on something quite other—namely, the people involved. Anyone who thinks, say, that the Davies/Dyke duarchy was the same in its workings as the Patten/Thompson duarchy—whatever might be written on bits of paper about governance—is out of touch with what went on. We could reconstruct a wonderful system of governance only to find that changes in personnel or in their personalities would render all the effort wholly redundant.

That is not for a moment to say that the arrangements should remain untouched. I have already given one example where I would like to see change: that is, in the NAO reporting to Parliament. Others are contained in the report, and the noble Lord, Lord Patten, has been putting many of them into practice. That is great. However, perhaps I might finish on a cliché and recommend to the House the old adage that evolution is better than revolution, and suggest that this is the safest way to preserve the BBC as a world-class institution in the media world of the future.