The Future of News (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay Excerpts

Friday 25th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Stowell of Beeston for her chairmanship of the Communications and Digital Committee, for the report that the committee has laid before us and for the way that she opened this debate. I understand that another report is still to come stemming from her time as chairman, so I shall save the encomium for then, but she does indeed deserve the praise that noble Lords have levelled at her again today, as I know from my short spell on the committee as a member under her chairmanship.

I have not yet had the opportunity to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, on succeeding her, and I look forward to the work and reports that she and her colleagues bring before us. I am pleased to see the noble Lord, Lord McNally, back in his place. We have missed him.

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Pack, on his excellent maiden speech. It is always a pleasure to welcome a fellow political historian to your Lordships’ House. Noble Lords have noted some of the many books he has written. I know him through his supportive work for the Journal of Liberal History, which certainly puts me and my colleagues at the Conservative History Journal to shame—theirs appears quarterly and ours is only an annual publication. He may be surprised to know that I am an admirer and occasional reader of his email newsletters, although I should confess that I used to subscribe to them when I was in the Conservative Research Department and responsible for monitoring the Liberal Democrats. I was looking to make mischief, but it is testament to his political shrewdness that I was rarely able to do so on the basis of what he had written.

This report, and indeed my noble friend Lady Stowell’s speech, began by stating that the future of news matters, and I wholeheartedly concur. We live in a world where myths and disinformation are rife. Increasingly brazen autocracies peddle propaganda to their populations and consumers of news around the world. Social media here in the United Kingdom is leading many to believe outright lies and fake news, and rogue actors across the world use our news media to propagate their poisonous ideologies and threaten their rivals. As the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, says, the problem is not just bad actors but intolerant and closed-minded ones who do not want to give any space to opposing views or scrutiny.

As my noble friend Lord Gilbert of Panteg reminded us, there is a role for us all in the way we conduct public discourse. There is a role, too, for the work of media literacy. I look forward to the work that the committee, under the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, will do in this important area. For my part, media literacy can be delivered through traditional subjects such as history, English literature and history of art, which encourage young people to be sceptical of the sources that they see before them. I look forward to the committee’s views on all this.

Over recent years we have also seen the rise of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, especially from the Russian Federation, with the intent of destabilising democracies and undermining the rule of law. Noble Lords are right to have highlighted the injurious effect of SLAPPs, strategic lawsuits against public participation. I echo calls for the Government to continue to close the legislative gaps in this area.

Importantly, the committee’s report highlights that trust in news is declining and that news avoidance is rising. More people are either no longer believing the news they read, even when it is factually accurate, or simply declining to engage with it altogether. That should concern us all. The importance of accurate and reliable news cannot be overstated. It is vital to the functioning of a vibrant and robust democracy, to free and fair elections and to countering the pernicious rise of extremism, so there is a lot at stake.

The root causes of these issues are numerous. Part of the problem lies in the failure of social media firms to regulate the content they put on their platforms—something that the previous Government committed to tackling through the Online Safety Act, which I had the pleasure of taking through your Lordships’ House. We watch carefully as the provisions of that Act start to come into force, and all recognise that there is continuous work to be done in this area, which I hope the Government will continue.

But the problem runs deeper. The report rightly highlights the inherent risks of the consolidation of the world’s major technology companies, and how this is already beginning to

“upend news media business models and change the way people find information”.

That is not necessarily bad, of course. Media habits and methods of consumption have changed enormously over the years, from the printing press to the telegraph—with a small t—to online news publications. Each has brought with it disruptions and challenges, but also opportunities. It is how we manage those disruptions and seize those opportunities that is important. As my noble friend Lady Stowell said,

“a changing media environment should not be conflated with its imminent demise”.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Birt: we should look at what we have lost, as well as what we want to see in the future. He was right to mention with pride the long-form interviews of “Weekend World”. I am sure other noble Lords have enjoyed the recent TV drama “Brian and Maggie”, the dramatisation by James Graham and Stephen Frears of Brian Walden’s 1989 interview with my late noble friend Lady Thatcher. It makes for compelling drama, but it is rather depressing that such interviews are the stuff of drama rather than current affairs. I think the responsibility for that lies with politicians as well as with broadcasters.

A number of noble Lords mentioned the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act. The News Media Association has highlighted the possibility that the Government may review the implementation of that Act. Can the Minister shed any light on that? The Act, passed in the last Parliament, gave the Competition and Markets Authority enhanced powers to regulate digital markets. As part of it, the CMA has established a new Digital Markets Unit to address some of the anti-competitive and market-skewing behaviour that my noble friend Lord Gilbert of Panteg outlined. We understand the Government’s desire to reach new international trade agreements, but I hope they will proceed with caution in this area. The legislation that we passed was done to address some of the issues that noble Lords have raised in their contributions today and need to be watched very carefully.

Like other noble Lords, particularly my noble friends Lady Stowell and Lord Young of Acton, I will be grateful if the Minister is able to give us an update on the sale of the Telegraph and the secondary legislation we are looking for following the debates we had just before the general election. I sympathise, as I have said before, with the position she is in; it is a quasi-judicial decision for the Secretary of State to make but, as noble Lords have raised repeatedly, the fact that this is now being discussed in other news publications adds to the uncertainty for the staff and readers of the Telegraph. There is great concern about the importance of this and other daily newspapers in our very important media market. I look forward to any update the Minister is able to give us today.

It may be important to end on a positive note and hopefully to disprove the adage that good news is no news. Actions taken by the previous Government have made inroads in protecting our news media. The BBC remains the world’s most trusted news source, reaching a weekly global audience of 450 million people. On average, 75% of adults in the UK use BBC news in some capacity every week; that is quite impressive for a corporation more than a century old. It remains one of our most trusted and valuable institutions and can act as a welcome antidote to the poison of misinformation and foreign interference. I agree with my noble friend Lady Stowell, an alumna of the corporation and a constructively critical friend to it. It is important that the BBC and all our public service broadcasters continue to earn their status as anchor organisations.

I commend all those who work in our news media on the work they do holding the powerful to account, reflecting the diverse views of our increasingly fractious world and upholding the robust, independent and respected news sector, which is so important not just to this country but to our place in the world.