BBC Charter

Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)]

My Lords, it is worth saying at the outset that the dire and wild predictions made by some about what the Government had in store for the BBC have turned out to be very wide of the mark. It is also worth repeating what almost all noble Lords have said about the huge importance and value of the BBC to our national life and, as the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, said, to people’s everyday lives.

The draft agreement between the Government and the BBC and the draft royal charter take us to 2027, 11 years away. If we look back at the past 10 years, we have seen an amazing transformation in the media, broadcasting, subscription television, streaming and so on. There will be even greater changes in the coming decade, some of which may yet be no more than a gleam in the eye.

When I was at school, a speaker at our speech day said something I have never forgotten. He told us that we would need something much more important than GCEs, qualifications and degrees—adaptability—because the world was going to change in ways that we could not begin to imagine. The same is true for the BBC. It will need to be adaptable. So we have to look at the agreement and charter in the certain knowledge that the world in which the BBC operates will see great changes over the lifetime of this charter.

This brings me to the new constitution and the new BBC board. Its overall responsibility will be, as the draft charter says, to set,

“the strategic direction for the BBC within the framework set by this Charter and the Framework Agreement”.

But we also want the BBC to think outside the box as the world changes around it. I am sure that the current director-general can do that. I very much hope that the new board will let him.

It is also vital that the BBC does not get bogged down in bureaucracy. Under the draft agreement, the BBC has to operate under a list of specified public purposes. But please can we avoid the nightmare of a mountain of public purposes, remits, priorities, values and targets, all of them overlapping—the horror unearthed by those of us who sit on your Lordships’ Communications Committee? I remember going into my local town hall many years ago and seeing posters boasting of and listing, “Our 200 promises to you”. Of course, no employee could remember even one of them.

As the noble Lord, Lord Birt, said, the BBC is going to need a chairman and directors who are tough and robust. It is not easy being a non-exec. You have to rely on the executives to supply you with the information you need and, even more importantly, not the pile of papers that you do not need. So my advice to any potential BBC director is to ask, “How will the board be served? What information will I get? What information will I ask for?”; otherwise, the board could become the creature of the BBC executive.

I apologise to my noble friend the Minister for having another go at this but I would prefer members of the board to be given one term only; otherwise, there is a risk that they will, consciously or unconsciously, seek to curry favour in the hope of being reappointed. I say this because there are times when board directors have to dig their heels in with their chief executive, in this case a highly respected director-general. At that point, directors should not be thinking about their reappointment or even have it at the back of their minds. If the Government really want a truly independent BBC board, as they say they do, this is what they should do.

Turning to the new role being given to Ofcom, I think we all understand how unsatisfactory it has been for the current BBC Trust to act as both cheerleader and regulator and why therefore the job of regulator has been given to Ofcom, which has a wealth of experience and expertise in the regulation of the communications industry. Nothing I am about to say should be seen as a criticism of Ofcom but, rather, as my reflections on the job Ofcom is being asked to undertake.

I have no major concerns about Ofcom’s role in looking at the impact of the BBC on the competitive marketplace. It is well placed to do this, but we do not want Ofcom to decide how the BBC should be doing its job; nor, I think, does Ofcom. But let me give your Lordships one example from the draft agreement, under the heading “News and current affairs”. I quote it directly, so I have not tried to correct the rather peculiar grammar. It says:

“Ofcom must impose on the BBC the requirements they consider appropriate for securing … the programmes included in the UK Public Television Services include news programmes and current affairs programmes at what appears to them to be an appropriate level”.

It is impossible to deduce from this what will appear appropriate to Ofcom. I suspect that even Ofcom will not know for some time, so how will the BBC know whether it is likely to fall foul of Ofcom?

Let me give another example, which other noble Lords have talked about: the definition of distinctive. The definition with which Ofcom will have to grapple includes “taken as a whole” and “overall”. This gives huge discretion to Ofcom to decide what is or is not distinctive. Does Ofcom know how to interpret, assess and evaluate this? Probably not. So Ofcom will have to feel its way, building up judgments on a kind of case law basis, with the BBC again not really knowing what will fall foul of Ofcom. These are matters of subjective judgment. They cannot be easily measured and are not quantifiable.

Many years ago, a wise Treasury Minister said that the trouble with the Treasury and its equations is that it cannot quantify common sense. The same is true here. Of course somebody has to regulate the BBC. If it cannot be the BBC itself, and it cannot, then we have either to establish a brand-new regulator, which would be a huge exercise, or give it to Ofcom, which is well established. I am sure that Ofcom is well aware of the challenges it faces, but the Government may well want to look at how the new regulatory framework is working well before 2027. The mid-term review would allow the Government to do just that.