Films (Definition of “British Film”) Order 2015

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Thursday 22nd January 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Grantchester (Lab)]

My Lords, I enjoyed the Minister’s explanation of the order before us today. If a film that has been supported by the Government and the taxpayer in this way should be very successful—he mentioned “Paddington”—and especially profitable, is some element of the profits returned to the pot, if that is the right expression, for further use by British films to encourage the British film industry or does it escape from the system? Is it in some way self-fulfilling that the profits of a publicly supported film go back into making more British films?

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to respond in this debate. First, I declare my interest as a former director of the British Film Institute. I thank the Minister for his kind words about my contribution in that time.

I have spent many happy hours over the last few years debating issues that come up on the DCMS brief with the Minister. I have usually been able to, I think, in his own words, “trip him up” on something and cause him difficulty. I am normally rewarded, because is it often a delight to have a two or three-page letter—indeed, the last one almost ran to four pages—in which he finally gives me the answers that I have asked for, usually to my complete satisfaction and sometimes even far beyond that.

Today is different. I have consulted widely with my remaining friends and colleagues in the industry and have sought comments from FACT and the British Film Institute. Nobody has a word of doubt about this order. They are delighted with it, and it seems otiose for me to stand here and even question the Minister about it, so I shall give the Committee one anecdote and ask three very small questions. I do not expect a letter.

When I was director of the British Film Institute, which I was for nearly nine years, I spent most of my time trying to argue with officials and Ministers in what was then a Conservative Government that we needed a better definition of a British film. It is therefore somewhat ironic to be considering an order which not only deals with that but improves the current definition and brings it forward. There is a little irony within that irony, which is that the order does not define a British film at all; it defines a film as British if it is made in the EEA, which must have come as a bit of a shock to those who perhaps take a view different from mine about the benefits that flow from the European Community, but let us pass over that.

The reason for the anecdote is that part of the work I was doing at the British Film Institute developing a public policy issue around this stemmed from work that was initiated by the late Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher, who held a very high-profile summit in Downing Street in 1990, from which most of the policy that we are now concerned with started. Indeed, other Members of your Lordships’ House were at that meeting and could talk about it as well. It was the beginning of government interest in film, but it constantly worried us because of something within the idea that more people should be going to see films, which was Mrs Thatcher’s view. She recalled her time in Grantham when the whole village used to go to the village cinema twice a week to catch the latest films, which were, of course, largely British. In the early 1990s, it was feast or famine. There were occasional rushes of successful British films that were invested in by American studios, but that tended to fade away and we were back to the usual diet. The main diet in British cinemas at the time we went to see her was films that were often made by British people, or had British expertise in them, but were financed, often produced and almost certainly made outside Britain, and we wanted to resolve that. It has taken a very long time, but the situation is now transformed. As the Minister said, between 150 and 200 British films a year benefit. It is an extraordinary transformation of the arrangements.