Lord Vaizey of Didcot
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Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts
Mr Vaizey
I am sorry to shout so dramatically, but I took on board what the hon. Gentleman said—I listen to every word he says—about his ear infection and I wanted to grab his attention. May I point out that the money from the BBC television licence fee that was used for broadband was actually the surplus left over from Labour’s highly successful digital switchover programme? That programme was so successful that it underspent its budget, and we used the surplus to pursue our own extremely successful broadband programme.
Mr Watson
I am being slightly diverted from the motion. I have only been in this role for 10 days, so I may not have my facts entirely right, but I think that the £630 million that my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Ian C. Lucas) described has also been underspent to the tune of £60 million. It would be very useful if the Government could give that money back to the BBC so that it could be put into diverse broadcasting such as children’s broadcasting, in which the right hon. Gentleman and I both have an interest.
Mr Edward Vaizey (Wantage) (Con)
I am grateful for the chance to speak in this important debate, and I greatly welcome the publication of the draft charter. It is worth recalling that at various points during the run-up to the charter there was some debate about whether we would have to extend it in order to give us time to cover all the bases, as it were. It is great testament to the previous Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), whom I see in his place on the Back Benches, that since the election in May 2015 to today we have a draft charter before us. It is also great testament to him that, as we can see, he does not have two horns on his head and is not carrying a pitchfork. He is not here to consign the BBC to the depths of hell, nor did he intend to do so when he was Secretary of State.
I have absolutely no time for those who think that my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon came to office with an agenda to bury the BBC, and that he was somehow seen off by the might of 38 Degrees and the effectiveness of Labour Front Benchers. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, my right hon. Friend is a great supporter of the BBC. He merely made the deeply obvious points that we were going through a charter review, and that the whole point of a charter review was to examine what the BBC does and whether it could be helped to do things better.
I used to joke that we could complete the charter review within 24 hours, but it took us slightly longer. However, as Members now know, the review does not shake the BBC to its core foundations, but makes some very welcome and long overdue changes. One of the biggest issues that we had to consider was whether the licence fee was sustainable, which was a perfectly rational issue to consider. I think it became pretty clear that the licence fee, like democracy, was the “least worst” of the options before us. Nevertheless, my right hon. Friend has given the BBC an opportunity to trial subscription services, and he was right to do so, because—as has already been mentioned—the BBC will face extraordinary competition, not from its terrestrial broadcast rivals but from the likes of Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google. It is appropriate that, in a digital age, the BBC should start to consider how best to raise its income, and, indeed, how best to distribute its content.
Not many Members have mentioned radio. We forget too easily, when we talk about the Poldarks or Ed Balls on “Strictly”, that a major part of the BBC’s output is on the radio. BBC local radio is extremely important, particularly to us in the House. All those people who huff and puff and say “I wouldn’t pay my licence fee for this kind of nonsense” are only too happy to wake up to the “Today” programme and go to bed with the Radio 4 midnight news. The BBC does an outstanding job in radio, and it is important for it to continue to do so.
Let me say something about the subject of James Purnell. I do not have a problem with his being an old leftie; what I have a problem with is the fact that he does not seem to believe in digital radio. I am a passionate supporter of digital radio, but James thinks that everything must go on to the internet. My right-wing friends should really want him to be made director-general, because he would probably put the entire BBC online within 24 hours of being appointed. If James is watching the debate—online—I urge him to back digital radio, because I think that it will be the medium through which we listen to radio. It is at a tipping point, and we need the BBC as a very senior partner in it.
Let me also say, as part of the whole conspiracy theory debate, that I welcome my right hon. Friend’s decision to provide for a mid-term review of the charter. As I have said, given the current rapid technological changes, it will be very useful to see whether a subsequent Government can make changes that will help the BBC.
I want to touch on four key aspects of the whole charter debate. First, there is the issue of Ofcom regulation. That was part of the reason for my quip about how we could complete the charter review in 24 hours. It seemed to me that the biggest fundamental change on which everyone was agreed was the replacement of the BBC Trust by Ofcom regulation, because the trust clearly did not work.
I have particular praise for the Minister for Digital and Culture and, in her absence, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State—and, indeed, the Prime Minister—because I think they were right to decide, when they came to office, that the chairman of the new BBC Board should be appointed through an open process. If I may echo the words of the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle), that is not a criticism of Rona Fairhead, but I think it was quite wrong that there was not an open process for the appointment of the chairman of an entirely new body, and I am pleased that there is to be such a process now. It is obvious that the BBC Board is completely independent. It always was independent even under the proposals made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon before the change of Government, but it is clearly even more independent now, for the benefit of the conspiracy theorists who think we are trying to take over the BBC.
I urge the Government to be as flexible as possible on the detail of how Ofcom goes about the task of regulating the BBC. I have no doubt at all that the chief executive of Ofcom, Sharon White, will do a superb job. Those of us who strongly believe in press freedom should watch out for a Trojan horse, however: if Ofcom is required to regulate the BBC, we will need to look carefully at how it regulates the BBC’s web content and print-like content. I do not want to see press regulation come in by the backdoor through Ofcom regulating what the BBC does online; I want Ofcom to regulate the BBC’s broadcast content—television and radio.
To my intense pleasure, a great deal of this debate has focused on diversity. I thank the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) for his very kind words about what I have done and return the favour, as I would to my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant) if she were in the Chamber, about the work they have done on diversity, along with many others. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon will confirm, not a meeting on the BBC went by without my banging on about diversity, and I am very pleased that it is one of the six purposes and that it is very prominent. I praise all the other campaigners outside on the work they have done, in particular Simon Albury from the Campaign for Broadcasting Equality.
We have made progress. I was talking to the playwright and theatre director Kwame Kwei-Armah when he came over a few weeks ago. A play he has produced, “One Night in Miami”, is now on in London. He said that, coming back after spending five years in Baltimore, he does see a change, but that is anecdotal and we must keep the pressure on to ensure we see greater diversity. We are not talking simply about black and minority ethnic diversity or gender equality; it is also very important to emphasise the greater diversity we need to see in the representation of people with disabilities, who are too often forgotten in this very important debate. We must make real progress on that.
We have reached a tipping-point, and the backlash has begun. We now see extraordinary newspaper headlines suggesting, for example, that the BBC is anti-white because it wants to promote diversity. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Even if there was not a moral case for diversity and equality, there should be an economic case for every broadcaster. As the right hon. Member for Tottenham indicated, broadcasters are losing audiences, catastrophically among the younger generation—those aged between 18 and 24, who are moving online. Those audiences will move to where the content appeals most to them. If they do not see people who look like themselves on the screen, or do not hear stories written and produced by people like themselves, they will turn off in their droves and go online to where that content exists. So there is an economic necessity, and we can make progress.
The right hon. Gentleman praised Channel 4. Considering the tone of so many of the debates we have about broadcasting, there is a great irony in the fact that it was actually Sky that was the pioneer. That great man Stuart Murphy—who has since left Sky, not under a cloud, I hasten to add, but because he wanted to write a novel—simply said, “These are the targets; we’re going to meet them,” and just got on with it. I am pleased to see the progress we have made on diversity but, as many Members have emphasised, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.
I have given my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon notice that I am going to give the competitive content fund a good kicking. I hope the new Minister will stamp his authority on the process of the charter review by ditching the fund. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon knows, I argued strongly against it behind closed doors and now, liberated on to the Back Benches, I can make my opposition to it public. It seemed to me neither fish nor fowl; it is too small to take on the BBC. It is perfectly valid to argue that having one public service gatekeeper is too few and we need two, but if that is the case we should take £500 million from the BBC—although I do not want to give the Minister any ideas—because £20 million is not enough; it is merely an irritant.
The competitive content fund would also in effect create what the critics of the BBC would see as a new bureaucracy producing content that nobody wanted to see. People have mentioned the importance of having diverse content and children’s content, and I want to see the BBC and all our public service broadcasters making that kind of content. I do not want to listen to a BBC executive in two or three years’ time saying that that is the job of the competitive content fund. I want that content to be on our main screens. We must not allow the fund to let broadcasters off the hook. I am a practical man, however, and if the Minister for Digital and Culture is intent on pursuing the competitive content fund I suggest he give it to the British Film Institute, which at least has experience in awarding public money for making brilliant British films and has a strong commitment to diversity.
I also want to comment on the movement of responsibility for the free licence fee for the over-75s to the BBC. The BBC has been raided on a number of occasions, and the arguments for those raids have varied in their strength. The raid by the last Labour Government to pay for the digital television switchover was potentially justified, because it was argued that the BBC should help to meet the cost of an infrastructure change that would benefit it.
Dr Julian Lewis
One of the more worrying raids, or trades, involving the BBC taking on funding in return for having the licence fee involved the decision that it should no longer receive direct Government funding for that prized open-source intelligence asset, BBC Monitoring at Caversham. May I appeal, through my right hon. Friend, to the Secretary of State in her absence that no decision is taken to implement the current recommendation to close Caversham Park and radically reduce the funding for BBC Monitoring until the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committees have taken the opportunity to visit Caversham Park, which we have been invited to do by the Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, my hon. Friend the Member for Reading East (Mr Wilson)? This is a matter of the greatest concern. The reduction in funding was entirely to be anticipated, but it should not have occurred.
Mr Vaizey
I have just been indulgent to my right hon. Friend because quite a few of my constituents work at Caversham and have been in touch with me to express their concerns. I thank him for his very welcome intervention and I echo his call. I hope that the Minister will pass on to his colleagues in the Foreign Office the need to note the sagacious views of my right hon. Friend and his colleagues on the Select Committee on the future of monitoring at Caversham and how it should be funded and analysed.
Returning to the other raids on the BBC, the digital infrastructure raid was perhaps appropriate. We then took the underspend and spent it on broadband. If the Minister is clever enough, as I know he is, not to proceed with the competitive content fund, we could put more of that money into broadband. I know that he has made incredibly rapid progress on the roll-out of broadband since he took up his present ministerial position, and I know that he will want to reach the new target of 100% by the end of next year. I thought I would just throw that in, because everyone said I was so useless at the job—[Hon. Members: “Aah!”] Thank you. This is turning into a pantomime, Madam Deputy Speaker—
Mr Vaizey
I was about to say that I was going to get things back on track.
The second raid was undertaken by the then new Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Mr Hunt), and me when we froze the licence fee in 2010. That moved the cost of the World Service on to the BBC’s books. Again, that was mildly justified in the sense that some operational savings could be made as a result. The Government have now started to fund the World Service separately.
The third raid related to TV licences for the over-75s, which we mitigated by taking some other costs off the BBC. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon, the man who was supposedly going to bury the BBC, actually secured from the Government an inflation-linked increase in the licence fee to counter the effect of that change.
The fundamental point is that they were raids. It is ironic that successive Governments, and indeed the BBC, have resisted a statutory basis for the BBC because that would undermine its independence. Without a statutory underpinning, however, how much money Ministers might take out of the licence fee is effectively down to their whim and how far they are prepared to bully the BBC. Over the past decade or so, too many Ministers, myself included, have seen the licence fee as a pot into which they can occasionally dip.
I do not propose a solution here, but as someone now liberated from collective responsibility I simply wanted to raise the matter and urge not necessarily the Government but the House to think hard over the coming years about how we protect the BBC. As so many Members have said in this debate, the BBC is a great treasure. It should be funded to get on with the job independently and should have light-touch regulation in order to adapt to the rapidly changing technologies that now dominate our lives.
The draft BBC charter gets pretty much everything right. I commend my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon, the former Secretary of State, and apologise for giving one or two of his pet projects a kicking. He did an absolutely superb job overall, particularly given the timetable. I must also praise his officials, mainly because they are glaring at me from the Box, and those who are not here, who also did an outstanding job in securing this draft charter. I commend the Minister for Digital and Culture and the new Secretary of State for the able way in which they have taken the draft charter forward.