BBC: Finance and Independence

Lord Wigley Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, for this debate. The BBC is credited with inventing the term “national region” within a UK context. With the financial cuts facing the BBC, it is that aspect on which I want to concentrate in these few minutes.

If the BBC is regarded in London as a UK national institution, it is also regarded in Wales as a Welsh national institution. Over the past 70 years, it has done an immense amount to help Wales to better understand itself and to interpret our national and diverse local life for the people of Wales, in both languages, and indeed to a wider world. At this time, when the relationships between the nations of these islands are in the melting pot, we need that facility in Wales. This is the worst possible moment to erode the BBC’s capacity. The key theme of devolution over the past five years has been the need to hold the devolved Governments to account by insisting that they raise their own taxes and are accountable for what they spend. For this to work, there has to be adequate scrutiny of government; and for this to reach the voting public in Wales—where we have only a limited press media, where the capacity of ITV has shrunk and where Sky has totally failed to engage—the central responsibility falls on to the BBC, which is having to shoulder a disproportionate share of this work.

The take-up of the BBC in Wales is proportionately higher than anywhere else in the UK: the average daily use is over six and a half hours per household. However, only half the adults of Wales are reached by BBC Wales’s news services. The other BBC news services, originating outside Wales, do not even start to address the question of scrutiny of Wales’s Government. For half the people of Wales, the performance of the Welsh Government in vital matters such as health and education is literally beyond scrutiny. The democratic deficit that existed in Wales before devolution has now turned into a transparency deficit, which is rapidly becoming an accountability deficit.

Securing an urgent solution does not lie only, or even primarily, in the hands of BBC Wales, but it must involve fundamental rethinking by the BBC on a UK level. The BBC centrally must come to realise that much of its news coverage on flagship programmes such as the BBC television “News at Six”, Radio 4’s “World at One” and Radio 1 and 2’s news bulletins are totally irrelevant to Wales and Scotland. In key domestic matters such as health and education, even worse, they can be positively misleading, with viewers and listeners in Wales and Scotland thinking that the policy analysis presented applies to them when it does not. In the context of these cuts, what do we have to do to safeguard the current performance—or indeed to secure new, augmented performance—as far as Wales is concerned?

First, we need news programmes that reflect reality in and for Wales. That may mean creating a new 6 pm TV news programme for Wales, bringing a better balance between Welsh, UK and world news; likewise, possibly news opt-outs for Wales on Radio 1 and Radio 2. Secondly, BBC Wales must be funded adequately to provide a much wider range of English-language television programmes emanating from Wales. Thirdly, if the UK is to survive, the people of England need to acquire a better understanding of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the BBC must play a leading role in that. The BBC, more than any other organisation, has a key responsibility in helping to mould a new Britain. To cut its resources at such a critical time may be seen by future generations as one of the most stupid acts by government in the modern era.