Broadcasting

Maria Eagle Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Karen Bradley]

No, I will make some progress.

A majority—nine out of 14—of the members of the new unitary board will be appointed by the BBC. That contrasts with past appointments by Governments of every member of the BBC governing board. The new director-general will be editor-in-chief and have final responsibility for individual decisions on the BBC’s editorial matters and creative output.

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

Does the Secretary of State not understand the difference between appointments to a unitary board that has overall editorial control over the BBC and appointments to a system of trustees or governors who do not have such editorial control?

[Karen Bradley]

I understand that point, but I think this structure will give the BBC more independence. The fact that the majority of directors will be appointed by the BBC makes it clear that the Government want the BBC to be independent, to be strong and to succeed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Karen Bradley]

I know my hon. Friend has campaigned strongly on this issue, and I understand the point he makes.

I will go through some further points about the new charter. The BBC will be regulated more effectively under it. The charter and agreement set out Ofcom’s new role as the BBC’s independent regulator. Ofcom will monitor and review how well the BBC meets its mission and public purposes, regulate editorial standards, hold the BBC to account on market impacts and public value, and consider relevant complaints from viewers, listeners and other stakeholders where complainants are not satisfied with resolution by the BBC.

[Maria Eagle]

Given the high number of extra roles and duties that Ofcom is taking on, will the Secretary of State undertake to the House today to ensure it is properly remunerated and given enough resource to do the extra job it will now have to do?

[Karen Bradley]

Ofcom has been asked about that point, and it has set out that it has the capabilities and the competence to do this work. The charter is the result of extensive negotiations between the BBC, Ofcom and others, and I am confident that Ofcom has the resources to be able to fulfil its obligations.

It is fundamentally important that the BBC should be impartial. Colleagues have been keen to impress that point on me in the run-up to and following the EU referendum. Although it is not for the Government to arbitrate on such matters, I will make sure that Ofcom never forgets what a vital duty it has in this regard. These are big new responsibilities for Ofcom, and it is rightly going to consult with the industry on its new operating framework for the BBC next year.

It will also be Ofcom’s job to set regulatory requirements for the BBC to be distinctive. Schedule 2 to the agreement makes it clear that the BBC’s output and services as a whole need to be distinctive, so concerns that this is a way for the Government to interfere with specific programmes are totally unfounded. The provisions in the charter that place new duties on the BBC to consider its impact on the market are not about reducing the BBC’s role per se.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Whittingdale]

She was originally appointed following a very open and widespread competition when she became chairman of the BBC Trust. Obviously that post was advertised, there were a number of candidates, and the process was subject to the full public appointments procedure. The fact that the then Prime Minister and I told the House that it was felt that she could serve during the transition following a transfer to the new position is a matter of public record. However, as I said earlier, I think that the later decision that it would be better to put the post out to open competition was the correct one.

[Maria Eagle]

The BBC may or may not have made a mistake in the way in which it appointed a particular individual—James Purnell, about whom the right hon. Gentleman has been talking—but it made that decision as an independent organisation. Is not the difficulty that we face, and the issue of political interference, caused by the fact that we in this place seek to control? When the right hon. Gentleman was Secretary of State, it was argued that the appointment of a majority of board members by the Government of the day was a matter of concern, because it was felt that there would be a route for political interference from this place and from the Government, rather than the BBC’s making its own mistakes—or not; as it may or may not do.

[Mr Whittingdale]

That was obviously a separate debate. I understand the concern expressed by the hon. Lady, but I do not agree with her. Even under the original suggestion, the BBC would have had a majority when the non-executive and executive board members were taken together. Moreover, as I sought to point out, the non-executive members will have been through the public appointments process. They will have had to demonstrate their competence and qualifications for the role, which most people regard as a pretty good safeguard. Of course, the BBC Trust, which the board replaces, was wholly appointed by the Government, so this is quite a big shift.

--- Later in debate ---

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

May I begin by saying to colleagues around the Chamber that, since I stood down from the Front Bench in June, I have agreed to take on the secretaryship of the all-party parliamentary group on the BBC?

I welcome the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and the Minister for Digital and Culture to their places. Both of them are new to the job but not to government. I also commend my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson) for his debut at the Dispatch Box in this role, and I wish him well.

Although the new Ministers have come late to the process of BBC charter renewal, it is now for them to finish off all the work that has been done so far. I am glad to see that some of the more lurid fantasies of the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), whom I am really pleased to see in his place, will be well and truly finished off by the time the new charter becomes operational.

I am sure that the Secretary of State and the Minister have realised already the incredibly high esteem in which the BBC is held by our constituents, who pay for and consume its services, and the concomitant interest and campaigning about the process of charter renewal. There is a wish around the country, the nations and the regions that the Government get this charter right.

Let me give the Government some credit—not something I often do. The end result looks like it will be better than many of us had feared. Let me also be clear that one or two concerns remain, and I will come on to mention them in my remarks.

When we consider the future of the BBC, we should always keep in mind both its great history at the centre of our national life—Members do that when they make contributions to this debate—and the fact that it is one of our most loved institutions. It is behind only the monarch, our armed forces and the national health service in the esteem in which it is held, so loved and valued it most certainly is.

The consultation on the Green Paper as part of the charter renewal process review simply reiterated the extent to which that is so. Those of us who knock on the doors of our constituents and try to get them to approve of what we do in our jobs can only look on in awe at an 81% approval rating—81% of the public believe that the BBC does a good job. We would all wish for such a high level of approval from those for whom we seek to work. That high approval rate is combined with the fact that a very high number of people in this country—some 97%—consume BBC services for an average of 18 hours a week. That is an impressive set of figures, which we should all bear in mind when we consider the future of the BBC.

The public have taken part in the charter review period, in so far as they have been able, by way of the consultation on the Green Paper. As the Secretary of State mentioned in her own remarks, some 192,000 people have replied. Three quarters of them believed that the BBC should remain independent, and two thirds that the BBC has a positive wider impact on the market and that BBC expansion is justified. The BBC is also a lynchpin of our creative industries, and our broader creative industries, in the whole of the UK. It allows us to punch well above our weight as a nation in exporting creative output to the rest of the world, as well as being a key component in the soft power on which even our new Foreign Secretary has commented as he starts to get to grips with his new role. Both of those things are even more important after the referendum on 23 June than they were before when the former Secretary of State and I were both still in our places on the Front Bench. We all should be able to agree—I am sure we will—on how lucky we are as a nation to have the BBC. We should use the charter renewal process to make it fit for the future and enable it to continue doing the job that it is doing.

[Andrew Bridgen]

rose—

[Maria Eagle]

Of course I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, who has just come back to his place.

[Andrew Bridgen]

The hon. Lady talks about how popular the BBC is, and she is completely right, but when 75% of UK adults rely on the BBC for a large amount of their news does she agree that it is very, very important that the BBC is, and is seen to be, impartial?

[Maria Eagle]

I do agree with that, but it is also important that the BBC is the judge of impartiality and is held to account for it. We should not be able to override it from this Chamber, because we—on both sides of the House—are not impartial.

A good charter must guarantee that the BBC’s editorial independence is beyond doubt. It must guarantee that the BBC’s financial independence will continue and it has to help it to fulfil its mission to educate, inform and entertain. That is the yardstick by which we should judge this charter.

The 11-year length of the charter is a good thing because that provides stability and takes the next review out of the political cycle into which Parliament’s passage of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 had suddenly pitched it. I am, however, still a little concerned that the mid-term review—it will presumably take place after five and a half years—or health check, as Ministers have imaginatively dubbed it, might be deeply destabilising if there is a will in government to exploit that process.

We have been reassured that this will not be a mini-charter review, as is feared. The Minister in the other place, Lord Ashton of Hyde, said that it would consider only governance and regulation, not the scope and scale of the BBC. However, halfway through the charter, a change in governance and regulation from the current proposals could leave things looking very different from how they do at present. When the Minister replies to the debate, will he give us some reassurance about the kind of change that he envisages this mid-charter review—or health check or mid-term review—might seek to make?

The Minister in the other place said that Ofcom will

“have to stand the test of time and prove itself”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 October 2016; Vol. 774, c. 1995.]

Might this mini-charter review lead to Ofcom being stripped of its regulatory function, if it does not stand up to some test that that Minister seemed to be setting for it? Precisely what kind of review does the Minister for Digital and Culture envisage? When he responds about Ofcom, can he give us the assurance that the Secretary of State did not quite give me in my intervention on her about the resources that Ofcom will be given to carry out its considerably extended role? The right hon. Lady did not say that Ofcom would be given new resources or the resources of the existing trust. We need to know what resources Ofcom will have to do the important and completely new job that it is given under the charter.

[Andrew Bridgen]

The hon. Lady is extremely generous in giving way; I thank her for indulging me. We will have a new regulatory regime for the BBC. Ofcom will replace the BBC Trust, in which there was no trust. We talk about a health check. If I went to the doctor for a health check and he found that I had some horrible disease, I would expect him to take action. I would expect the Government to take action if, at the health check, the new regulatory regime was found not to be working.

[Maria Eagle]

The hon. Gentleman employs an extended metaphor. I do not quite understand how that would apply in respect of the mid-term review. I do not know why the mid-term review was not simply dropped. It seems to me that Ministers have been casting about to try to find some purpose for it because they did not want to accept that the mid-term review or the break clause had started out as something different from how it ended up. I am not sure what the role of the review is, so when the Minister winds up the debate, I hope that he will be able to give us a little more reassurance.

It was said in the other place that governance would form part of that mid-term review, so what kind of change to governance, if any, is it likely to make? To what extent might there be some change in the air? If the Government do not like how the arrangements that they set out in the charter are proceeding, will we see a wholesale change at mid-term to the governance of the BBC? What steps will the Government take to ensure that any such changes are as fully scrutinised as the arrangements for the new charter have been? There is not necessarily a parliamentary aspect of the mid-term review or health check.

We had an exchange about governance earlier. I welcome the fact there is to be a competition for the new chair of the BBC Board. I was critical that the chair of the BBC Trust had simply been appointed to what is a rather different role without any competition at all and at the behest, it seems, of the previous Prime Minister—though not, I suspect, at the behest of the former Secretary of State. I emphasise that I am not and was not commenting on the ability or otherwise of Rona Fairhead to do the job, but simply on the principle of the matter. In any event, she has decided not to put herself forward, so the BBC will have a new chair. Opposition Members are mindful of what the outgoing Commissioner for Public Appointments, Sir David Normington, said about the Government’s increasing propensity to appoint Tory supporters to important public roles, so we will be watching this particularly sensitive appointment with extremely close interest.

I welcome the fact that the Government have abandoned the previous Secretary of State’s attempt to enable the Government to appoint a majority of the unitary board, which I do not believe was a sensible proposal. The retreat that the Government have agreed to, following discussions with the BBC, is a good one, because they could have led themselves into criticisms that they would rather not have. I think that the development is entirely positive.

I want to say a little about the thorny topic of distinctiveness. What on earth does “distinctiveness” now mean in the context of the charter? We know what the right hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) thought it meant. Indeed, today he reiterated in part his view of what it means—we got the distinct impression that anything popular, commercial or with good ratings would not be distinctive enough. He thought that the BBC should be prevented from engaging in any kind of competition with its commercial rivals in this respect, but what does that mean in the context of the new charter?

I think that the definition in the White Paper is fiendish, because “substantially different” can mean whatever anybody wants it to mean. We are assured by Ministers that it will not be applied to individual programming. To be fair to the right hon. Gentleman, I never heard him say that he meant it to apply to individual programming, except in some lurid newspaper stories that seemed to be coming from his Department at the time. The Government have simply left it to Ofcom, which is not used to doing this kind of thing, to work this all out later. In my view, there is still a significant prospect of this being used mendaciously, either by politicians—perish the thought—or by the BBC’s commercial rivals, who might simply want to stop the BBC competing with them by making complaints about distinctiveness.

[Sammy Wilson]

The hon. Lady makes an important point about the meaning of “distinctiveness”, but does she not agree that there is also an important point about the BBC, with the vast amount of money it acquires from the licence fee payer, having an unfair advantage over other commercial operators? There has to be a way of ensuring that that advantage is not abused to prevent commercial operators competing for good programmes.

[Maria Eagle]

The BBC ought to be held to account for how it spends its money, whether or not it meets its objectives and its requirements under the charter. I think that that is absolutely fair. We should not get into arguments about whether particular programmes are sufficiently distinctive or different. The definition is a lawyer’s dream, and there are concerns about what it will end up meaning in practice.

We have heard tell of the £60 million contestable pot of licence fee payers’ money. The survival of that pot is a retrograde step, no matter what use it is to be put to. I note that there is supposed to be some kind of pilot and that commissioning children’s programmes is to be involved in whatever is done with the money from the underspend. The fact is that the Government are establishing the principle that licence fee payers’ money should be handed over to the BBC’s commercial rivals to make programmes. That is different from the BBC itself deciding that it might want to commission programming from independent producers, which it of course does a lot of as part of the way it does its business. The problem is that if the contestable pot simply takes money away from the BBC and gives it to its rivals to make their own programmes without any of the guarantees that the BBC would have for maintaining ethos and quality, it is no more than a raid on the BBC’s resources. That could be the thin end of what might end up being a very large wedge.

We saw newspaper reports before the White Paper was published about a contestable pot involving a lot more than £60 million. Although the pot is currently small and has been identified as a way of using underspends, the possibility that it will expand over time and that a principle will be established that licence fee payers’ money is not to be used by the BBC to fulfil its mission could be significant. I therefore would like some assurances from the Government that the contestable pot will not be vastly expanded during the period of this charter review. I do not think that it should be proceeded with at all.

I want to say a little about salary transparency. We have heard the argument that publishing the salaries of the so-called talent in the BBC is an issue of transparency. I understand that argument, but I want to put an alternative viewpoint. Far from being about transparency, this is actually a tabloid editor’s dream and a destructive bit of punishment for anybody who wants to work for the BBC rather than a commercial broadcaster. Why is it right to invade the privacy of those who work for the BBC but not those who work for any of its commercial rivals? The Minister in the other place said that this requirement—

[Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Maria Eagle]

No—[Laughter.] I was halfway through a sentence. I might give way to the hon. Gentleman when I have finished it.

The Minister in the other place said that this requirement would not be extended to BBC Studios. BBC Studios will still be using public money—licence fee payers’ money—when it is commissioned to make programmes. Why is it right for parts of the BBC that are in the public bit of the BBC to have to meet this requirement when talent in other places commissioned by the BBC, using licence fee payers’ money, does not? Is this really about transparency, or is it about giving a stick to tabloid editors to have a go at the BBC?

[Karen Bradley]

The point about BBC Studios is that it is a commercial operation that will compete with other commercial operations. When the BBC commissions an independent company to produce content for it, the people employed by the independent company are not paid directly from the licence fee, so their salary is not declared under these arrangements. We want the same arrangements for Studios as for independent companies to enable competition. However, clearly, we also need to know how much of the licence fee is paid to those independent companies that then go on to make programmes such as “Top Gear” that we enjoy on the BBC.

[Maria Eagle]

This could lead to unintended consequences. When I was a trade unionist, the idea of comparability and of trying to get a pay rise because somebody else was doing a similar job was grist to the mill. If the proposal simply leads to costs for the BBC’s front-of-camera talent increasing, that might be an unintended consequence. I do not think this has been thought through.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

The hon. Lady must recognise that there is a big distinction between people who are paid from the public purse and people who operate commercially in the private sector. The salaries of all of us in the House are publicly known, and it is entirely legitimate for the public to see where some of their money is going as far as salaries are concerned.

[Maria Eagle]

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point, but if the ultimate bill is being paid by licence fee payers, why are they not entitled to transparency in respect of salaries just because an independent producer is involved? That is not consistent, and the proposal could have unintended consequences. This seems to be a populist measure, and it does not necessarily do the BBC any favours when it is trying to make sure it gets the talent that is available. It also gives commercial rivals a lot of inside information—published information —to allow them to see what it would take to poach talent. I do not see how that helps the BBC to fulfil its mission. I do not see the point of pursuing this vindictive little measure but, none the less, the Government have said they will implement it, so we will see how it goes.

It is good that we have got to a better place with the charter review than we might have done. From an early stage of the process, the Government seemed to be contemplating shrinking and diminishing the BBC. They denied that, but it was there in the background, and I think that if they could have got away with it, they would have done. However, a huge up-swell of support from our constituents and in both Houses of Parliament has stopped them. There are still pitfalls and problems that might end up being much bigger issues than they now appear to be, however, so we will keep an eye on how things go, especially leading up to the so-called mid-term review or health check. We will be watching to make sure that the Government do not go back to their original aims in the charter review of trying to do down the BBC. On behalf of our constituents who love and value the BBC as a great UK institution, we all hope that this charter does what the Secretary of State now says she wishes it to do, and we will make sure that it does.