TV Licence Fee

Matt Hancock Excerpts

Monday 20th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Helen Jones]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. There is much more to do, and I will come to that in a moment.

Media City has been a huge success and has boosted other creative industries in the region, although it took some time to convince certain people that there are nice places to live that are not in London and that northerners do not keep coal in the bath and ferrets up their trousers.

[The Minister for Digital (Matt Hancock)]

Speak for yourself.

[Helen Jones]

The BBC’s natural history unit, which produces excellent documentaries, is based in Bristol. There has been investment in Birmingham and Belfast. As the hon. Member for Solihull (Julian Knight) said, there is a lot more to do. The BBC needs to do much more to reflect the diversity in this country.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Digital (Matt Hancock)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon. This has been a generally cheerful and thoughtful debate. I would first like to thank the tens of thousands of people who engaged with the petition process and ensured we are debating this issue today. Whether hon. Members agree with them or not, we would not be having this debate if it was not for people signing the petitions. E-petitions are a relatively new innovation in this House—they are less than a decade old—and the fact that we are having this debate and airing these issues demonstrates that the process is working and that our democratic institutions are responding to the citizens we serve.

The hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) is the embodiment of that principle. I thank her for her introduction. I was interested in how she would speak to the two petitions. She was clear that she did not agree with their thrust, but she faithfully set out the arguments and opened up the debate. If people a sign a petition, it is very important that their views are expressed, even though it is right that Members express their own views. The hon. Lady made an excellent speech. The Churchill quotation that she referred to—she said that the BBC is the worst system except all the others that have been tried from time to time—came up many times during the debate.

Most Members generously supported the BBC’s funding model. Others did so more grudgingly, but did not actually support the petitions. Some said that the BBC is full of lefties. That may well be true now, but it was not always so. The truth is that we fished out the best talent in the BBC, and they are now Conservative Members of Parliament. It is good to see so many of them here today. Perhaps there are only lefties left in the BBC.

Hon. Members raised the issue of diversity, about which every institution faces questions. The recent revelations, thanks to the transparency measures we introduced, demonstrated some of the concrete changes the BBC needs to make with respect to diversity and equal pay, but that is true for many institutions, including Parliament. It is a fact that, in this debate, there are as many white men from Chester as women.

[Helen Jones]

And white women.

[Matt Hancock]

My goodness! There are more people from Chester than women in this debate. What is it about the wonderful, great city of Chester that leads to so many people with an interest in one of our greatest national institutions? Chester, the city of my birth, is a great place. I was shocked to hear the hon. Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) describe himself as a leftie—he has never given any indication of that before. In this debate, like many others, he is probably closer to the Government position than to that of the leadership of his own party.

I am amazed at how much spare time the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) has to watch things on the BBC, to write texts about chaperoning Mrs Balls around the Labour party conference, to watch 1970s music programming and even to appear on Dave. I am delighted that he has spared a bit of time to turn up.

I am grateful that the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara) declared unambiguously the Scottish National party’s support for the BBC, but he made some unreasonable attacks because he was unhappy about what he perceived to be the BBC’s balance, which is a pity. He might be unhappy with the outcome of the referendum, but I think that the reporting surrounding the referendum truly demonstrated the impartiality to which the BBC is committed. When it comes to the BBC’s representation and its expenditure on programming around the UK, the clue is in the name: the BBC is the British Broadcasting Corporation, and it has a duty to spend money in—and, indeed, to reflect—all parts of the UK. Whether it is the west midlands or each part of Scotland separately, it does that. That is true for Wales, Northern Ireland, the west midlands and cities within Scotland—it is not just about Scotland as a whole. It is the British Broadcasting Corporation, and it rightly serves the UK as a whole.

[Brendan O'Hara]

For the record, will the Minister confirm that he thinks it is acceptable that Wales gets 95% of spend, Northern Ireland gets 75%, and in 2015-16 Scotland got 55%? Is that acceptable?

[Matt Hancock]

I was just coming on to that. As the BBC’s new regulator, Ofcom will require the BBC to allocate its TV network spend and programme hours based on population, and in Scotland that will mean at least 8% a year. Because the Government represent and govern the whole UK, we are dealing with that point, but the way to do so is to help the BBC ensure that it reflects the whole nation, rather than make unreasonable and mean-spirited attacks on it.

Let me move on to some of the other speeches. My hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Mims Davies) expressed her strong support for the BBC, and in particular for the increased transparency and accountability that we have brought to it. I have enormous respect for her—I consider her a friend—but I want to pick up one little thing. She said that people do not have a choice not to pay the licence fee, but as we discovered from the hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown), they do have the choice if they do not watch TV or use the iPlayer. It is not a choice that many people exercise, partly because of how brilliant BBC content is, but they do have it.

Many hon. Members called for more flexibility. As part of the BBC charter renewal, we are introducing a contestable fund, which will ensure more flexibility on how licence fee money is spent on different programming. We will introduce details of the contestable fund shortly.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) made an excellent speech, and he made a point that I want to pick up. He said that content should be neutral. I think that the language we use is incredibly important. I do not think that the BBC should be neutral; I think it should be impartial. There is an important difference between the two. It should not simply take a neutral position between two stated arguments and split the difference. It should carry out an active, muscularly objective, fact-based analysis of the arguments, then put forward an impartial point. That is actually much harder. It requires more judgment and probably more self-confidence. The BBC should be aiming for true impartiality, based on objective analysis of the facts before it. For instance, my hon. Friend mentioned the slip about universal credit this week. I think that, culturally, the BBC should be appalled when a slip or a factual error is made. It happens, although it is rare. We all make mistakes. The BBC’s attitude should not be defensive; rather, it should be open and responsive to criticism.

My hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh and the hon. Member for City of Chester talked about “Blue Planet II” and the value that the BBC can put into productions, but there is a bigger point. Of course, the BBC has great production capacity and can set long-term budgets. The poor, poor producers of “Blue Planet II” had to go to the south Pacific twice in two years— we all feel their pain—because they missed those extraordinary scenes of the fish shooting up while they were spawning, which we enjoyed. But that is changing, and the context is changing—the length of the BBC funding settlement is not changing, which is a good thing, but the context is.

The nature of the internet means that people now reach global audiences quickly, with Netflix the best embodiment of that, so the BBC is increasingly competing against production budgets in the private sector that are predicated on a global audience. Hence Netflix can pay an enormous amount for a production, whereas the BBC relies on licence fee income plus commercial income, largely from Worldwide which is the commercial exploitation of BBC content. I agree, however, that the BBC has an opportunity to broaden where it gets such revenues from, and I was interested that the director-general talked recently about how to make the most of the amazing back catalogue and see whether the BBC could monetise it further in order to put more into production. That was discussed by several Members, and it was interesting.

The hon. Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell), with whom I have debated this subject in the past, pushed hard for more transparencies, some of which we are bringing in, especially on pay. He also wants greater transparency in commissioning, and we have been through some of the detail of his concerns. As I have said in the past, the BBC must engage with those concerns and ensure that it listens to them, responding appropriately. Also, I always stand by to assist him in getting the responses he needs.

I come now to my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Peter Heaton-Jones), who made a brilliant speech—a forensic dissection of the petitions worthy of a journalist of 17 years who trained at the BBC. It was also a brilliant exposition of the BBC funding model—he went further than the hon. Member for Cardiff West who said that if we did not have it, we might not invent it—and how, if it did not exist, we might want to invent it as it is. He also made the point, however, about the need not only for a broader range of people but, crucially, a broader range of people reflecting the whole of Britain.

The BBC has a special responsibility for diversity in its broadest sense, not only in the important protected characteristics such as gender, race, sexual orientation and disability. Those are important, but so is ensuring that BBC, in front of and behind the camera, represents and reflects back to us the nation that we live in. There is no doubt that the BBC is the finest mirror we have on our society. It is incumbent on the BBC, from the programme makers through to those who are on screen, to lead rather than to follow, and to ensure that they represent and reflect the whole of the country they serve.

I will touch on a couple of other points. It is clear to me that this debate has broadly reflected the views of the country. Recently we had a charter review, one of the biggest consultations undertaken by Government. We received 192,000 responses and engaged with more than 300 organisations and experts. The process was overseen by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) who is no wet blanket and by no means an instinctive cheerleader for the BBC, yet we have come up with a solution that has a broad consensus of support behind it.

[Alan Brown]

The Minister is moving on from the contributions made by hon. Members, but may I remind him that part of my speech touched on the threatening nature of the letters from, and the harassment and intimidation by, TV Licensing? I was hoping that he might respond to that at some point.

[Matt Hancock]

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman for reminding me of that, because I had buried the relevant piece of paper underneath an extremely elegant and new description of who is sitting where in the Chamber. The Perry review found that the existing regime is broadly fair and proportionate. However, when it comes to ensuring that those letters are worded appropriately and to their tone, we expect the BBC board to keep that under review, and I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will help. Members across the House have spoken about the tone of the letters, and in no circumstances is it reasonable for people to be presumed guilty until they are proven innocent. The opposite is rightly true in the system we have in this country.

I was talking about the scale of the consultation. The existing model has wide public support: 60% of consultation responses indicated that no change was needed to the licence fee model and only 3% favoured full subscription funding. That has been reflected in today’s debate. We are committed to maintaining that model for the duration of the 11-year charter period, which will provide the BBC with the funding certainty that it needs.

There is also a commitment to considering whether elements of subscription have a role to play in future funding alongside the core licence fee model. It is for the BBC to set the scope of those plans, but we expect progress. The success will be appropriately reviewed to feed into the next charter review process. As my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Julian Knight) pointed out, there are ways to add subscription funding on to the core licence fee—BBC Worldwide does that already—and the BBC’s existing content is a huge potential source of wealth.

In wrapping up, let me say that if we assess the value for money of the BBC, for approximately 40p a day we are offered an unrivalled range of services, including seven national TV services, more than 50 radio services and digital services including the iPlayer, as well as some of the further efforts that the BBC makes on education. That represents great value for licence fee payers. The introduction of the contestable fund; the need to consider the future of children’s content, which was raised by the hon. Member for Cardiff West; the need to ensure that local areas of the country are fairly represented; the support for local news; and, in this era of an increasingly disrupted and diverse range of news sources, the need for objective, factual news domestically and around the world, mean that the case for the BBC as funded by the licence fee is incredibly strong.

Ultimately, our democratic discourse and our freedom as a nation are underpinned by having a debate based on an agreed set of facts that can be objectively verified. In this disruptive digital world, the BBC plays a vital role in helping to improve the quality of that public discussion and in enhancing the quality of public understanding. Although I would push it harder on diversity of thought and distinctiveness of programming, the value that the BBC adds to our public debate and of course to our enjoyment, whether on a Saturday night or at any other time, is second to none.

Before I end, let me add that the support for S4C, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore), is incredibly important. With that, I bring this lively debate to an end. I submit that we have faithfully debated the petitions and I look forward to continuing this debate in the months and years ahead.