BBC: Funding

Olly Glover Excerpts

Wednesday 18th December 2024 Westminster Hall

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I commend the right hon. Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale) for securing this important debate. It was good to hear his support for public service broadcasting and his recognition that the licence fee is there not just for live television, but for many of the services that hon. Members have mentioned.

I will start by saying why I feel strongly that we need the BBC, and why it delivers such great value. It still does so many things that the proliferation of streaming platforms do not. From the perspective of UK cultural and economic benefit, the BBC provides a critical role in education, not just through children’s programming, but through ever-informative and breathtaking nature documentaries from David Attenborough and others. Even in this age of streaming, “Line of Duty” managed to secure 13 million viewers a night; many of us were gripped and looked forward to the next episode. The BBC has brought fantastic foreign-language content to BBC 4, including the iconic “The Killing”, which astonished people by hitting 1 million viewers a week as a subtitled programme. Those of us who were alive, albeit somewhat younger, in the 1990s could always look forward to the thrill of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” at 6 pm every Wednesday. For all those reasons, a KPMG report estimates that for every £1 of economic activity generated by the BBC, £2.63 of wider economic value is created.

The BBC is so much more than entertainment. Fact-based and impartial reporting, analysis and investigations are essential, particularly in this age of social media misinformation when we are all trapped in our thought bubbles. We need the forensic interviews on Radio 4’s “Today” programme, we desperately need the local political reporting and scrutiny of services such as BBC Oxford and BBC South, and we need the investigative journalism, domestic and international, that can be found across Radio 4. As the hon. Member for Leeds North East (Fabian Hamilton) said, the BBC World Service plays a key role in maintaining access to free and accurate sources of information in many repressive countries around the world or in countries facing humanitarian challenges, such as Syria, which he mentioned.

Of course, we should recognise that the BBC is not perfect. The salaries of top presenters can be very high indeed, and scandals and crises have not always been prevented or well managed. But what other organisation would create and broadcast a documentary that looks critically at its own failings and weaknesses, as “Days That Shook the BBC” with David Dimbleby did?

Value for money from current funding and potential future reforms are important, but 95% of adults still use the BBC at least once a month. The alternative funding models that have been explored to date would not necessarily create a fairer system without disadvantages, so it is important for the Government to be very clear about our desired outcomes from the BBC and public service broadcasting, and then to work out from that how we fund them. We should consider ways to spread the TV licence cost more equitably, taking people on low incomes into account.

We need the quality, independence and breadth of the BBC now more than ever. It is too important to risk losing through sub-optimal or over-complex funding routes. I am pleased to see that the Government are looking hard at how to sustain the BBC’s future.