TV Licence Fee

Peter Heaton-Jones Excerpts

Monday 20th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Peter Heaton-Jones (North Devon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Moon, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) on leading this debate and the Petitions Committee on organising it.

This debate is on an extraordinarily important issue that we need to discuss, for the very reason that many tens of thousands of our constituents have signed these two petitions, which is as good a reason as any to debate it.

Before I go any further, I must declare an interest, as many colleagues have done in the past. I worked for the BBC for 17 years, so I probably hold the record among colleagues here for longest service with the BBC. That was from 1986 to 1997, and then from 2000 to 2006. There was a gap, and I shall come on to that gap in a minute, because it feeds into what I want to say about one of the alternative methods of funding the BBC as opposed to the licence fee. That was where I worked at the time.

Having said that, it is vital that we discuss what the petitioners say in the two petitions. I will just look at the wording of a couple of the sentences. Petition 170931 says that the BBC licence fee should be abolished, and states:

“It should be included through your provider for free.”

The difficulty with that phrase is that it completely misses the point that someone has to pay for the BBC. What it seems to suggest is that the petitioners believe that their provider—whether Sky, BT or Virgin—should somehow pay the licence fee, even though the petitioners still want to watch BBC services. Those services have to be paid for; I do not think that anyone will find a model that works whereby Sky, BT or Virgin will pay the BBC licence fee.

Petition 200239 says of the licence fee:

“It is unfair that one should hold one to watch Freeview channels.”

However, the Freeview channels include BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, BBC4, CBBC, CBeebies, the BBC News channel and the BBC Parliament channel which, of course, is worth the entire licence fee on its own.

How do people believe that those BBC Freeview channels will be paid for? They still seem to want to watch them but without thinking that we need to fund them. I have scratched my head for some time; I am not the brightest guy in the world, but I cannot see how that would work.

The two petitions are our starting point; I believe that there are two very important issues that we need to consider: first, how the BBC is funded and, secondly, what the BBC spends its money on. The hon. Member for Warrington North quite rightly began to look at alternative models around the world for how public service broadcasters are financed. I have looked into those models. I have worked for one of them; that is where the mystery three-year gap comes in, which I am sure the Chamber is agog to discover more about. In my view, there is not another model of public service broadcast funding around the world that works as well as the BBC licence fee. In Germany, as has been mentioned, there is a broadcasting levy on every household. It is an incredibly blunt instrument and incredibly regressive. In Finland, the model is funded through personal taxation, and the same could be said of it.

However, I want to discuss the Australian model, which is where I worked for those missing three years; I worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in both Sydney and Melbourne. The system under which the ABC is funded in Australia is something that we must avoid at all costs. The funding comes out of direct taxation, then every three years the ABC goes cap in hand to the Government and says, “Can we have some money, please?” To me, that seems to be a one-way route to bias, and to too much political interference and meddling with the output of a public service broadcasting organisation.

I worked for the ABC when we had to do that cap-in-hand exercise. It is not a pretty thing to watch. They say there are two things that people should not know how they are made—laws and sausages. The funding of the ABC is the third thing; nobody wants to be involved with that. We talk about political interference, which brings me to the issue of bias, because petition 200239 specifically mentions the question of bias. In fact, it says that there should be alternative methods of funding the BBC

“particularly as it is commonly felt there is a high level of bias.”

I start to twitch rather nervously at the conflation of those two concepts—how the BBC is funded and the issue of whether or not it is biased. I do so for this reason: the BBC should not be biased, however it is funded. We should not question a method of funding just because we believe that the BBC might or might not be biased. The BBC, as a public service broadcaster, should not be biased.

Let me give hon. Members, looking at the clock, “The Six Minutes Past Six News”. The headline is, “Having worked as a journalist at the BBC for 17 years, I know that the BBC is not biased.” It is not institutionally biased and it does not deliberately set out to give one editorial line over another. I know that for two reasons. First, in all the years I worked at the BBC—first, as a junior journalist—not once did a senior editorial manager put any pressure on me to take a particular line in a news story, to include a particular guest on an interview programme or to write a news story in a particular way. Not once did any of those things happen. Secondly, years later I had moved up the greasy pole, and I am living proof of the BBC axiom that someone always gets promoted to just beyond the level of their ability. When I was at that level, not once did I dream of saying to any of the reporters working for me, “I want you to cover this story in a particular way”.

There is no bias institutionally in the BBC. I have sympathy for the view that has been expressed here that there is perhaps a cultural problem with the slightly narrow pool from which the BBC recruits its talent and its journalists. The BBC absolutely needs to be more diverse, and to look far more closely at where it recruits its journalists, reporters and editors, as they are from a slightly elite group. It is getting better, but it is not good enough.

There is another reason—I say this only slightly tongue in cheek—why I am sure that the BBC is not institutionally biased and does not deliberately set out to give a party line. That would suggest the BBC is capable of a level of organisation that, in my experience, it is not. I can tell Members from personal experience that it is nigh-on impossible to get one programme in the news department to talk to another, even on the simplest of issues, let alone, as a large corporation that puts out hundreds of hours of news broadcasting daily, be capable of organising itself to put out a particular editorial line. Oh no, it is not; of course not.

I have a story for you, Mrs Moon. When I was in charge of a programme at Radio 5 Live, I needed a particular piece of music to illustrate a news story. I was told by the BBC’s internal systems that it would take three days and cost my programme budget £15 to borrow that CD from the BBC’s gramophone library. I sent a reporter to the HMV store on Oxford Street and we bought the CD for £9.99. That is not an organisation that is able to arrange institutional bias. It does not do that. When people, like the petitioners, accuse the BBC of bias, what they have seen is a politician they agree with being given a hard time or a politician they disagree with merely being given the right to reply. That is not bias. There is another word for it: journalism. That is what the BBC does extraordinarily well. It does journalism, and we need to protect it, because that costs money. As has been said by other right hon. and hon. Members, the BBC gets an awful lot of that money—£3.78 billion this year—from the licence fee. If we add to that this year’s commercial revenue of about £1.16 billion—do the maths—that is nearly—

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

Nearly £5 billion.

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

I thank the hon. Gentleman—he did do the maths. That is a lot of money, and the BBC needs to be held to account for it. I do not, for one minute, stand here and say that everything about the BBC is perfect. We absolutely need more transparency and more accountability, and the hon. Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell) made that point extraordinarily well. It frustrates me that the BBC seems to show an extraordinarily defensive attitude whenever complaints are made about it. Whenever a member of the public or, indeed, a Member of this House, raises a perfectly reasonable concern about something the BBC has done—how it has covered a story or how it has spent public money, for example—its first thought is defence: “Fold the arms and try to pretend it didn’t happen”.

[Julian Knight]

Does my hon. Friend think that the BBC sometimes co-opts its talent in its defence, so to speak? Is that really the right way to go about things, rather than with the openness and transparency he rightly talks about?

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

There is sometimes a tendency, I think, for BBC managers not to be front and centre or, when they are, if they appear on a programme like “Feedback” or “Points of View”, the defensive attitude is the one that comes to the fore. What we need sometimes, just sometimes, is for the BBC to say, “We got this wrong. We didn’t do it right and we’re gonna do it differently next time”. I do not see enough of that.

When I worked for the BBC as an editor, and then again as a programme presenter, my manager would come to me once a week with a spreadsheet of the complaints I had received. He used to say, “As long as I’m getting about equal numbers of complaints, Peter, from either side in politics, you’re probably getting it about right.” That is probably as good a yardstick as any. The BBC does get stick from all sides.

The BBC is an organisation that gets a lot of our money and we need more analysis of how it chooses to spend it. There is one particular area of the BBC that I know best, and that is radio, particularly local radio, as that is where I worked. After all, I have the perfect face for radio. As has been mentioned, regional telly and local radio—in my area, BBC Radio Devon and “Spotlight”—do a fantastic job of covering news, which no other broadcaster would be able to do without that public service funding input. That is why I welcome the recent announcements by the BBC director-general at the Gillard awards, which celebrate local radio broadcasting. The first of the two main decisions he announced was that the £10 million of funding cuts he had asked the BBC to find from local radio will not now have to happen. He has found that funding from other sources, and I welcome that. Secondly, the national shared evening programme that local radio has had to have for three years now will be scrapped and local services restored. That is an example of the BBC listening, doing the right thing and saying, “We understand we have all this money and that we’ve got to spend it in a way that benefits the majority of licence fee payers”.

The alternatives do not stack up. Subscription or advertising would be extraordinarily retrograde steps. If we allow the BBC to take advertising, not only do we immediately raise questions about impartiality and neutrality but, frankly, come midnight most nights we will have a live roulette wheel, which is exactly what we have on ITV most nights.

On subscription services, I have been undertaking a text conversation with a constituent of mine in North Devon ever since I said I would be taking part in this debate. He said, “Netflix costs me half as much as the BBC and has five times the content”. Here is what Netflix does not have: radio, regional broadcasting, news and current affairs, and huge educational programmes. It does not put computers into schools or cover live sport. It does not have the huge community events that bring the country together, like Children in Need, which raised £50 million last Friday. That is what Netflix does not give us.

[Damian Collins]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. On advertising revenue, does he agree that, as brands have a finite amount of money to spend, if the BBC were fully commercial and accepted advertising it would be the biggest commercial hammer blow to independent television and radio in this country?

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

That is another perfectly good reason why we should not move to, or even consider, an advertising model for the funding of the BBC.

I will conclude with the animated conversation I was having with my constituent. Two programmes in particular have been mentioned in the debate—“The Blue Planet” and “Peaky Blinders”—and my constituent said he could watch them both on Netflix. Yes, but someone has to make them in the first place and, in my opinion, the only way they will ever be made is through a public service broadcaster being funded in the way the BBC is.

We are in a position where there is quite rightly debate about the funding of the BBC. It is right that we are having that discussion but, I believe, having worked for the organisation for 17 years and having looked closely at some of the alternatives, that the licence fee is the least worst option. That phrase was used earlier and it is absolutely right. If we try to move beyond that, we find ourselves opening up a hornet’s nest that could lead, as my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe said, to advertising or subscription, to a model that will not be the one we want the BBC to be.

I will say a couple of things in conclusion. I pay tribute to the Government and to the arrangement they have reached with the BBC for its charter renewal settlement. It is absolutely right that the BBC has been given a guarantee of income, and that it will rise with inflation. That is good and positive. The Government need to look further, as I know they are doing, at ways in which those who find it hard to pay the licence fee are able to do so, and I look forward to their working with the BBC on that. I have a great deal of sympathy with the concern that has been raised about some of the tactics used by those who collect the licence fee, about some of the letters that are far too threatening in the first instance. If someone does not have a television, that is their right, and they should not get threatening letters through the post because of it.

The licence fee and the BBC are, however, intrinsically linked and there is no viable funding alternative for our public service broadcaster. The BBC is a brilliant organisation but it has to be paid for and the licence fee is, in my estimation, the best way to do that. The BBC is known colloquially as Auntie. We have to hug Auntie close. She may be slightly eccentric but she needs to be fed. If we do not feed her, we will soon regret it, and we will miss her when she has gone.