Broadcasting (Public Service Content) Bill
Debate between Richard Bacon and Peter Bone
Mr Bone
That is a hugely important issue. According to my personal prejudice, “Test Match Special” must survive for ever, but the BBC cannot be trusted in that regard. Oh, no.
In my desire to be a new Conservative and a modern man, I bought a Saab biofuel car. There was a radio in it, and I tried to tune it. I understand that the new chairman of the BBC has never listened to Radio 1 or Radio 2 except when he has experienced difficulty in tuning his radio to radio 4. Would you believe it—when I tried to tune my radio to Radio 4 to listen to “Test Match Special”, I found that it was not on the dial! The BBC had removed it from medium wave and stuck it on long wave. The BBC cannot be trusted with “Test Match Special”. That is one of the respects in which the Bill would improve the position, and I thank my hon. Friend for raising the matter.
The Bill does not, however, concern only news programmes and sport. It also concerns other rather important matters. Since the introduction of the earlier Bill in June 2009, commercial broadcasters have cut current affairs and religious programmes and children’s entertainment. I think that if such programmes were made available to other broadcasters, we would be able to welcome their return.
I was going to give a very good example of why the BBC should not be allowed to have any money for its current affairs programmes, but I am conscious that time is moving on and I want to deal with the detail of the Bill, so I shall remove that little example. I will not go into it. [Hon. Members: “Go on!”] No, I will not allow myself to be encouraged, other than to say that it related to an occasion on which Mr Brown, the then Prime Minister, went to the European Parliament—I will summarise it very quickly—and Dan Hannan beat him up briefly in a speech. Whatever one may have thought about that occasion, it clearly qualified as public service broadcasting. Unfortunately, the BBC reporter decided to walk out and not to cover it, although he had been notified earlier that it would happen. Two million people tuned in to watch it on YouTube.
Mr Bacon
I mentioned that the event was watched by 3 million people rather than 2 million because I monitored it, and I remember the figure rising from 2.6 million to 2.7 million and eventually to well over 3 million. Does my hon. Friend agree that that speech would rightly rank in an anthology of the greatest speeches of the last 10 years? It is only three or four minutes long, but it is one of the most extraordinary things that I have ever seen.
Mr Bone
Indeed. I have to say that I have not had the privilege of seeing it because I do not know how YouTube works, but on the very day that it was broadcast, my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch, who was taking his children to school, was hauled aside by someone who said “You must come and watch this on YouTube.” It should have been on national television rather than on YouTube. He followed it up with a letter to the director-general, who passed it on to someone else in the organisation to answer, who eventually replied saying, “We’ve looked into this matter and”—this is the crucial point—“the BBC news content is subjective.” How right that is! It is utterly subjective. Therefore, by the BBC’s own admission, it would fall foul of this part of my Bill and so would not necessarily qualify for licence fee funding for its news output. It would then have to start being objective, factual and impartial, and once it achieved that, it would qualify for the funding.
Because of what we Members do for a living, we watch all the news broadcasters to see the different ways they cover the news so we get a broad understanding of what is happening. Quite often Sky, Channel 4 and ITV will have a story at the top of the bulletin that the BBC has chosen to place further down because it is biased against that story. I do not say that with any glee; rather, I say it with some sadness and concern. When a state broadcaster is institutionally biased against the views of Conservative-leaning people—even though it does not understand that—I wonder why the majority in this country, who are Conservative leaning, have to pay a forced poll tax. I remember the poll tax demonstrations.
All that this little, uncontroversial Bill would do is remove all of the funding from the licence fee going to the BBC, thereby reducing the cost of the fee to, let us say, about £50, and allowing the BBC to put on other programmes if it wants—and which it should do—but funding them through product placement, resale or a small subscription. The great benefit of that is that it would bring competition into the industry. I think all Members would agree that the BBC is overmanned and that some of the other stations produce the same quality of news broadcasting for far less. The key benefit for viewers is that after the Bill becomes the fifth private Member’s Bill to be enacted this Session, if they want to watch the BBC, they will find that the cost of the licence fee they are required to pay—which will be the fee for public service content for all broadcasters plus the subscription fee to the BBC—is less than the £150 that they are forced to pay now.
In concluding my opening remarks, I shall address the detail of the Bill. It is a fairly short Bill—there are only three clauses—but it is very important.