S4C

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to speak in this debate on a very important subject. This is a great moment in our history, celebrating, as we do, the 30th anniversary of the world’s only publicly broadcasted Welsh language channel. Of course, we now take the channel’s existence very much for granted. We are not only used to S4C, but used to seeing and hearing the Welsh language, though I certainly do not accept the view of some commentators that the historic struggle for securing the future of the Welsh language is over. None the less, it is fair to say that Welsh is still a living language. It stares at us from road signs, beams down from the large letters beloved of supermarkets, and plays on our television sets, radios and on the internet. It is the language of much, though not all, official documentation.

One thing I am sure of is that none of that happened by magic or by chance. The existence of S4C is a reminder of a diverse history of people—some of them famous, but most of them not—who fought for the Welsh language in times when it was not fashionable to do so. The fact that we are here at all today is testimony to them, and they, above all, deserve our publicly expressed thanks and admiration.

In case we need reminding of the scale of the challenge that they faced, I would like to share with hon. Members the words of Mr E.R. Appleton, who was the senior BBC official and man in charge of broadcasting in Wales in the late 1920s. When questioned about whether the people of Wales might have a modicum of Welsh language in broadcasting, he said that

“the official language is English. When His Majesty’s Government decided to form a corporation for the important function of broadcasting, it was natural that the official language be used throughout. To use the ancient languages regularly—Welsh, Irish, Gaelic and Manx—would be either to serve propaganda purposes or to disregard the needs of the greatest number in the interest of those who use the language for aesthetic and sentimental reasons rather than for practical purposes...If the extremists who desire to force the language upon listeners in the area were to have their way, the official language would lose its grip.”

There we have it—no Welsh-language broadcasting, or it might affect the grip of the English language. That is not quite a reflection of what happened.

In the 1950s, our great Welsh youth movement, the Urdd Gobaith Cymru, implored the youth of Wales, “Cymraeg yw iaith yr aelwyd, siaradwch hi”—“Welsh is the language of home and hearth, speak it.” It spoke of an era when Welsh was commonly spoken by all members of a family. The greatest challenge then was seen as ensuring that the young carried on speaking and using the Welsh language. However, that is no longer true for most families today, including my own, and those of us who come from homes where Welsh was not spoken by all members of the family owe S4C a particular debt of gratitude.

It is a great privilege to have been brought up in a country with a television station such as S4C. It is a privilege to have been a viewer of S4C as a teenager in Wales, and as an adult in both Wales and London. Last September, on my first holiday to that great European city of Barcelona, a Freesat box meant I was able to watch S4C there too. I have no complaints about people in Barcelona, or indeed, England, needing a Freesat to watch S4C. However, I object to the fact that according to a recent admission by Ofcom, 2% of Welsh viewers need to do the same. I have brought that matter up in the House before, and I will do so again. If the technology of transmitters is beyond the collective abilities of Digital UK and Ofcom to sort out, I believe that they, and not Welsh television viewers, who pay their licence fees every year, should foot the bill for the Freesat boxes.

I grew up in Rhosllannerchrugog, which is Wales’s largest village, though I know there are some in south Wales that have a different version of events on that one. I think it could be described fairly as a village with two community languages. My father came from a village five miles away, where Welsh was not a community language. He does not speak Welsh. My mother speaks Welsh as a second language. English was the language of our household, but my community and school were bilingual.

In the household that I grew up in, the regular presence of S4C, sometimes with subtitles on, did much to normalise the use of the Welsh language for me. It brought bilingualism to life in my family and in many other families in my local community. Through it, Welsh became not only the language of chapels and older people, but a contemporary medium with a diverse range of interesting programmes. One of only five television channels on offer at the time in our area, it provided something new and different. It made Welsh relevant, and for people from backgrounds such as mine, it gave us new impetus to use the Welsh language.

Today, S4C faces a different media age. In the internet age, the development of the channel’s online presence is vital, as is its work in commissioning broadcasts produced by media companies across Wales. There is a real challenge in what must be the development of new media companies in our Welsh-speaking heartland communities, offering diverse programming and a genuine cultural renaissance and regeneration in those communities.

Those challenges will not be easy. There were those of us who wanted to take S4C out of the Public Bodies Act 2011. At the time, on that Bill Committee, three parties, dare I say it, were acting “in the national interest”—myself, along with the hon. Members for Arfon (Hywel Williams) and for Ceredigion (Mr Williams). That was voted for by all Opposition parties and a few Liberals who had a bit of the best Welsh Liberal tradition at heart. That was contrary to the UK Government’s policy, and, I believe, to the policies of all parties in the National Assembly for Wales. We did that, not because we wanted to be awkward, controversial or any of the suggestions that people far less pleasant than those in this room might make, but because we knew the scale of the challenge that S4C would face, even without the disproportionate level of cuts that the channel saw levelled against it.

According to S4C’s calculations, those cuts amount to 24% over a period of four years—a real-terms cut of 36%. In 2010, S4C’s grant was £101 million, and it was reduced to £90 million in 2011 and £83 million in 2012. Last summer, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced further reductions—1% in 2013-14 and 2% in 2014-15. From April this year, most of S4C’s funding will come from the licence fee through the BBC Trust for the duration of the existing BBC Charter, due to be renewed in 2017. We do not know what will happen after that. As noted from this week’s statement from the BBC, the funding from the BBC will go down every year between now and 2016-17. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that the £7 million received by S4C from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport will be received after 2015. According to S4C’s figures, if that £7 million was not there, there would, in fact, be a 42% cut. It is no wonder that the 1,200 people in that mass e-mail and letter lobby—organised so well by the Welsh Language Society—of Members of Parliament serving on the Public Bodies Bill Committee were so concerned. They were absolutely right to be.

For those learning Welsh, and for those longing to be able to speak Welsh by the time of the next census, I believe that we need to consider the situation—to celebrate S4C’s 30th birthday, certainly, but also to look forward to its future and the future of Welsh, as a living, sustainable language throughout Wales.