BBC Charter

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful for being allowed to speak in the gap. I declare an interest as a freelance television producer who used to work for the BBC.

I, too, want to raise my concerns about the talent drain at the BBC. I fear that this charter will damage the quality of many BBC programmes beyond repair. For me, the most worrying part of the charter is hidden away in Section 3 of Schedule 7 to the agreement, entitled “Television, Radio and Online Production”. It calls for 100% of BBC programmes outside news to be put up for competitive tender by the time of the next charter, a great percentage of them much earlier.

My noble friend Lord Hall made an agreement last year with PACT, the independent producers’ association, which would open up 40% of the in-house production quota to competitive tender. I imagine he naively hoped that the move would assuage the former Culture Secretary’s demand for competition to sweep through the BBC, but the Culture Secretary simply responded by kicking down the door and introducing 100% competition. This strikes at the very core of the BBC, the in-house production base. These are the people who make many of the great history, science, arts and current affairs programmes for which the BBC is so justly famous. For two decades, until this summer, I have been proud to have been involved in making these programmes.

The in-house programme makers are specialists who can turn a seemingly impossibly complicated science PhD paper into television or make a three-part series on dark matter, a substance we are not even sure exists. Until now, the volume of programmes being commissioned for in-house production has allowed a mass of talent to remain within the BBC. However, all these programmes are being put out to competitive tender. The first to be announced are “Horizon” and “Songs of Praise”.

The BBC is burdened with being the gold standard of the industry. Supporting a wide range of regional offices, it will inevitably have higher overheads than those of independents. In-house production costs have been dramatically reduced in the last seven years since the licence fee was frozen, but that will not be enough to compete with lean, mean independents. I speak as a freelance producer working for an independent company, so I know what I am talking about.

The BBC will lose these tenders and independents will take up the slack. That means that the whole industry will become casualised, and in the cut-throat world of independent television there is no place for very specialist producers who just concentrate on one genre. There is much more work and many more opportunities for generalists. As a result, the great stock of BBC programme-making talent that has been built up and passed on down the generations of BBC producers is now coming to an end. Many of my former colleagues are leaving voluntarily. This week, huge redundancies are going to be announced for BBC producers across all genres. My noble friend Lord Hall says that these people are the core of the BBC, and I agree. We are about to lose a great treasure of knowledge and talent, and once it is gone we are never going to be able to rebuild it.