Communications: Digital Britain

My Lords, that is one of the trickiest questions. Although it was said at a private breakfast meeting, I think that I am allowed to quote the Director-General of the BBC, who this morning described this as one of the tricky tensions of the new world. In this country we rightly take the view that the sector merits and benefits from public subsidy. That public subsidy is provided in the main by the licence fee, but there are other sources. In the report we ask the question—noble Lords may criticise it as an open question, but I have never felt that asking open questions is a bad thing; I was always taught that they were a good thing—as to whether we should identify alternative funding streams. Alternative funding mechanisms for quality content are available in other countries, and we need to find answers to this question.