Public Service Broadcasting (Communications Committee Report)

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, for not only securing the debate but for the excellent report on which it is based. His committee goes from strength to strength and I am far from alone in the House in hoping that as soon as possible it could lose its provincial driving licence and have its long-term future secured. It will not have escaped your Lordships’ notice that we are rapidly approaching what might be described as the end game in terms of the direction likely to be offered by the forthcoming government report Digital Britain. Here I declare an interest as deputy chair of Channel Four. That is the same hat I was wearing when, in April last year, I accepted an invitation to a very pleasant dinner hosted by the BBC Trust, then quite recently formed. That evening we discussed the future of the BBC and of public service broadcasting more generally, and I strongly recommended that the BBC ensure that it takes on the role of the architect of the future of PSB in this country, which everyone at that dinner regarded as being, in the long term, an endangered species. I got no sense but that this view was generally accepted as being sensible, and certainly the right direction of travel. I probably should have known better—I had forgotten the lessons of history. From its inception, the BBC has only ever truly been the architect—I could say, the all-consuming architect—of its own immediate future. In this respect, it is probably worth taking a quick canter through the corporation’s history. Originally starting as a private company, it became a public corporation only in 1927. Success as our sole national radio broadcaster was rapid, and the first serious challenge to its sense of self-preservation came, ironically, from within. Early experiments in television had been treated benevolently, but with little serious interest from the top. It was not until the televising of the 1948 Olympics that things started to get serious, when the number of receivers in the London area increased fourfold to over 66,000 by the end of the Games. The then Comptroller of Television, Norman Collins, was sufficiently jubilant to write: ""once television is truly national it will become the most important medium that exists … the first casualty of television, possibly the only casualty, is not the local cinema or the local country theatre, it is sound radio"." For daring to question the then received wisdom—that is, the primacy of radio—Norman Collins was quickly given the boot. Lord Reith was no pushover but, as far as I can make out, it was this that set the seal on future decades of autocracy. The next threat rolled along a few years later in 1952, when on 11 July Parliament started to seriously discuss the possibility of a second television channel, opposed in principle by the then doyenne of television, Grace Wyndham Goldie, who reportedly told a parliamentary committee that the whole idea of a second channel was fatuous as she could barely put together a talented enough team to deliver one channel. Market forces, driven by scarcity, were obviously in play even at that early date. There then began a two-year struggle for what was described as "the soul of the nation" when the then Conservative Government had the temerity to suggest that the most appropriate competition might be mounted by an advertising-supported channel and not one controlled and operated by the BBC. The corporation mounted a fearsome rearguard action, and the Bill establishing what became ITV was passed by only six votes, to receive Royal Assent on 30 July 1954. More battles followed. As chancellor of the Open University, it saddens me to recall that the creation of the OU was initially opposed root and branch by the BBC as being an imposition on its editorial independence. Happily, those two organisations seem to be rubbing along rather better nowadays. I could go on at great length, but I hope my point is clear: here is an immensely successful organisation that seems compulsively to feel that any development within the media space it occupies represents a threat, possibly a mortal threat, to its survival. So we reach today and the regrettable possibility of a continuation of the corporation’s them-or-us attitude towards the whole of the rest of the content world. I remain a huge admirer of the BBC but, as wiser heads than mine have pointed out, it seriously endangers itself if it seeks to remain part of the problem instead of becoming that architect of a long-term answer—that is, achieving the plurality of voice that a broad consensus of both Houses and all parties appears to regard as essential to the future of democracy. I will not delay the House by niggling about the inappropriate parsimony of the corporation’s approach to what it describes as "partnerships". It will suffice to read the letter from ITV’s chief operating officer, John Cresswell, in yesterday’s Financial Times regarding his frustrations in trying to achieve an agreement with the BBC over the sharing of regional news obligations. Sadly, the experience he relates is all too familiar to those who have ever attempted to design a sustainable future for all the various components of our broad public service offering. In the coming few days the BBC has a unique opportunity to change the habit of a lifetime by proving my analysis quite wrong in generously and unambiguously setting out a future for public service broadcasting that is plural, inclusive and, in production terms, as broadly based as possible. When I walked off into the night following that meeting with the trust, I was confident that it had in mind exactly this type of outcome. I find it almost tragic that the ghost of autocracy past appears to have come back to haunt its deliberations. Without unduly delaying your Lordships, I have one very specific proposal that I would like to take the opportunity of today’s debate to float out into the ether. Our public service broadcasters are in receipt of a variety of forms of support from the public purse, which gives them a clear line of responsibility to the taxpayer as well as to the licence fee payers they serve. However, they are often unable to prepare programming and online services in a timely fashion to reflect major political debates, as they have little access to key policymakers and other political thinking on a wider number of crucial social issues. The problem is exacerbated by the long lead times the broadcasters require to prepare the very best of such material. As a consequence, their ability to deliver public value to the taxpayer and to the licence fee payer in the form of public understanding and participation is greatly diminished. I would like to see a secure and non-partisan channel of communication established between government officials and public service broadcasters to help the latter prepare content, where they feel it is appropriate, that could better reflect the breadth of thinking and the possible options in relation to critical forthcoming debates, at both a national and international level. I propose that a mechanism be created which would enable the editorial and policy units—particularly, but not exclusively, those attached to the public service broadcasters—to have a formal and privileged access to emerging government thinking on a range of political, social and economic issues, as far in advance as is practicable. To ensure the non-partisan nature of this arrangement, any such discussion should fall under the aegis of the Cabinet Office and, through it, to the relevant Permanent Secretaries, along with such senior officials as they may designate. This country currently suffers from a crippling trust deficit. Any such scheme that was able to inject trust and co-operation into the widening gap between policy development and public understanding would, in my judgment, be a small but significant step forward. Let me be crystal clear: in no way is this a proposition that is designed to tame the broadcasters—quite the contrary. In an age often said to be laden with political spin, I hope that it would allow them much more effectively to be the grit in the oyster of many political debates, putting down serious challenges to the Government of the day and to the Executive, but based on fact, not theory. In fact, I think this kind of proposal is all of a piece with the kind of thinking about the public value of public service broadcasters which underlies the whole of the noble Lord’s report. As I say, I also think that it is the kind of partnership which broadcasters would welcome if they are really to step up to the plate on their public responsibilities, most particularly in an age when it is ever more difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff, deluged as we are with vast amounts of information every minute of the day. Today we have gone to the polls to vote on Europe. I do not think that anyone could honestly claim that young people in this country have a clue, or have been adequately informed, about what these issues are. Therefore, any proposal which could enable better, more accurate and more timely information to be available to young people must be a step forward. I recommend it to the House.