Public Service Broadcasting (Communications Committee Report)

My Lords, we must be profoundly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, and his colleagues, many of whom have spoken in this debate, for the admirably succinct, clear and well argued report. I shall focus on one issue—how we preserve Channel 4. Despite the advocacy of the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, the affairs of Channel 4 get only a fraction of the attention in both Houses of Parliament as those of the BBC or even ITV. That is partly because there is an All-Party Parliamentary BBC Group, as there is one for ITV, admirably chaired by the noble Lord, Lord McNally, but there is no Channel 4 group. That needs to be remedied in the very near future. Leaving aside the formalities of all-party groups, if you talk television with Members of this House—and with our hours being what they are we watch only a fraction of the television that normal human beings watch—it is surprising the extent to which it is Channel 4 that people are talking about and not the other main channels—even among those who, peculiar though it may seem, are not interested in racing, where the BBC is stuck in the starting stalls while Channel 4 proceeds to make the running. Without Channel 4, the BBC would have a monopoly of non-commercial public service broadcasting. ITV has deserted or is deserting the field. Under its present leadership, it has downgraded—I apologise for the pun—anything that could claim to be public service broadcasting. Axing the "South Bank Show" is an act of cultural vandalism that future generations will wonder at. Sky Arts does a great job on limited resources, but it is of course an arm of a gigantic commercial broadcaster and relies on its benevolence to keep it going. Absent Channel 4, there would be the danger of a BBC monopoly. Monopoly is, ipso facto, undesirable, even if it is a monopoly in the hands of a world-class institution such as the BBC. Certainly, that is the view of the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler. It says: ""We believe there would be dangers if the BBC were to become an even more dominant provider of public service programming"." Channel 4 has done a quite remarkable job. It sometimes seems almost to defy gravity. That cannot go on for ever. The economics of the television market are such that it will not go on doing it on the present basis; it needs more money. Some sources can be ruled out. The advertising market’s extremely weak short run is likely to remain quite weak and in the end there will not be more money. Given the state of public finances, it does not have a prayer of getting more money from the Treasury. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that one way or another there is only one source of more money, and that is the BBC and its licence fee. However, there is an obstacle. The BBC is a world-class institution and, among the things that go with being a world-class institution, it is a world-class lobbyist. The BBC’s position at Westminster has been noticeably weakened these past 12 months by the Jonathan Ross affair and its stance on the Gaza emergency appeal. That is not a statement of opinion on either of those things, but a measurable fact from talking to people around the House. If it were not so, the Tories would not have dared move their recent populist motion in another place to freeze the licence fee. To put it crudely—they thought there were votes in it. However, the BBC remains a giant beast in the jungle. I still bear the scars of the long battle to get it to be subject to some form of public account scrutiny. It came up again today with the BBC trying—rightly or wrongly—to keep Terry Wogan’s salary away from the committee. You get into a very dangerous and long drawn-out battle if you do not entirely take the BBC’s view on things. The BBC will fight tooth and nail against topslicing, contestability, the reallocation of its digital switchover money and anything else that might cost it a bob or two. That is why the solution advocated by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler—and I hope that Channel 4 will get some money through some sort of partnership with Worldwide—is a good one. The devil is in the detail and the detail is proving very testing, but agreement there has to be. It is not the most logical solution—the most logical solution would be to take a chunk of licence fee money and give it to Channel 4—but it may be the most practicable solution, and I would rather that Channel 4 got more support through an illogical means than no support because we insisted on the logical means. An immediate question arises from this—I think I am talking in this Chamber only to supporters of the BBC and I really mean it when I say it is a world-class institution—can the BBC afford to give up any money to Channel 4 while maintaining its role as a full service public service broadcaster? Can it even afford a larger knock from a direct subvention to Channel 4 as opposed to the indirect subvention involved in the Worldwide deal? I was a member of the Davies committee on the BBC licence fee in 1999, and a great experience that was. The committee had a mixed membership but it agreed, as it happened, on everything except one thing; how much money the BBC needed. I recall that my noble friend Lord Gordon, who is unfortunately unable to be with us this afternoon, was on the low end of the spectrum. The chairman, Gavyn Davies, was at the high end of the spectrum, which was as well as he went on to be chairman of the BBC. I was somewhere in the middle, with all the other members scattered in between. I make that point simply to say that well-meaning people with a strongly pro-BBC view in life, which every member of that committee had, came to quite different conclusions on how much money it needed. It is a matter of judgment. To conclude our Thursday Back-Bench contributions on a rather wicked note, my own yardstick is that so long as the BBC can afford BBC Three it has too much money. Here is a channel, much to most of the content of which is paltry, aimed at appeasing a mythical target audience of young viewers who the commercial market can adequately cater for in any case, at a cost of some £125 million per annum, and which is watched by the average viewer for three minutes a day. Compare that with the use that Channel 4 could make of money on that scale, which amounts to nearly a third of its total programme budget, and there is no contest.