UK Parliament / Open data

Deregulation Bill

Proceeding contribution from Lord Rooker (Labour) in the House of Lords on Tuesday, 11 November 2014. It occurred during Debate on bills and Committee proceeding on Deregulation Bill.

My Lords, I did not come to speak on this—I am a complete outsider as far as the media are concerned—but having listened to the noble Lord, Lord Grade, before the Division, I will.

This is unfortunate. I know that it is fair enough to make the point that we did not have these discussions on the draft Bill; I will not make a serious complaint about that, because things in the Bill have been added since the pre-legislative scrutiny. However, on what I know about the media, I certainly take the point of what the noble Lord, Lord Grade, said, that in the end this is basically all about the attempt to force the BBC to go down to a subscription channel basis, and I fundamentally disagree with that. The BBC has not helped itself in the last couple of years; as an outsider I have watched in the other place some absolutely inept performances in front of that Select Committee by very highly paid people, who on some occasions are inarticulate beyond belief. You can imagine where the groundswell against it comes from.

I fully accept that there has been an attempt to do something about the banker-style salaries. I fully accept that you need the best people, and it is a competitive market. However, I have nothing to declare, by the way. While Murdoch’s alive, I do not do Sky. I sacrifice Formula 1 and everything for that. There will come a day when I can have Sky, but it is not there at the moment. The fact is that there is a disparity when one sees the cost of what is advertised—but then you do not see the full cost of the BBC, for example. When you turn the radio on in the morning, you expect it to be on, but you do not see the separate figures for that. It is a bit like other services, whether schools or hospitals. When you walk through the door you do not see a price on the top—although now you do with universities, where the cost of walking through the door is nine grand a year. It is not quite like that; it is not put across that way. Therefore you do not have the marketing. The BBC has no interest in having the marketing to compete with the marketing that Sky does to make it seductive.

That is the only point I want to make. There is a conspiracy—no question about it. I freely admit that I was very tempted after it went to the Commons; I was not sure whether it would be put in the Commons or the Lords. When the arguments were first put they were very seductive on decriminalisation. I have friends who are magistrates, and they say, “Jeff, it’s nonsense. We parcel them all up—we do them all together”. On the time argument, the noble Lord, Lord Grade, said that it takes 3 minutes and 13 seconds. That is exactly believable—talk to magistrates. That is the way it is done. There is no time factor in the courts; there is no question about that. If anyone wants to go to jail in this country, it is very easy to do it—just do not pay the fines. Lots of people make a business out of that. Therefore the BBC is an excuse. However, I fully accept that there is an underlying issue. The BBC staff have to up their game when they appear before Select Committees, but we have to bear in mind that at the end of the day there is a seductive and well funded attempt here to force the BBC to go to a subscription service. We ought to oppose that at every step of the way.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
757 cc37-8GC 
Session
2014-15
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords Grand Committee
Subjects
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