My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, for starting our deliberations in Committee in such a careful and considered way. We have already had allusions to Chesterton, Orwell and Sonia from “EastEnders”, so we are off to a good start.
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Before I turn to the amendments to which other noble Lords have spoken, perhaps I should say a little on the two government amendments in my name in this group. Amendments 18 and 35 are minor and technical. Amendment 18 provides additional clarity that, for the purpose of calculating the maximum financial penalty to which a public service broadcaster may be subject, the qualifying revenue of the non-UK-based on-demand programme services it provides should be determined with regard to the same provisions as its UK-based on-demand programme services. Amendment 35 changes Clause 27 to make clear that Schedule 2 contains amendments relevant not only to public service broadcasters but to Part 1 in general.
I turn to the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, and others. Let me start by addressing the legacy of the late noble Lord, Lord Reith, which was referred to a number of times. As we have heard, in an act of great foresight, Lord Reith developed the principles that still guide the BBC today, through its mission to produce high-quality and impartial content that informs, educates and entertains. These remain fine principles and, as a mission statement for the BBC, they continue to work very well indeed. As the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, noted, much has changed in the 100 years since Lord Reith came up with his famous formulation. The BBC is no longer a monopoly provider, and the public service broadcasters are subject to competition for audiences from other television channels and the new streaming giants. This expansion of choice represents an amazing triumph of UK broadcasting, but it dramatically changes the meaning of public service broadcasting and the best way to legislate for it.
We want a Bill that will also stand the test of time. Let me briefly set out how our drafting has aimed to achieve that. At present, Section 264 of the Communications Act sets the purposes of public service broadcasting, as the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, said. This includes broad commitments to concepts such as quality, range and diversity. It goes on to set out a series of objectives. This is a shopping list of very worthy types of content, but it does not represent a clear statement of what we want to be distinctive about our public service broadcasters. In practice, the breadth of the list gives the regulator little guidance about the priorities on which it should focus its assessment of that important public service delivery.
By contrast, the new streamlined remit in the Bill puts audiences at its heart by directly linking the remit to their needs. It focuses on what it means to be public service broadcasters, which will make it easier for Ofcom to work with them to achieve this. Of course, that does not mean that the Bill does not recognise the importance of content that informs, educates and entertains. Indeed, there are already specific provisions in the Bill that directly require the BBC and other public service broadcasters to take action in these areas. For example, the Bill prioritises the provision of news content designed to inform—both by putting this directly in the remit and by retaining Section 279 of the Communications Act, which allows Ofcom to set quotas for news and current affairs content for each licensed public service broadcaster.
With regard to education, the focus of Amendment 7 from the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, there are similar, broadcaster-specific requirements to include educational content. The Bill strengthens the education requirement on Channel 4, and the BBC’s royal charter requires it to support learning for people of all ages, as my noble friend Lady Fraser of Craigmaddie rightly pointed out. Educational and factual programming is well represented among the output of our public service broadcasters. Ofcom’s Communications Market Report found that the BBC and Channel 4 collectively provided more than 180 hours of educational programming, as well as more than 17,000 hours of programming across the various factual genres.
Finally, the need for public service broadcasters to entertain us, while not directly legislated for in the Bill as it stands, is fundamental to their very model and we would expect audiences to vote with their feet if they were not entertained. However, it is worth pondering whether we need to put that in the remit and say that it should be a priority for our public service broadcasters. I take the point that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds and others made that it is through being entertained that we can also be informed and educated. This is a question worth pondering further, and I am happy to ponder it with the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, the right reverend Prelate and other noble Lords who have raised it today.
Let me now consider the naming of specific genres, which is covered by Amendments 3 and 8. As I have already set out, it is essential that the public service remit speaks directly to what it is to be a public service broadcaster, and we want to avoid diluting this. His Majesty’s Government have already carefully considered the issue of genres, both in drawing up the Bill and as part of its pre-legislative scrutiny. We have added a new subsection (6) in response to this, which makes it clear that public service broadcasters must together produce a range of genres in order to fulfil the public service remit.
Noble Lords raised a particular concern about how this will be reported on. There are two mechanisms. First, Clause 1 of the Bill requires Ofcom to report at least every five years on the extent to which the public service remit is being fulfilled. Given that the remit can be fulfilled only when a range of genres is produced, we expect that this would continue to include reporting on different genres. Secondly, we have retained the specific obligation on Ofcom in Section 358 of the Communications Act to collect and report statistics annually on the principal genres made available on television and radio services. Furthermore, should Ofcom’s reporting on the remit or licence renewal demonstrate that a particular genre is being underserved, this Bill gives the Government the power to take action.
Against this backdrop, Amendments 3 and 8 seek to add references to specific types of content to the remit. The content to which the amendments refer—drama, comedy, music and science-based public information—are all most certainly valuable and I am entirely sympathetic to the aims of the amendments. But the provision of these genres is already monitored, at least at a high level, by Ofcom and we would be concerned that further legislative granularity would serve only to complicate Ofcom’s role in regulating an area over which it already has oversight. At the same
time, the nature of the remit means that, far from strengthening it, these amendments would in fact risk diluting it, reducing clarity for public service broadcasters.
On Amendment 1, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, I am glad to echo what is rightly said by people all around the world, not just by Ministers at this Dispatch Box: that our public service broadcasters produce world-class content. I understand the desire of noble Lords who have put forward proposal to protect and promote this very important feature of UK broadcasting, and I hope that I can reassure your Lordships that the Bill already does just that.
I have spoken already about the importance of the remit being streamlined and the need to focus on ensuring that Ofcom can hold public service broadcasters to the standards set out in it. This amendment would reintroduce the commitment to quality in the current purposes and objectives in Section 264 of the Communications Act. However, the current regime has demonstrated the challenges of attempting to measure and enforce quality. The issue is not a significant focus in Ofcom’s reports on the current public service broadcaster purposes and objectives, and understandably so.
The “quality” of a programme is difficult to measure and somewhat subjective. This requirement asks Ofcom to do something even more complicated: to assess the quality not just of a television programme but of the public service broadcasting system as a whole. We would be concerned that that is not a realistic regulatory goal. Instead, we believe that quality is best assessed with regard to each individual public service broadcaster. That is why we retained the commitment to quality in the remit of individual licensed public service broadcasters, in Section 265 of the Communications Act. A similar requirement to provide high-quality output is in the BBC’s mission statement.
The single best protection we have against a decline in standards is competition. That is why, for all the challenges it brings, the explosion in choice available to viewers in the UK has driven up and will continue to drive up the quality of programme-making, particularly high-end drama and film. What we now see on our small screen would not, I think, have looked out of place on the big screen just 20 or 30 years ago. But the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, is right to raise the important question of the quality of our television, and she right to point to the Government’s commitment to the creative industries and the link this has to them. She knows that the creative industries are one of the five priority areas of our economy, as identified by the Chancellor. We want to ensure that we are helping them to grow even more.
The noble Baroness has shown a great commitment to the creative industries through her work here in your Lordships’ House, and the work that she and others are doing with my department and the Department for Education to help the latter deliver on its White Paper commitment to a new cultural education plan. I very grateful to her for raising this issue as we begin Committee today. I am certainly happy to continue to reflect on it and to make sure that we have the balance between baby and bath-water right in this Bill. I hope I have provided her and other noble Lords with some reassurance today that the Bill maintains the commitment to quality, and that, for now, she will be content to withdraw her amendment on that basis.
I turn now to Amendment 33 from the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, which relates to the promotion of diversity and equality within our public service broadcasters. The Government remain committed to ensuring that our public service broadcasting system offers equality of opportunity to people of all backgrounds. Ofcom already has a duty under the Communications Act to promote diversity and equality of opportunity in the broadcasting sector. As part of this, public service broadcasters are required to report on the composition of their workforce, on which Ofcom itself reports annually. Although we recognise their independence, we welcome the work our public service broadcasters are already doing to improve representation in their workforce. That includes, for example, ITV’s diversity acceleration plan and its diversity commissioning fund, which continues to invest in content that supports diversity both on-screen and off-screen—a point that noble Lords rightly raised. Meanwhile, Channel 4’s diversity and inclusion strategy has committed to ensuring that at least 20% of its workforce is composed of people from different ethnic minority groups, and that its top 100 paid positions are split 50:50 by sex.
I take what my noble friend Lord Vaizey of Didcot says about the difference between strategies and action and, indeed, the need for Ministers to be engaged, although I remind him that, in this instance, it is a case of the Minister taking action herself, whether that is my honourable friend Julia Lopez or my right honourable friend the Secretary of State. He asked about project Diamond. We welcome that and other broadcaster-led initiatives in this area. Given that there are already well-established processes in place to collect diversity data across our public service broadcasters, and a clear statutory role for Ofcom to monitor and track progress against that, while I welcome the sentiment behind the noble Baroness’s amendment and thank those who have spoken in favour of it, I do not think it is necessary and invite her not to press it.