My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 6 and 10 in my name and the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness. I am very grateful to those noble Lords for their cross-party support.
These amendments are designed to address an urgent problem. They seek to provide more explicit protection for Gaelic-language broadcasting within the Bill. Gaelic broadcasting faces a crisis—and I do not use that word lightly—caused by decisions over the allocation of responsibilities when the Scottish Parliament was established. As a result, there is no reliable mechanism for resolving funding and operational matters.
Gaelic broadcasting is provided by the BBC Alba channel, a joint venture between BBC and the Gaelic Media Service, otherwise known as MG Alba. The channel is resourced by the BBC’s contribution to the JV of content and people, valued at £10 million per year, and MG Alba’s annual budget of £13 million per year. Its funding is provided by the Scottish Government via Ofcom. The effect is to split responsibility for Gaelic broadcasting. Broadcasting is a reserved matter. The statutory underpinning for MG Alba is UK legislation—the Communications Act 2003—and Ofcom, the UK regulator, is arbiter of whether enough Gaelic is being broadcast. However, funding responsibility for the forerunner of MG Alba was devolved in 1999 to Scottish Ministers, who are not answerable to Ofcom.
The consequences of this split are clear to see. In 1991, a Conservative Government set up the first Gaelic television fund of nearly £10 million a year; today that would be worth £25 million, almost double MG Alba’s current budget. The Scottish Government have chosen to freeze MG Alba’s budget for the last 10 years and, if that trajectory continues, in two years’ time its budget will be worth half of what it began with in 2008. These arrangements do not provide Gaelic broadcasting with a sustainable future, with all the potentially adverse consequences for Gaelic as a living language, because, make no mistake, education and broadcasting are the twin pillars of its survival.
Let us consider for a moment the practical implications. First, viewers increasingly consume content online rather than via the traditional linear services. To succeed,
Gaelic content must be prominent and visible on the new digital channels that people actually use. Digital transition requires investment. I see the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, in his place, and S4C has been provided with ring-fenced funding to develop its digital services, but BBC Alba has not.
Secondly, if Gaelic broadcasting is to engage the next generation of young would-be Gaelic speakers it needs to be able to create new content and not rely on repeats which are increasingly dated. BBC Alba can afford only to broadcast one hour and 40 minutes of new content per day and to commission three hours of drama per year.
Thirdly, one of MG Alba’s potential advantages is the freedom to invest in co-productions with commercial producers, yet it lacks the funds to be an attractive investment partner of any scale for commercial producers.
MG Alba commissioned EY to assess its future funding requirements. EY’s report suggests that an annual budget of around £25 million is required—in effect, restoring the value of the original Gaelic Television Fund —to put the business on a sustainable footing. Unfortunately —this is the main point of my amendments—there is no forum for evaluating this report because Gaelic broadcasting, MG Alba in particular, currently has no formal mechanism for ensuring that its needs are assessed in a holistic way.
This is the context for the amendments tabled in my name, which are supported by both the BBC and MG Alba. As we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, new subsection (5)(b)(ii) in Clause 1(2) places a duty on Ofcom to assess whether public service broadcasters, taken together, are producing
“a sufficient quantity of audiovisual content that is in, or mainly in, a recognised regional or minority language”,
specified as including
“Welsh, the Gaelic language as spoken in Scotland, Irish, Scots, Ulster Scots or Cornish”.
This is very welcome. It does not, however, provide sufficient protection for Gaelic broadcasting, which will otherwise, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, be swept up in a generic assessment of minority languages across all PSBs.
Amendment 6 therefore obliges Ofcom to consider specifically the needs of Gaelic broadcasting when making its assessment of sufficiency. Without this specific obligation, Ofcom could determine, for example, that an on-demand curated collection of Gaelic content is sufficient, rather than what is necessary to sustain a Gaelic media service, with at its beating heart a schedule of live daily news, sports events, and topical and lifestyle programmes.
Amendment 10 would bring the Gaelic Media Service into the scope of the PSBs to be assessed by Ofcom. Amendment 11, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, addresses the same issue. This is a very modest and narrowly focused amendment. The Gaelic Media Service would be considered a PSB only for the purposes of assessing Ofcom’s duties in new subsection (5)(b)(ii).
In practical terms, the proposed designation would formally include MG Alba in the scope of Ofcom’s five-yearly review for the period 2019-23, which will start later this year. This will provide a yardstick of sufficiency and a mechanism, which is currently missing,
for assessing the needs of Gaelic broadcasting in the round. The affect is more limited than making BBC Alba a PSB in its own right, so Ministers can be reassured that, in agreeing to this amendment, they would not be creating—however great it is—another S4C, with all the associated legal, financial and other obligations, not least for the BBC, that this entails.
The other feature of these amendments is that they would tie the Scottish Government more explicitly into the process for putting Gaelic broadcasting on a more sustainable footing. MG Alba is under a statutory responsibility to provide a wide and diverse range of high-quality programmes in Gaelic. Scottish Ministers have a statutory duty annually to provide Ofcom with a sum they consider appropriate for MG Alba to discharge its responsibilities. However, there is no guidance to or formal expectations of Scottish Ministers in this regard. By bringing MG Alba within the scope of Ofcom’s assessment, Amendment 10 would establish a direct link with Scottish Ministers’ statutory funding responsibilities.
Should Ofcom determine that there is insufficient Gaelic content, the BBC and MG Alba, and by extension its funder, would be obliged to respond to Ofcom. This would create an expectation for the first time of Scottish ministerial participation in a more formal, transparent and joined-up process to consider the overall sufficiency of Gaelic media content.
6.45 pm
As things stand, the risk for the UK Government is that they accept there is a problem, that the next charter review is the solution and that they are then held solely responsible for fixing it. In reality, responsibility is and should be shared with the Scottish Government.
I understand that the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills, Jenny Gilruth, has written to Julia Lopez to support strengthening the legislative protection for Gaelic broadcasting in the Bill and to highlight the Scottish Government’s record as a strong, consistent supporter and principal funder of MG Alba and BBC Alba. While welcoming their support, I gently suggest to Scottish Ministers, who I know follow avidly the proceedings of your Lordships’ House, that they might reflect on whether freezing MG Alba’s budget for a decade qualifies as strong and consistent support—“consistent”, certainly, but “strong”, not so much.
Why does all of this matter? Gaelic is part of the UK’s and Scotland’s rich and diverse heritage. Gaelic is on UNESCO’s list of endangered languages. If we fail to protect it, we risk losing something precious. It is something which enriches our education, adds colour to our tourism, enhances our music, and provides jobs in fragile island communities and economic value. There is an investment return of £1.34 for every £1 spent on MG Alba.
For over a decade, I have argued strongly for the UK and Scottish Governments to work together to advance issues of common interest. I believe that Gaelic broadcasting is one of those issues and it needs a joined-up approach. What better time than now to adopt this approach, with the return today of Kate Forbes, a Gaelic speaker, to the Scottish Cabinet as Deputy First Minister holding the Gaelic portfolio? I hope my noble friend the Minister, who is a great
promoter of cultural heritage, will give these amendments serious consideration. With the pace of digital change, we cannot afford to wait for the next BBC charter review or to fail to address both sides of the Gaelic broadcasting joint venture. These needs sorting out now. This Bill is the perfect vehicle for doing so.