My Lords, I begin by saying to the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, that I am very supportive of her Amendment 35. Perhaps like her, I have had communications over several years from the campaign, Turn On The Subtitles, which is doing extremely good work in drawing attention to the way in which putting subtitles on by default and allowing people to be able to turn them off if they wish has been shown to provide huge benefit to children’s learning of reading.
I also say a huge thank you to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. He and I had a brief chat the other day about his amendments. I went away and had to put a wet towel over my head in a darkened room to try to understand them, and I did not get very far. I am enormously grateful that, today, I understood the arguments that he is making. They are very much in support of my Amendment 70.
My amendment seeks to apply the Ofcom standards code—which, as we have heard, is described in Section 319 of the Communications Act—to all on-demand programme services, to ensure that there is a consistency in standards objectives across all platforms. I entirely agree with the noble Lord that we need to find ways to bring the Broadcasting Code and the current tier 1 standards code into unison. The problem is that Schedule 7, as currently drafted, will
apply those standards only to tier 1 services, leaving a wide range of on-demand services entirely unregulated. It is worth recalling that the senior executive in charge of implementing the first system of VOD regulation at Ofcom, Trevor Barnes, warned last month:
“The Culture Secretary is given very wide discretion to decide who is, and who is not, caught in the Tier 1 net”.
The amendment removes that discretion and, therefore, offers far greater public protection.
As we have heard, Section 319 encompasses a broad range of standards objectives, including protection for children and protection from material that might cause harm and offence, but I will focus on Sections 319(2)(c) and 319(2)(d), which require that news be
“presented with due impartiality and … due accuracy”,
and, further, that the special
“impartiality requirements of section 320”
be applied—namely, that every TV and radio service must preserve due impartiality on
“matters of political or industrial controversy; and … matters relating to current public policy”.
Those requirements date back to the very beginning of commercial TV in 1954 and have ensured that we have had a highly trusted broadcast media environment that has, so far, resisted the kinds of disinformation and polarisation that is so prevalent in online information services. Preserving that trusted environment not only depends on Parliament legislating for impartiality but requires a regulator that is prepared to do its job robustly and to implement that legislation without fear or favour. For most of its 20 years in regulating the linear world, Ofcom has done just that.
But here there is a spoiler alert—I note that the current chairman of Ofcom, the noble Lord, Lord Grade of Yarmouth, is in his place, and I suspect that he will not be particularly comfortable with the view that I hold. I think it is a matter of concern that, more recently, Ofcom does not seem to apply those rules with the rigour that Parliament has required, particularly in respect of GB News. Two examples will illustrate the problem, but there are many that I could have given.
On 13 January, the GB News presenter Neil Oliver used his programme to link Covid vaccines to the non-existent disease of “turbo cancer”, a wholly fictitious medical condition beloved by conspiracy theorists. That kind of dangerous disinformation, which went entirely unopposed on the GB News programme, should have been a slam dunk for a regulator charged with ensuring both accuracy and impartiality on licensed broadcasters. A month later, after multiple complaints, Ofcom delivered its verdict:
“In line with freedom of expression, our rules allow broadcasters to cover controversial themes and topics … We recognise that these brief comments were the presenter’s personal view and did not materially mislead the audience. We therefore will not be pursuing this further”.
It did not even bother with an investigation.
Last month, the same presenter hosted a journalist, Jasmine Birtles, who suggested that action against climate change was part of a “depopulation agenda” designed to
“remove 7.5 billion people from the world”.
There was no contrary view from either the presenter or other guests on the show. What was Ofcom’s response? It simply announced on its website that the programme
“did not raise issues warranting investigation”.
When challenged, it responded that the views expressed on the show
“were clearly presented as a personal opinion, consistent with the right to freedom of expression”.
I suspect that we all support the idea of freedom of expression—it is an Article 10 right—but there is no conflict between that right and an impartiality regime that ensures that all sides of any controversial matter are freely presented. That is the law of the land, and it needs to be upheld in both the linear and on-demand worlds.
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More experienced industry figures than me have been raising serious concerns for some time. Writing in the Guardian two months ago, two very senior former Ofcom executives, Stewart Purvis and Chris Banatvala, expressed their fears in stark terms. They said that
“Ofcom has repeatedly failed to quickly conclude many of its investigations, and is apparently unwilling to uphold impartiality … These failures seem to be compromising its statutory duty to act as an independent regulator and ensure a bias-free broadcast environment”.
If anyone believes that this is woolly liberal thinking, it is worth remembering that, only a few weeks ago, the eminent journalist and co-founder of GB News, Andrew Neil, attended the Communications and Digital Committee and said that he was
“surprised how tolerant Ofcom has been of GB News”,
and that
“Ofcom needs to find a backbone—and quick”.
Only this morning, Ofcom reported a further breach of impartiality rules by GB News, and that it will therefore
“consider this breach for the imposition of a statutory sanction”.
I await to find out what will happen.
As I said, we have a trusted broadcast environment, which is the result of decades of commitment to both accuracy and impartiality. We look at media environments elsewhere, particularly in the US, which have slipped almost silently into a partisan and polarised approach, where lies and conspiracy theories proliferate. We do not want nakedly partial news and information on our licensed broadcast channels, and we do not want them through the back door via on-demand services or weakened regulation. As Purvis and Banatvala concluded in their article:
“It is not for Ofcom but parliament to decide whether impartiality rules should be weakened, changed or abandoned”.
I hope that my amendment demonstrates that we wish not only to retain those rules, and to extend them to on-demand services beyond tier 1, but to see them upheld by a regulator doing its job properly.