BBC: Royal Charter

Lord Birt Excerpts

Monday 15th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

Although it is up to the BBC to decide how to deliver its services, the Government are clear that it must make sure that it continues to deliver its remit as set out in the royal charter and the agreement. The Government expect Ofcom, as the BBC’s regulator, to ensure that the BBC is held to account in the way it does so. We recognise the strength of feeling on the importance of news coverage, both nationally and locally. We have raised the concerns expressed in your Lordships’ House and another place about cuts to local news reporting services, but it is up to the BBC to decide how it delivers these services with the money that it gets.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, my final act in departing the BBC in 2000 was to negotiate a licence fee settlement for seven years at RPI plus 1.5%. That was with a Prime Minister who was crystal clear—to repeat a phrase from earlier—that he wanted to see a well-funded BBC in a rapidly expanding new digital universe. A quarter of a century later, we find the BBC with its finances brutalised and forced to pull back in every area of programming. Is it not time to restore the scope and scale of our most important national cultural institution?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The BBC is indeed a beacon that shines brightly around the world, reflecting British values and doing great credit to us as a nation. I pay tribute to the noble Lord for the work that he did at the corporation. However, since he left, we have seen the number of people paying the licence fee falling. It has fallen by 1.7 million people over the last five years. Therefore, as well as ensuring that there is a fair settlement that gives the BBC the money that it needs and is fair to the people who pay the licence fee, we are looking at the funding model to ensure that the BBC is able to continue to get the income and to shine brightly as a beacon in an increasingly competitive media landscape.

BBC Funding

Lord Birt Excerpts

Tuesday 12th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I quote the current Secretary of State: the BBC

“needs to live in the real world”,

and

“We can’t keep putting prices up for the licence fee”.


What is actually happening in the real world? In the last three years, while the licence fee has been frozen, the price of Netflix has risen by 50%, Disney+ by 83%, Apple TV by 40%, and spend on the NHS, excluding Covid costs, has risen in the same period by around 12%. In the period 2010-20, the BBC had to cut spending by 30%. After two years flat, there is a further drop in real terms of something like 12%. Against that backdrop, frankly, this new settlement will be but a drop in the ocean.

It is recognised the world over that the century-old BBC is one of the greatest creations of our times. No other country in the world has so effectively captured its national experience, cultural expression and national dialogue, viz: the exquisite “Planet Earth”, “Horizon”, “Dad’s Army”, “Fleabag”, “Little Dorrit”, “Happy Valley”, “Gardeners’ Question Time”, and the Proms— I could go on and on. The BBC still makes wonderful programmes, but—

[Lord Harlech (Con)]

My Lords, the Companion is very clear that, in the Back-Bench portion of Questions on a Statement, noble Lords are encouraged to make their point and ask a question.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

I hope noble Lords will allow me to come to a conclusion. I can see all too clearly how much the BBC has diminished in every area of programming since my time as director-general. Last year, the previous Secretary of State tweeted:

“It’s over for the BBC as they know it”.


Let us name the game; the BBC is a victim of the culture wars and, as a result, we are witnessing the long, slow, painful, diminution of this great institution. Will this continue?

BBC: Appointment and Resignation of Chair

Lord Birt Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

It is right that an independent process was commissioned and allowed the time to run. Mr Sharp himself has said that he regrets the impact this has had on the corporation he has faithfully served. Mr Heppinstall’s report says:

“Overall, DCMS officials conducted a good and thorough process”.


There are some helpful lessons for all in his investigation, which we will look at and take forward as appropriate.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a former director-general of the BBC. This episode will not damage the BBC—there, I agree with the Minister. It has been around for 100 years, and it is a wonderful institution. It will quickly ride through this sorry affair. The damage that has been done is to the Government’s own process for making public appointments. The Heppinstall report is a truly shocking read. Will the Government now overhaul the process for making public appointments?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I agree with the first part of what the noble Lord says. The news today about the BBC’s work launching the emergency radio service in Sudan is another testament to the fantastic work it does not just in this country but around the world. As I have said, Mr Heppinstall’s report concluded that:

“Overall, DCMS officials conducted a good and thorough process”.


There are some lessons in his report. We will carefully consider its findings and respond in due course.

Football: Illegal Entry to Matches

Lord Birt Excerpts

Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The noble Baroness is right that there is action for everybody throughout football to ensure that people can enjoy the game safely. We should not overstate it; the vast majority of people who go to matches do so in a law-abiding way and help people do that. There is a minority of people who want to spoil that. As I have said, we have taken action to toughen football banning orders. The football authorities themselves have taken action, with the FA, the Premier League and the English Football League announcing tougher sanctions, including automatic reporting to the police of anyone participating in anti-social or criminal behaviour. On the fan-led review commissioned by my honourable friend Tracey Crouch, we will be coming forward in the coming weeks with our response.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, it was an absolute miracle that there was no major loss of life at last year’s Champions League final at the Stade de France. It was a terrifying experience for many Liverpool fans who attended, of whom I was one. Four English teams have now reached the last 16 in this year’s Champions League, so one or more may very well reach the final. It is a matter of regret that UEFA’s own inquiry into last year’s events has yet to report. None the less, will the Minister undertake to approach UEFA to seek reassurance that all the many glaring operational failures seen in Paris will not be repeated at this year’s final in Istanbul?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, who has provided some insights from his own experience of attending that match. We were all appalled to see the terrifying and potentially dangerous scenes that occurred there. The French Senate published its report on the final, which rejected the initial response from French Ministers to blame Liverpool FC fans. UEFA’s inquiry is ongoing, but a full report is due to be published soon. We are in close contact, at ministerial and official levels, with both the French Government and UEFA to ensure that their investigations align with experience and point to future matches, as the noble Lord suggested.

Channel 4

Lord Birt Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, in answer to a Parliamentary Question, the Government set out that, in the last financial year, we spent £600,000 on plans for privatisation.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I unequivocally welcome this decision and recognise that it took some political courage to make it. In effect, the Government are again supporting public service broadcasting. I express a hope that the same attitudes and considerations that brought this sharp reversal will apply when they consider the future of the BBC over the next few years.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

Without wanting to interrupt the harmony that has broken out at the start of the new year, the Government have always had the best interests of the public service broadcasters, including Channel 4, at heart when looking at that issue. As we have noted, the media landscape is rapidly changing. Unlike other public service broadcasters, Channel 4 has limited ability to diversify its revenue or to raise money through borrowing or equity capital. That is why we have looked at a range of options and why we have been very clear that doing nothing is not an option.

Champions League Final

Lord Birt Excerpts

Monday 6th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The noble Lord makes an important point. In international fixtures, it is important that lessons are learned across jurisdictions so that scenes such as this cannot be repeated. The French Government, who are hosting the Rugby World Cup and the 2024 Olympics in Paris, will want to make sure that they have learned the lessons for those important sporting events. The Home Office will be working with its counterparts, in line with existing protocols of co-operation, to ensure that any appropriate evidence is gathered to contribute to the review, and has undertaken to look at many aspects of the event beyond the policing response.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I am a Liverpool supporter and I attended this shamefully managed event. The inquiry announced by UEFA needs to explore quite a number of things: first, the manifest limitations of the design and management of the Stade de France; secondly, the prior planning and operational response of the French police; and, thirdly, the quality of oversight of UEFA itself. Will the Minister endeavour to ensure that the inquiry has the power, capability and capacity to do all those things?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The inquiry is for UEFA, and I am confident that UEFA is committed to a thorough review. I am grateful to the noble Lord for his first-hand observations, which I am sure will have been heard, but I shall gladly pick that up with him after this to ensure that they can be fed to UEFA so that the lessons can be properly learned.

Football Governance

Lord Birt Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The noble Lord makes the very pertinent point that football clubs are rooted in their communities and are community assets. That is why we are very glad that the review by Tracey Crouch was fan-led. We are very grateful to all those who took part in it; we will set out our response in full having given it the thorough consideration it deserves.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I am a Liverpool, not a Chelsea, fan. We all support sanctions designed to bring an end to Russia’s acts of sheer evil in Ukraine, but it is surely not right that Chelsea’s fans, players and operational managers should be directly affected by sanction measures while they await new owners. Will the Minister urgently review and remove these purely sporting constraints?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, given the significant impact that sanctions would have on Chelsea Football Club and their potential knock-on effects, Her Majesty’s Treasury issued a licence which authorises a number of football-related activities to continue at Chelsea, including permissions for the club to continue playing matches and other football-related activity, which will in turn protect the Premier League, the wider football pyramid, the loyal fans and other clubs. The licence allows only certain explicitly named actions, to ensure that the designated individual cannot circumvent UK sanctions. However, we are meeting daily with the club and football authorities to discuss further amendments to the licence should they be necessary.

Channel 4: Consultation

Lord Birt Excerpts

Tuesday 16th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The noble Lord mentions the work done by Ernst & Young. Our analysts, UKGI, and our corporate finance advisers, JP Morgan, take a different view and that is why we are taking a range of views on the suggestions. On the work that Channel 4 does across the United Kingdom, I say simply that Channel 4’s strengths in this regard are to be celebrated and maintained, and that is not at odds with private investment; in fact, Channel 4’s access to networks outside London and its ability to speak to such a diverse range of audiences are likely to be attractive assets to nurture and develop for any potential buyer, if that is the route we go down.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, there is a meme of the moment that Channel 4 and, indeed, the BBC are being marginalised by the awesome economic power of Netflix. Does the Minister accept that Netflix’s programme proposition, though wholly admirable, bears no relationship whatever to the breadth of the public service propositions offered by both Channel 4 and the BBC? Moreover, will the Minister remind his department that in terms of hours of consumption per adult per week, far from being marginalised, the BBC enjoys six times the consumption of Netflix, and that Channel 4 is level-pegging?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The noble Lord speaks with great experience of the sector. I am about the same age as Channel 4; the environment in which it was launched in 1982 was very different from the environment now. The Government should never stand still when it comes to ensuring the success of our public service broadcasters and the growth of competitors such as Netflix, as the noble Lord mentioned. That is why it is appropriate to reflect on Channel 4’s future and consider whether the current model gives it the best chance to succeed in the new environment as we seek to ensure that it is set up for success for decades to come.

UK Journalism (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Birt Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Birt (CB)]

May I, too, join the “when I was a lad” brigade? I should tell the noble Lord, Lord McNally, that when he and I were lads, I was actually a director on “All Our Yesterdays”, briefly.

Like others, I warmly welcome the real focus that the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, has brought to this critical issue, as all the contributions so far have made abundantly clear. Independent, challenging journalism is the sine qua non of a healthy functioning democracy, as the award last week of a Nobel Prize to courageous but endangered journalists in Russia and the Philippines underlined. In a scene reminiscent of “The Thick of It”, the Kremlin congratulated Dmitry Muratov on his award, describing him as “brave”. This is the very same Kremlin that had just expelled BBC journalist Sarah Rainsford, after 20 years of impeccable and expert reporting from Moscow.

Over centuries, the UK has enjoyed an unparalleled tradition of vigorous comment and challenge, beginning in our Parliament but extending well beyond to a lively press. Those on the receiving end may not always like it—it is not always scrupulous and fair—but that tradition guarantees that no part of our national life goes unscrutinised and unquestioned. That in turn guarantees, sometimes in a rough and chaotic way, that as a nation we will always expose and address problems of every kind that we, as a nation, will progress.

My first job out of university was as a journalist on “World in Action”, the programme with the proudest tradition of investigative journalism on British television. By the time I left ITV, the network boasted three major and well-funded national current affairs programmes. None now exists, nor does any equivalent. I left ITV because I was invited to lead the creation of BBC News as a single entity. Previously, it had been organised in separate, unco-ordinated baronies.

In the 20 years since I retired from the BBC and from broadcasting, I have had the painful experience, as someone who was involved in journalism every day of his career, of watching from the sidelines the massive loss of revenues suffered by our vibrant national and regional newspapers, the substantial decline of income of the advertiser-funded PSBs and two brutal cuts to BBC revenues—soon, I greatly fear, to be followed by a third.

The internet has brought absolutely huge gains in disintermediation, immediacy and the ability to find out anything we want in a flash. But the impact has been to reduce, not to increase, the amount of journalism of quality. For journalism of quality is expensive; it needs both expertise and time—not just to uncover wrongdoing but to get under the skin of the complex issues that face all Governments and societies.

Of course serious journalism of quality still exists: Tim Shipman’s must-read, careful and insightful chronicling of our national politics, the FT’s economic reporting and John Ware’s and Peter Taylor’s supremely authoritative unravelling of the dark side of the Troubles. But so much of our declining journalistic resource is now invested in simple reactive coverage of today’s overt events, or in the repackaging, aggregation and regurgitation of other outlets’ stories. Of the stock of current affairs programmes that existed when I departed the BBC 20 years ago, only a less well-resourced “Panorama” remains.

There are no easy answers to the questions posed this afternoon, but reducing the real funding of the BBC and privatising Channel 4 are not two of them. Let us avoid incrementalism; let us stand back and recognise the big picture. As the committee suggests, digital players should not have a free ride. The noble Lord, Lord Grade, expressed that particularly well. They must contribute to the cost of creating original journalism and content. We must do everything we can to put a foot on the brake of the decline of UK PSBs. We must also do everything we can to ease the decline of our vital newspaper sector. As the PM would say, it is surely time to “Prenez un grip”.

Television Licence Evasion

Lord Birt Excerpts

Tuesday 26th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The figures that my noble friend refers to—the 91 people receiving a custodial sentence—are for the period 2015-18, and those numbers have declined significantly in recent years. In relation to a civil sanction, it needs to be sufficiently robust to underpin the legal requirement to hold a TV licence, and, as I mentioned, it might result in higher financial penalties. We are keeping this matter open for further review.

[Lord Birt (CB) [V]]

My Lords, in recent times we have seen a rapid decline in the funding of one of our greatest achievements as a country, admired and envied the world over: British public service broadcasting. Over the past 15 years, investment in original UK production has been cut by 30%. Does the Minister accept that addressing this massive decline should be top of the agenda when the BBC’s licence fee is soon reviewed?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord makes an important point. In the review of the licence fee—which, as he knows, we are committed to until 2027—a very wide range of issues will be taken into account, including, of course, the importance of our independent production sector. As he understands better than I, it has been enormously successful and vibrant, thanks to a great deal of other investment as well as that from the BBC.