Broadcasting: Recent Developments

Lord Hall of Birkenhead Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hall of Birkenhead (CB)]

My Lords, I also join in the congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, for inspiring this debate at what is a crucial time for broadcasting.

The Green Paper the Government published on the BBC starts off with a reminder of what, despite all its travails, the BBC delivers for this country:

“It is not just a broadcaster—it is a national institution”,


and

“If it did not already exist, we would have to invent it”.


Those are my sentiments entirely. The Secretary of State also singled out the BBC, along with the NHS, as the two most important institutions in our country. She said that:

“While one is fundamental to the health of our people, the other is fundamental to the health of our democracy”.


Seeing the BBC not only as another media organisation but as a cultural organisation, and part our social infrastructure, is crucial.

The BBC is central to our democracy as the nation’s most widely used and trusted source of news, national and local. Of course, we all benefit from the BBC’s global news services, now reaching around 453 million people each week, as the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, reminded us. This example shows that this country’s soft power needs to be built on and enhanced, and not, as at present, diminished.

The BBC is also the nation’s storyteller. The truth is that the streamers like Netflix, Apple and Amazon are commissioning content that will work on an international scale. Of course, we all value and love that. However, the total number of hours they make about the UK is in the thousands, not the tens of thousands that the public service broadcasters produce. I watched the immensely powerful documentary “Our Girls: The Southport Families” on BBC1, about the families of the three girls murdered in that dreadful attack last year. I do not believe that would have been commissioned or made by a streamer. James Graham, the illustrious playwright and screenwriter who, in my time, wrote the BBC1 series “Sherwood”, said that:

“The BBC and the public service broadcasters have a role to train, find and amplify voices that, on paper, may not have an easy, wide audience yet”.


He also said:

“Speak to any American screenwriter or programme-makers, and they are bewildered at our complacency over our PSBs. They wish they had a BBC”.


When I was working at the BBC, we would shy away from the argument that the organisation was also a defence against market failure. Nowadays, that should be part of the reason—not by any means the whole reason—why the BBC exists. For example, programmes about religion, the arts or music are rarely going to be internationally successful. As DG, I lost count of the number of parents who told me how much they valued British content for their children, either as toddlers or later as teenagers using “Bitesize”.

The BBC also gives cultural definition to communities. These services, whether they are in small local areas or serving the nations of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, are needed to report the stories and things that matter to their audience, and to celebrate the characteristics that make them what they are. Taking this forward is vital.

In my view, the BBC deserves a lot of credit for rethinking its programmes and services for the world we are now in. Audiences continue to spend more time watching the BBC TV iPlayer on average, per week, per person, than they spend on Netflix, Disney Plus and Amazon Prime combined.

Obviously, one of the big questions for the next year is how we fund all this in a way that allows the BBC properly to be what we want it to be. Can the licence fee, a charge for universal services, be reformed to be fairer and easier to pay, and more broadly based? Could the quantum of the licence fee be assessed by an independent body that could help inform the debate about what we, as citizens, think we should fund? There has been a 30% reduction in real terms in licensing income since 2010, done with little or no public debate about the consequences.

The BBC is the largest single investor in UK-made programming, contributing nearly £5 billion to the UK economy each year, half of which is spent outside London. That is important. However, an even bigger question is where and how should we have our culture defined. Let us make sure we have a properly funded BBC that reflects and celebrates who we are in all our rich diversity.