News Broadcasting: Regulation

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord McNally, on bringing this debate forward. He has been an indefatigable campaigner on this subject for many years. I also declare my interests as a trustee of Full Fact and the Public Interest News Foundation. An awful lot of what I would have touched on has already been said, so rather than go over it again I will make a series of slightly generalised points which may seem slightly separated from each other but, I hope, hang together coherently.

The underlying reality is that the media world is an ongoing, permanent revolution. What is appropriate, correct and accurate today may not be tomorrow or next week. As the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, said, you cannot have a properly working free country with universal suffrage if those who live in it do not have a reasonably accurate understanding of what is going on in the public realm—subject to the obvious caveats. If that is the case, you must get the information to the public. This is something that we spend insufficient time thinking about, because it requires money; it cannot be done for nothing. How you get it and how it is deployed is very important. Within that framework, pluralism is very important, because to answer Pilate’s question “What is truth?” is much more difficult than saying what is not true. Hence there is a real need in the broadcasting landscape for as much truthful pluralism in the national debate as you can achieve.

As somebody who chaired a local newspaper company for over a decade, I say that we must not overlook the problems and issues covering news in the smaller local areas around the country. In some ways this is a much greater problem than the question of national and international news. While the development of local democracy reporting is something that I support, I am not sure that we have cracked the problem.

The world that we live in is defined by the Government of the day. As a basic proposition, I suggest that the Government of the day should be kept as far as possible from news gathering and the national Executives of this country and other government agencies should in general have as little as possible to do with setting the terms of reference or the modus operandi of news gatherers. As has been said already, it should be left to Parliament and the courts and independent regulators to do that within a framework of an independent judiciary.

I have considerable sympathy with the journalists’ basic proposition that you must keep government as far as possible from this aspect of public life. Furthermore, it is almost axiomatic that the very rich should not be able to provide “their news” as opposed to “the news”, and they should not be able to gag the news media or stop them from distributing material that is in the public interest. I am not quite sure whether we have got the balance right in this country.

In the age of digital communications, we cannot control everything outside our own jurisdiction. We must watch what techniques there may be for dealing with aspects related to that, but we must recognise this as a truth. Equally, along the same lines, it is not appropriate for foreign Governments to control and own media coming into our country, for the simple reason that, by definition, we cannot be their priority.

At Second Reading of the Media Bill, I made the point that the world is changing so fast, and we do not have an appropriate legislative framework for dealing with the changes as they come into effect. As I said, this is a permanent revolution, and a decennial Act of Parliament is not a relevant means of keeping on top of the matters that are so important. We in this Parliament spend a considerable amount of time debating and thinking about these things, which is right and proper and must continue because, as Thomas Jefferson said, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. We must not cease to be vigilant. One of Parliament’s most important roles as part of the checks and balances in our system is to establish the framework within which our fourth estate works.

Media Bill

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 28th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the previous speakers, who have been advocating for more emphasis and importance to be ascribed to Welsh and Scottish television. As a Cumbrian, we do not have any regional dialect television, but I live in hope.

I am also delighted to support the Bill, and simultaneously slightly depressed because we heard from a number of speakers that the previous Bill covering this was 20 years ago. Well, I was the Minister sitting where the Minister sits now on the Bill before that. On that occasion, I told your Lordships, who I do not think really believed me, that we were on the cusp of a revolution. We are now dealing with the effects of much of that revolutionary change. Everything has morphed and evolved, and all the hardware that we were talking about are now forms of computer.

There is a single universe of multiplicity, variables and variations behind the subject that we are discussing. It began with the moving image. I am glad to say that radio is now increasing its prominence, and I would never have guessed at the popularity of podcasts, with some of them so important to people who work in the Palace of Westminster.

Then, as now, there was a vigorous debate about public service broadcasting, and in an era of almost limitless quantities of information, it is just as important —arguably more important—given the volume of material that is available and washing around in the digital space. At the centre of it, a core of curated and moderate material is very important.

It is equally important that it is not from a single monopoly supplier, and it must be from independent organisations that are free from either domestic or foreign political control. I entirely agree with the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, about the control of newspapers by foreign Governments or their fronts. I assume that he would agree that, were that to go ahead, the Government would deserve to lose the next general election.

These matters underpin our civic society and freedoms and rightly sit at the heart of the Bill and our discussions. Since much of this is, in one way or another, paid for by all of us, it follows that access should be free to the user and made simple, and the material should be didactic and give some pleasure as well.

I feel like I am the Grinch at Christmas, but we are in a world where excessive prominence is given to sport. I enjoy sport and it has an important place in our society, but it seems all politicians go weak at the knees at the mention of it. There are a range of things behind paywalls that matter to people, and we need to recognise that. A system where people can come together over subjects that they value is part of the project’s raison d’être; we must recognise there are other things beyond sport.

When we look at the media from the perspective of this Chamber—and the noble Lord, Lord Mendoza, made this point—we sometimes forget that media is big global business, and that we must, as a nation, have our share of it, and the policies surrounding our media must support this and our media’s contribution to our national prosperity and global influence. This depends on having trained and skilled entrants into the industry, and we must recognise that, first, we have a good record in this country and, secondly, it is expensive, but it will be even more so if we do not get it right. Equally, we must make sure that the working capital of the media industry is not killed off by public parsimony, greed or confiscatory taxation. Outcomes are capable of being measured not only in strict financial terms.

In some ways, the digital world is a kind of Wild West, but it is neither the public bar nor simply a private domain. Private matters can go viral, and private point-to-point communication can become as publicly available as deliberately broadcast material. In this country, we have a limited jurisdiction over the interface between the virtual and territorial worlds, and we must find ways of dealing with often difficult, ever-changing problems for lawmakers, Governments and regulators.

Some of the problems with the material that we are dealing with and the extent of it—we have recently discussed in this House digital markets, this Bill, data protection and artificial intelligence—occur within the context of Brexit repatriating to this country a significant amount of regulation that was previously dealt with at European level, which is an unnoticed aspect of this. The effect is that all these things are connected, are complicated, move quickly and are always changing, and I agree with the noble Lords, Lord Russell and Lord Mendoza, that one of the great challenges we face as a nation in this sector is how can we properly legislate in a timely manner in a fast-changing world.

What is clear from the Bill is that much of this will be done by secondary legislation, but there is considerable dissatisfaction, which is entirely legitimate, with the way Parliament handles these things. Setting aside general constitutional principles, I wonder whether our system of scrutinising secondary legislation is doing this properly on a technical level for the individuals and commercial sectors affected. I also wonder—and I do not know if they will thank me for suggesting it, and I rank it no higher than a suggestion—whether, on a rolling basis, the Communications and Digital Committee could have a standing role in examining the substance of these things. I can see that the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, in front of me is sceptical about that.

Finally, I turn to Clause 50. I chaired a local newspaper group for 10 years and one of the characteristics of the newspaper industry, based on its traditions of investigative journalism that this House has always endorsed, is the great suspicion of the Government of the day. I am surprised by the apparent nonchalance of the national press about what looks like an attempt in the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill to corrupt our legal system. The changes in this Bill will proceed; on the other hand, there is hard and soft law, and if the abuses that undoubtedly took place are going to be kept under control in future, it is important that the soft law—if that is the way we are going—deals with the problem. The difficulty is there is not sufficiently wide public confidence in the self-regulatory system that is in place. There still are abuses from the national newspapers, although not what we saw previously, but the confidence is not there, and they need to look at themselves to see if they think they can improve their standing in the wider world, which underpins their acceptability and long-term sustainability. Maybe a bit of blood on the carpet will help.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, and I say to my noble friend on the Front Bench that we are still on an advisory speaking time. The noble Lord made a very important point about parliamentary oversight of the powers delegated or devolved to regulators through various pieces of legislation that have gone through Parliament in the last few months. The solution is to expand our existing Select Committee capacity to manage that and not to try and manage it through our existing capacity, because we do not have the relevant resources and we need more. I have tabled an amendment to the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill precisely to meet that objective, and I urge the noble Lord to support it when it is debated in a couple of weeks’ time.

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

I was delighted to hear what the noble Baroness said. My remarks were clearly justified because they elicited that remark from her and got her on her feet to tell us all about it.

BBC Funding

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Tuesday 12th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

The Minister has explained that at the centre of the financial arrangements which he has described is the concept of fairness. If we consider fairness in respect of licence fee payers and in respect of the BBC, we are really talking about apples and pears. Could the Minister explain how the Government balance fairness to the licence fee payer with fairness to the BBC? It seems that there may be a bit of a risk that we end up with a solution that is rather fairer to one side than the other.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

That thorny question is one for the future funding review, but it is important. We want to ensure that the BBC has a sustainable income, but also that the sources of that are fair. I have pointed already to the declining number of people who are paying for a licence fee and the declining number who watch television live. Funding models which are predicated on some of those conceptions of the past will look increasingly anachronistic as we move into the BBC’s next century. We have also seen licence fee evasion rising, so it is right that we look at this to make sure that we are coming up with a good answer to the difficult question that the noble Lord poses.

Online Safety Bill

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 19th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I very much agree. The core of what I want to say in supporting this amendment is that in Committee we will do what we are here to do. There are a lot of amendments to what is a very long and complicated Bill: we will test the Minister and his team on what the Government are trying to achieve and whether they have things exactly right in order to give Ofcom the best possible chance to make it work. But when push comes to shove at the end of the process, at its heart we need to build trust in Ofcom and give it the flexibility to be able to respond to the changing online world and the changing threats to children and adults in that online world. To do that, we need to ensure that we have the right amount of transparency.

I was particularly pleased to see proposed new paragraph (g) in the amendment, on transparency, as referenced by the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell. It is important that we have independence for Ofcom; we will come to that later in Committee. It is important that Parliament has a better role in terms of accountability so that we can hold Ofcom to account, having given it trust and flexibility. I see this amendment as fundamental to that, because it sets the framework for the flexibility that we then might want to be able to give Ofcom over time. I argue that this is about transparency of purpose, and it is a fundamental addition to the Bill to make it the success that we want.

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, made possibly one of the truest statements that has ever been uttered in this House when she told us that this is a very complicated Bill. It is complicated to the extent that I have no confidence that I fully understand it and all its ramifications, and a number of other speakers have said the same. For that reason—because I am aware of my own limitations, and I am pretty sure they are shared by others—it is important to have a statement of purpose at the outset to provide the co-ordinates for the discussion we are going to have; I concur with the approach of the noble Lord, Lord Allan. Because there is then a framework within which we can be sure, we hope, that we will manage to achieve an outcome that is both comprehensive and coherent. As a number of noble Lords have said, there are a number of completely different, or nearly different, aspects to what we are discussing, yet the whole lot have to link together. In the words of EM Forster, we have to

“connect the prose and the passion”.

The Minister may say, “We can’t do that at the outset”. I am not so sure. If necessary, we should actually draft this opening section, or any successor to it, as the last amendment to the Bill, because then we would be able to provide an overview. That overview will be important because, just as I am prepared to concede that I do not think I understand it all now, there is a very real chance that I will not understand it all then either. If we have this at the head of the Bill, I think that will be a great help not only to us but to all those who are subsequently going to have to make use of it.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to say something simple in support of what has already been said. If it is true that the Bill’s purposes are already scattered in the course of the Bill and throughout its substance, I cannot see what possible objection there can be to having them extracted and put at the beginning. They are not contentious—they are there already—so let us have them at the beginning to set a direction of travel. It seems so obvious to me.

It is an important Bill. I thank the Minister and his colleagues because they have put an enormous amount of work into this, and of course the Joint Committee has done its work. We have all been sent I cannot say how many briefing papers from interested bodies and so on. It is vital that, as we try to hold as much of this together as we possibly can in taking this very important Bill forward, we should have a sense of purpose and criteria against which we can measure what we eventually go on to discuss, make decisions about and introduce into the body of the Bill. I cannot see that the logic of all that can possibly be faulted.

Of course, there will be words that are slippery, as has been said. I cannot think of a single word, and I have been a lexicographer in my life, that does not lend itself to slipperiness. I could use words that everybody thinks we have in common in a way that would befuddle noble Lords in two minutes. It seems to me self-evident that these purposes, as stated here at the outset of our consideration in Committee, are logical and sensible. I will be hoping, as the Bill proceeds, to contribute to and build on the astounding work that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has laid before us, with prodigious energy, in alerting all kinds of people, not just in your Lordships’ House but across the country, to the issues at stake here. I hope that she will sense that the Committee is rallying behind her in the astute way that she is bringing this matter before us. But again, I will judge outcomes against the provisions in this opening statement, a criterion for judging even the things that I feel passionate about.

The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and I have been in our own discussions about different parts of the Bill, about things such as suicide and self-harm. That is content. There are amendments. We will discuss them. Again, we can hold our own decisions about those matters against what we are seeking to achieve as stated so clearly at the outset of the Bill.

I remember working with the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson. It is so fabulous to have him back; the place feels right when he is here. When I was a bit of a greenhorn—he was the organ grinder and I was the monkey—I remember him pleading at the beginning of what was at that time the Data Protection Bill to have a statement like this at the beginning of that Bill. We were told, “Oh, but it is all in the Bill; all the words are there”. Then why not put them at the beginning, so that we can see them clearly and have something against which to measure our progress?

With all these things said, I hope we will not spend too much time on this. I hope we will nod it through, and then I hope we will remind ourselves of what it seeks to achieve as we go on in the interminable days that lie ahead of us. I have one last word as an old, old preacher remembering what I was told when I started preaching: “First, you tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em; then you tell ‘em; and then you tell ‘em what you’ve told ‘em”. Let us take at least the first of those steps now.

Online Safety Bill

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, like other contributors to the debate, I support the Bill, but that does not mean that I think that it is perfect; we must be aware of letting the best be the enemy of the good. I declare my interests as a trustee of Full Fact and the Public Interest News Foundation.

I was very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, referred to the Broadcasting Act 1996, because, during its passage as a Bill, I was fulfilling the role that the Minister is performing today. I remember that, before coming to address your Lordships, I looked at the draft speech that had been prepared and which described the Bill at length. It was incredibly boring, and I said, “No, I am not going to do that; I want to describe to the House what the world that the Bill will bring into effect will look like”. I told your Lordships that I was taking them into a world of science fiction. In fact, I may have misled your Lordships on that occasion, because I underestimated the impact of the technology that was evolving. Also, I do not think that anybody realised quite to the extent that we do now that you cannot disinvent technology: things have happened which are here for ever from here on out.

While technology has changed, sadly one thing has not changed: human wickedness. Rather, human wickedness has been innovative. The Government tell us that they are great believers in innovation, but I do not think that they believe in innovation in this context. History suggests, and the contemporary world corroborates, that countering wickedness and vice is never easy, particularly when it is complicated by issues of jurisdiction, geography and technology.

My view is that this simply cannot be done by primary law or, indeed, secondary legislation. As the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, touched on, we need all kinds of soft law and codes of conduct to complement that. She was right that we have to move on from the kind of legislative approach we have now, which I call “stop and start”. We have a period of intense debate in Parliament about a piece of legislation and then, as has been heard this evening, it is all forgotten for five years—and then you find that the piece of legislation you passed does not really meet the problems of the day. We must find a way of passing what I like to describe as “living legislation”, so that it is possible, in an ongoing way, to allow those things to evolve in response to the problems that the world is presenting. It is not simply a matter of a cosy relationship between the Government, the regulator, media companies, pressure groups, charities and so on; Parliament must be involved in doing what is, after all, its real job: law-making. I think that the public, too, need to know what is going on.

If I am right in saying so, and I think I am, this kind of static approach to law-making cannot really be what is needed in circumstances of the kinds we are talking about now. Parliament, this House and the other place together, should somehow take the metaphorical bull by the horns and evolve ongoing procedures to complement the technological evolution of the internet, which changes every day—indeed, things will have changed during the duration of the very debate we are having. I dare say that the same is true elsewhere, including in other sectors about which I know very little. If we, as parliamentarians, do not grasp this particular nettle, the consequence will be that the citizens of this country will materially lose control over quite a lot of what surrounds their daily lives.

Public Service Broadcasting: BBC Centenary

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I start like many other speakers by saying how appropriate it is that the noble Lord, Lord Foster, has instituted this debate, first, marking as it does the Minister’s return and, secondly, celebrating the BBC’s 100th birthday. It is now older than each and every Member of the House of Lords—and I am confident that it will stay that way.

During that past century, the BBC has become a real UK-wide and global institution and brand and, taken as a whole, has been a real force for good during both peace and war. In terms of its current place in the UK, it and the National Health Service seem to be the two most significant institutions that have emerged.

At its start, the politicians and broadcasters were quite right in insisting that the Government were to get nowhere near the day-to-day running of the corporation and that political interference should be nowhere near our national—and, in those days, monopoly—broadcaster. It is from this that public service broadcasting, or what the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, called “public service media”, has evolved, combining the requirement of non-partisan political news and comment with the need to provide other things for society as a whole. This has obviously developed further with the establishment of ITV and then our other public service broadcasters in the ensuing years. Channel 4, in my view, is a little bit different in some respects, and I will try to explain that later.

One of the heresies of contemporary Britain is that there is an overweening tendency to believe that we are exceptional—generally, we are not. But, as far as I can see it, there is a fair case to be made for saying that the quality of broadcasting—using that word in a wide sense in an internet world—is not surpassed anywhere else. This is something of which we should be proud, for which we should be grateful, and which we should cherish.

I mentioned Channel 4 which, as has been said, also has a significant birthday this year. If we look at its history, how it has evolved and the way in which it has been established in law by Parliament, it seems clear that, even if at one time it was a mere broadcaster, it now has a distinct role and purpose in helping and supporting our independent broadcasters and young businesses to break into the national and then the international market, which is hugely important from a UK economic perspective. Its function now is, in some respects, much closer to something in the third sector than being purely commercial. It is for this reason that the suggestion that it be privatised calls to mind the phrase “breach of trust”. Apart from anything else, I really cannot see how privatising Channel 4—for what, in the context of the national finances, is a mess of pottage—tallies with what it should be doing.

Since we are celebrating anniversaries, I remember 25 years ago—I do not expect that many other noble Lords will—when I was Minister for Broadcasting. What is dramatically clear is that the media was very different then in all respects from what it is now. No longer is spectrum the key; in the age of the online world, that has changed. While it is important, television and broadcasting are only a part of something much larger.

The question, then, is whether public service broadcasting is still relevant. I think it is. Not merely must even-handedness be embedded in at least some news provision that is available free to all—after all, we have seen how fake and dishonest news is universal and its impact is invariably malicious and carcinogenic—but the availability of quality broadcast material over a range of genres is a complement to the educational and cultural remit of the contemporary UK state, at least for the time being. It is part of society’s information and societal infrastructure.

One of the big questions is how to pay for the BBC, not least when the use of television sets is far from universal, as has been said. I have always thought, although I may be heterodox, that the licence fee is essentially a charge, not a tax. I suggest that it should be treated as such. I would attach it to the council tax for onward hypothecation, rather than having the BBC bankroll the cost to certain deserving categories that should be dealt with as part of the mainstream element of the welfare system.

What about the non-licence fee-funded broadcasters? Clearly, spectrum and EPG prominence have some value, but is it enough to sustain this important part of the public service offering beyond the commercial revenues they can generate? I do not know the answer to that; it needs to be thought about carefully.

Nobody would have set out to create the system of public service broadcasting we now enjoy. It has evolved in a peculiarly British way into something that works, and we should be proud of it. We must not curtail the evolutionary processes of technology and the way the world works; if we do so, it will die, and everyone will be the loser.

BBC: Government Support

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I join the chorus not only of the Cumbrians here but of the whole House in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, on securing this debate at a time when, as we all can hear, there is a degree of controversy surrounding certain aspects of the BBC and its activities. I must declare at the start that I am a supporter, albeit a critical friend and, I trust, a candid one. I also recognise that we live in a fallen world, where the best aspirations are not always achieved but must never be forgotten.

I begin from the perspective shared by a number of speakers in the debate that the BBC has become an institution which helps define this country and its own brand of distinctiveness—Britishness. It is very important to very many people in all kinds of ways, but not to everyone, and it is, as we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, probably the greatest instrument of soft power and the promotion of British views and voice that we can hope for.

When, about 100 years ago, the media world—not that it was called that then—went through a revolution with the development of radio and then television, it was recognised that the fourth estate, which is of course an important part of the wider constitution, was changing. The BBC in its current form evolved from that, with its central attributes—and people may accuse me of being a semantic pedant—of being a national broadcaster, not a state or government broadcaster, which has public funding but, at the same time, is independently managed under the rule of law. This includes the rule of impartiality, which, as we all know, is a pretty slippery concept in certain contexts. It is also accountable both to Parliament and to the public. From that British concept, public service broadcasting evolved.

These attributes do not necessarily work smoothly but they do basically work. That is important. Now it seems to me that it is the central datum point around which the rest of the media world in this country relates. It is a touchstone against which other things are judged; some, as we have heard, are better and some less so. I believe that the availability of accurate information is at the core of democracy and voters need to be sure of a modicum of correctness, truth and true understanding properly to play their role, not least because decisions we all take as voters can have as big an impact on our neighbours as on ourselves. The BBC in particular, and public service broadcasting more generally, plays an important part in this. Like the National Health Service, it is always there, even if you do not use it. Furthermore, clearly the public must have confidence—it must be trusted and be impartial. One of the crucial aspects of this in the round, it seems to me, is that the media must never take the Government’s shilling as respects news and current affairs.

I now briefly turn to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, one of its latest initiatives in this context. For more than a decade I chaired a regional media group, principally newspapers, which were very important in the dissemination of local news and information and, as such, performed an important civic function. The well-understood collapse in the classified advertising market led to a collapse in our revenues, which led to fewer journalists which led to less local news, which in turn was a civic failure, I believe. In response to that, the Local Democracy Reporting Service provides money for journalists employed by local newspapers with financial support from the BBC. It then makes their stories more generally available. It is rather like a mini Press Association. The local press still matters in this country and this is an important initiative. I was initially sceptical about it but I am very happy to eat my words and say that it has been a very good example of how the Government and the BBC have responded to collateral damage from the digital revolution. To underline my point, it was only last week that I was metaphorically doorstepped by one of its reporters.

There is a lot of discussion, debate and rumour about where the BBC goes from here. What it seems to me must not happen is that the Government may feel tempted to eye up the BBC rather as Henry VIII eyed up the monasteries. It should remain at the heart of public service broadcasting and at the heart of this country’s media landscape. It is not a cash cow and should be run by Lord Reith rather than Lord Haw-Haw.

Channel 4: Consultation

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Tuesday 16th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for that important point. Channel 4 is uniquely constrained in its ability to meet the challenges facing the media landscape today; in comparison with other public service broadcasters, its access to capital is highly constrained. That is why we are looking at reform to protect Channel 4’s long-term future, so that it can continue to be a valued public service broadcaster, serving audiences with great public service content for years to come.

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

Does the Minister agree that Channel 4 is not just any old media company but rather a sui generis British institution established by Act of Parliament—a hub at the centre of networks reaching out deep into broadcasting and the digital world, the creative industries, skills, minorities, the regions, entrepreneurialism and culture?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

Yes, and Channel 4’s inherent characteristics are also its strengths: its ability to make distinctive content, its work with independent producers and, in turn, its ability to attract diverse audiences. However, those strengths are not at odds with private ownership. They are things that we think would be attractive to potential buyers, things that they would seek to nurture and strengthen. We do not think that there is a false choice between public service remit and privatisation. As the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, pointed out, it is possible to have both.

UK Journalism (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, as other noble Lords have said, this is a good report from the Communications and Digital Committee under the distinguished leadership of the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert. Hence, this is an important debate. It is also an important debate because we are talking about an important topic, which is the framework in which our democracy works. This has been on the agenda of the Communications Committee since its early days, when I played a part in it, and regularly, rightly and forcefully, the committee comes back to it from time to time. I declare an interest as a trustee both of Full Fact and the Public Interest News Foundation, which are referred to in the report.

I am going to make my remarks from the perspective of local news. I was chairman of the CM Group, a Cumbria-based regional media company, for more than 10 years. It is now part of Newsquest. There is not only an important democratic aspect to news and local news, but an important community one because of the cohesion it can help bring to communities around the length and breadth of the country. We all know of some of the problems relating to that in the current world. I think it was CP Scott in his editorial to mark the centenary of the Guardian—some of your Lordships may have been sent a copy of it—who commented that newspapers are both institutions and businesses, but that it is important that a newspaper’s role as an institution ultimately trumps its characteristic as a business.

In discussions such as this, we tend to look to the future perhaps more than we might. I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, who commented that 200-odd years ago, when modern newspapers as we know them came into being, there was—in my words—rather a long-established ménage à trois between advertisers, journalists and publishers. Interestingly, in the original edition of the Guardian, the first item on the first page was an advertisement for an anonymous black dog, which has thereby gained some degree of immortality.

For about 200 years that was sustainable, but now, thanks principally to technology, it has all broken down. The crucial question is, what happened? In very simple terms, the money ran out. I believe that in this country—and across the world more widely, for that matter—we somehow need to establish a sustainable system that will work to deliver these things over the years and into the future, so that the money will not run out.

In the report, a number of very useful points are made about specific things. But while they are valuable by themselves, they do not actually give a full lead towards a bigger picture. The report comments on charities, and the Public Interest News Foundation has registered investigative journalism as a proper subject for charitable registration. But it is not appropriate for the rough and tumble of real politics. It has a role to play, but it is not the answer. Criticism is made of the system of apprenticeships that we now have in this country. I currently chair the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership, and for a time chaired a training company, and I believe that the criticisms, not merely in the context of journalism but more widely, are justified.

The noble Lord, Lord Faulks, talked about algorithms, and I am sure he is absolutely right. If consumer protection means anything, the confidence the public have and the need to know exactly how algorithms work is obviously crucial in this sector. Finally, as far as the relationship between platforms and publishers is concerned, it is clearly the case that the platforms have a dominant position, as the noble Lord, Lord Grade, said. This needs to be addressed.

It used not to be the case, but recently it seems that when there is a problem, the Government throw money at it. Journalists and media companies must not take the 39 pieces of silver, because it betrays their constitutional role. It seems to be one of the heresies of the modern world that the private sector is motivated principally—indeed often only—by greed. Clearly there are some extremely greedy people in the private sector, but we have to find a way whereby the private sector can deliver what we want to see, because we do not want the state to be directly involved. One of the interesting things about our country is that we seem to have a genius for devising ways of doing this. In public sector broadcasting, it is not only the BBC—there is Channel 4, ITV and Channel 5, all of which are working in a slightly constrained legal framework to enable media to be delivered to our fellow citizens. I suggest to the Minister—and I congratulate him on his new job, as a predecessor of his predecessor, the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey—that, if he could help lead on establishing a new settlement for media in this country which enables the fourth estate to play its constitutional role and at the same time remain solvent, he will have done a very great service.

As I said at the start, this is an important debate which goes way beyond the economic value of the sector. I am sure we shall come back to it, and it is right that we should.

Public Service Broadcasting (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, this is an important debate on a valuable report and I welcome it, perhaps as much despite the tribulations currently facing the BBC as because of them. That is because the noise that that scandal generates may drown out other, at least as important questions which need consideration. Before proceeding, I declare that I am a director of Full Fact and the Public Interest News Foundation.

I first became engaged with the question of public service broadcasting in 1995, when, unexpectedly—to me at least—I became the Minister for Broadcasting in the last chapter of the John Major Government. Before then, it was not a topic with which I had had serious political engagement. The title of this report would have been as apt then as now, and the document under its banner could equally have been written at that time. However, thanks to technology, the world about which it would have been written would have been more or less entirely different.

Of course, unless you are establishing radio and television from scratch, you are always caught by the hangover from the immediate past. Paradoxically, therefore, while the political case is strong for public service broadcasting in some form at the inception of radio and television services with monopoly characteristics, it may, superficially, at least, appear to be weaker as the number of channels increase. Is that right, and what should the response be?

As we all know, one of the revolutionary changes in recent years is that the means for transferring information, including the media, have been transformed. The constraints imposed by spectrum scarcity have more or less disappeared, and broadcasting, which in simple terms at one point was a multipoint service, has evolved into a whole series of varying versions and combinations of point-to-point, point-to-multipoint, multipoint-to-multipoint, on-demand and mobile services. This is a revolution and, I suggest, a beneficial one which has been life-enhancing and life-improving for many people. The effect of all this is that we have in the most general sense moved from a world of scarcity to one of abundance—some might say excessive abundance—which of course poses problems, just as scarcity does.

Having ended my much-enjoyed stint as chairman of the Communications Committee in 2004, because I believe that when one gives something up one should walk away, I deliberately took a step back from engagement in the politics of the media. However, I did not leave my interest in it behind, and my involvement with the wider media world continued in some respects. It is this change from scarcity to abundance which strikes me so strongly. During the whole of this period, public service broadcasting has been at the heart of UK media thinking, and, while things keep evolving, it has remained there while being consistently challenged.

We must be clear that public service broadcasting is not only what used to be known as television; it is also radio, and, as has been mentioned, it is not only the BBC but Channel 4, ITV and Channel 5. Together, they comprise our public service broadcasters; equally, each is an interconnected part of the whole, and they should not be wantonly and rashly reverse-engineered or disaggregated. In a world of information overload, they together provide a kind of datum point at the centre of what is on offer more widely.

In recent years and months, the incidence of fake news and its younger brother, dodgy information, has been at the heart of political debate in this country, both as a phenomenon but also as an influencer of voter behaviour. In my view, public sector broadcasters’ role is to provide an accessible gauge against which people can look at these wider media offerings. Because public service broadcasting is plural in its suppliers, there is no monopoly in its source, something which is very dangerous in a free society.

Our society has a number of national services with which everyone can engage if they feel the need to do so—that is the way we do these things in the 21st century. Of these, perhaps the National Health Service is the most obvious. Public service broadcasting in some ways—but only some—is similar, in that it is available to all. Just as the NHS relates to health, ultimately, public service broadcasting, given its plural character, provides guidance and commentary on the accuracy, truth, relevance and quality of material which is so important to the political and wider social health of the nation. It is available to all and compulsory for none.

Our country, it is said, is in an unhappy political state. I believe that public service broadcasting can and does contribute to resolving some of the differences and tensions across the United Kingdom, in a way that the simple dialectic of competition in the market will not do by itself. We have inherited public service broadcasting and, as has already been mentioned, I do not suppose that anybody would invent it in its present form now. However, it is a reality and I believe it is serving a valuable purpose. We just have to remember, in the well-known words of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in The Leopard, that it is necessary that things must change for things to remain the same.