Media Bill

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th May 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Viscount Colville of Culross]

14: Clause 8, page 9, line 29 at end insert—
“(2A) After subsection (1), insert—“(1A) The regulatory regime for Channel 4 includes the conditions that OFCOM consider appropriate for securing that, in each year, not less than 35 per cent of Channel 4’s total spend on qualifying audiovisual content is allocated to independent productions made by independent production companies with an annual turnover not exceeding £25,000,000.(1B) The Secretary of State may by order amend subsection (1A) by substituting a different figure for the annual turnover specified in that section.(1C) Before making an order under subsection (1B) the Secretary of State must consult—(a) OFCOM,(b) Channel 4, and(c) independent production companies that are likely to be affected by the order.””Member's explanatory statement
This amendment would add an “SME Guarantee” for Channel 4 commissioning, requiring that at least 35% of Channel 4’s annual spend on qualifying audiovisual content is allocated to productions made by “indie” producers with annual revenues smaller than £25m. This amendment also provides the Secretary of State the power to amend, following consultation, the revenue figure defining the production companies eligible under the SME Guarantee.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a freelance television producer who works for small independent production companies making content for public service broadcasters. I am also an officer of the Channel 4 APPG, so I speak as a critical friend to the channel. I thank the noble Lord, Lord McNally, for putting his name to this amendment. I also thank the many small independent companies to whom I have spoken, as well as Tom Chivers from the Media Reform Coalition, and Channel 4 itself.

I put down Amendments 14 and 15 to Clause 8 because I want to ensure that Channel 4 focuses its commissioning on future support for the SMEs. I hope the amendments will encourage the channel to expand its present commissioning process, which too often rewards large suppliers with large commissions. There will be much argument about the level of the cap below which companies qualify as SMEs. However, subsections (1B) and (1C) of this amendment give the Secretary of State the power to be flexible and alter the threshold figure if it proves to be too low for small drama producers, for instance, but only after she has consulted Ofcom, Channel 4 and independent companies.

Amendment 15 requires the criteria to be extended to an annual revenue of £25 million a year over five years. This would mean that a single large drama commission would not adversely affect a company’s status as an SME by pushing its annual revenue in a single year over the £25 million mark. The information on the company’s revenue will not be hard to find; it will be readily accessible in Companies House.

Channel 4 was set up in 1982 by Mrs Thatcher’s Government in order to break the duopoly of BBC and ITV. Its purpose was to disrupt the television ecosystem, which it did wonderfully well. Its aim was not just to have content different from the existing public service broadcasters and to reach new audiences, but to allow a thousand flowers to bloom. As Mrs Thatcher’s deputy, Willie Whitelaw, said:

“We must aim for a channel that says something new in new ways”.


He added:

“We must seek to provide an outlet for the talent of independent producers”.


Channel 4 has been very successful in encouraging thousands of people across the television industry to leave their comfortable staff jobs in the other public service broadcasters and take the risk of setting up small, independent television production companies. It created a culture in the media where independent producers became risk takers and small business owners, supplying a channel which aimed to reach minorities and poorly served audiences.

For much of the last few decades, Channel 4 has been at the centre of nurturing Britain’s independent television sector, which is the engine of our world-beating creative economy, the seed corn of the industry. But the media environment has changed dramatically in the last few years, both in content commissioning and in the supply side of the industry. Hundreds of small companies, which make up the lifeblood of the industry, have been bought up by mega television production companies such as Banijay and All3Media, which is owned by the American company Warner Brothers.

It is not surprising that these big companies have been so successful. In 2022, over three-quarters of Channel 4’s UK commissioning spend went to production companies with turnovers in excess of £25 million per year, while just 21% went to producers with annual revenues of under £25 million per year, despite these smaller companies making up more than half of all independent production companies in the UK.

Unfortunately, the latest figures, from 2022, show the percentage of Channel 4’s spend on commissioning from those bigger companies to have increased from 64% in 2020 to over three-quarters two years later, while the figures for the under £25 million companies have gone down from 36% in 2020 to 26% in 2022. This has happened at a time when Channel 5—which is privately owned—commissioned an amazing 81% of those smaller companies, a figure which has gone up even further in 2022.

This is contributing to the crisis in the industry, with commissions to smaller indies, and regions, collapsing. The latest BECTU survey of its members estimates that nearly three-quarters of its members are not working. Some 30% have not worked in the past three months, while 34% have had less than a month’s work since November 2023. As a result, there is a dramatic exodus from the industry, which has been one of the beacons of our economy. In February 2024, 37% of the respondents to the BECTU survey said that they were planning to leave the industry, with 40% of women and half of black respondents saying that they were going to look for work outside the sector within five years.

The money to build these small companies comes from the terms of trade, set up to ensure that they get the majority share of the back-end revenue from further sales of these programmes. This comes only from commissions by British broadcasters. US companies pay a straight production fee and keep all the back-end profit, so the Bill needs to focus on ensuring that British broadcasters support the future of up-and-coming content suppliers across the UK. The BBC is carrying much of the burden, but I and many other colleagues have fought hard to ensure that Channel 4 remains in public ownership. That mission having succeeded, the emphasis must be to encourage the broadcaster to support the next generation—the seed corn of television production.

I fear that Channel 4’s attitude can be summed up in its submission to Ofcom when renewing its 2024 licence, in which it said that

“the UK production sector continues to be significantly smaller outside London”,

with

“fewer production companies, often smaller in scale, and therefore with less capacity to develop creative ideas and produce them”.

This statement also relates to Amendments 16 and 17 in the next group, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser of Craigmaddie, which will support quotas for commissioning in the regions and nations.

I have been talking to small indies across the country and have been told horrendous stories of the Channel 4 commissioning process—or lack of it. One told me of a series being cancelled just three weeks before filming was due to start. Others had the extreme difficulty of getting programme ideas through the channel’s commissioning process.

I want to balance my statements by pointing out that Channel 4 is capable of commissioning astonishing programmes from small production companies, such as “The Push”, from a small Leeds-based company, Candour, which had good ratings, and told an important story from a diverse community, but there are not nearly enough of these. The channel did point out to me that its emerging indie fund has invested £17 million over the last four years, to identify and nurture emerging talent and to help them grow their businesses. The fund also provides guidance to selected indies about the Channel 4 commissioning process, to provide them with the skill set to pitch for further work. This help must, of course, be welcome, but it is not revenue from commissions.

This great channel, which is still one of the jewels of public service broadcasting, is battling against the headwinds of a fiercely competitive television economy. As it is a publicly owned company, I call on the Government to push it further in supporting SMEs and to help to bolster the future of our creative industries. Channel 4’s slogan is “4 All the UK”, and I ask the Minister at least to look at Amendments 14 and 15, to ensure that this publicly owned channel does just that.

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, I point out that I did not speak at Second Reading. I was here until 6 pm and then went off to speak at a long-standing engagement at Queen Mary University of London.

It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Viscount, Lord Colville. I put my name to Amendment 14 because I strongly support his campaign, as he has explained it, to make sure that we do not get stampeded or bamboozled into policies because the world is changing, globalising and internationalising and we therefore think that certain things are inevitable. One of the things that we enjoy in the British broadcasting environment is that, for 100 years, we have been bucking the market. It was a Conservative Government that created the BBC as a public corporation safeguarded by a royal charter. It was a Conservative Government that introduced ITV as a confederation of regional television companies. Even today, ITV retains some of the DNA of that regional network; I still consider myself as coming from “Granada land”, and you can still find some of that company’s ethos in ITV today. As was pointed out, it was a Conservative Government, under Mrs Thatcher, that created Channel 4. Let us not be bullied; we have a good record of making television that is national—in the broadest sense—and distinctly British and that sets standards for others around the world.

Unfortunately, I cannot stay for the debate on the next group, but I crept into the meeting that was held on it. I felt like a Sassenach in the gathering of Scots and Welsh and Northern Irish people, putting the point, which has been proved time and again with a little nudging by government, that there is talent out there in the regions. But if you leave it just to the market, you have to make some effort to get results, because London is such a massive black hole of energy.

I am sometimes teased by my colleagues when I refer to the fact that I was on the Puttnam committee that gave pre-legislative scrutiny to the 2003 Act. One of the great advantages of the House of Lords is having that kind of perspective. When I look at that, I see that it was amazing that we got so many things right when we were not just looking through a glass darkly at what was happening. There was no internet and none of the technologies that have been developed in the last 20 years. In that Act, there were still various safeguards for making sure that our broadcasting ecology retained a British stamp to it—a British DNA—and that is why I support this amendment now.

I do not think that the idea for Channel 4 was to create a whole new industry of successful British indies, but that is what it did. It was perhaps too successful, in that many of those indies, as was referred to, were then swallowed up by other companies or themselves became big—not little—minnows.

However, that is the great effort: if we can keep this diversification of commissioning in Channel 4, and in the other countries and the regions, we are distorting the market to a certain extent but beneficially, by forcing it to find the talent in the regions and in the smaller companies. The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, in his intervention earlier referred to the crude market forces “squeezing out” those opportunities. I therefore hope that Channel 4 will think again.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The diversity of our world-leading television production sector is one of the main reasons that it is so successful. We have companies of different sizes operating all over the UK, focusing on genres ranging from specialist factual to high-end drama and everything in between. Last year, these companies delivered the highest sector revenues on record: just under £4 billion. Smaller producers are, of course, hugely important for ensuring a healthy production ecosystem, and the current regulatory regime for independent production has been very successful indeed in promoting and supporting them. Boosting this independent sector was one of the purposes behind the design of Channel 4. I do not want to make the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, feel old, but I was not around to be a sceptic at the time of those debates—they happened before I was born. But Channel 4 has, as I have said from this Dispatch Box, done a great service over the last four decades, and the regulatory regime has supported that too.

PACT, the industry body, estimates that there are more than 250 independent producers with an annual turnover of less than £1 million operating in the market today. Its statistics also show that 75% of independent producers have an annual turnover of less than £25 million. These are the producers that the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, had in mind, particularly with his Amendments 14 and 15. The issue of providing further support for smaller independent producers is one that we have looked at closely, most recently through our work on the mitigations to accompany the removal of Channel 4’s publisher-broadcaster restriction, which noble Lords have noted.

The clear message from the sector when we did that was that the measures which singled out smaller producers specifically—for example, via a turnover threshold, as the noble Viscount’s Amendment 14 proposes—would not be welcome on the grounds that they would be anti-competitive and penalise success. Producers want an incentive to win more commissions and grow their businesses, not to stay small. Those we spoke to also raised concerns that such measures would be difficult for Ofcom to enforce and could lead to increased monitoring and compliance costs for the regulator. Although these issues are addressed in part by the additional flexibility which the noble Viscount offers through his Amendment 15, the overarching concerns that we have with this approach still stand.

The Government recognise that this is a challenging time for producers and the production sector because of the slowdown in commissioning activity as a result of the downturn in the television advertising market, and we are taking steps to support producers and the production sector at this time, including the generous tax reliefs across studio space and visual effects, investing in studio infrastructure, supporting innovation and promoting independent content through the UK Global Screen Fund, but, for the reasons I have set out, we do not feel that we are able to support the amendments which the noble Viscount has put before us, but we are grateful for the opportunity to have this debate.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

I thank the Minister for his reply. I think we all agree that we want to try to encourage the diversity of Channel 4, which has been so successful in creating a vibrant independent sector. But the truth is that the small indies that I have spoken to are having a really hard time. I am grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Bassam and Lord McNally, for talking about the diversity of the production sector and the role that the channel has played in helping that to develop. I listened carefully to what the Minister said about the regulatory regime as it stands having been successful in developing the market, and that his work with PACT and other producers has delivered a message that the sector and small producers do not welcome any kind of threshold, which I am suggesting in this amendment.

All I can say is that I have spoken to a great many small independent production companies across this country. They are really struggling; they are having a really hard time getting their commissions even looked at, let alone getting any kind of positive response. I ask the Minister to go back and talk to some of the smaller ones—not just PACT, but some of the smaller indies as well. I know that the Conservative Government see themselves as being on the side of entrepreneurs, so I encourage the Minister to do all he can to support the courageous and determined men and women who have set up these independent production companies across our country and made the sector so successful. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 14 withdrawn.

Media Bill

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th May 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Viscount Colville of Culross]

9: Clause 1, page 3, line 11, leave out subsection (6) and insert—
“(6) The requirements in this subsection are that—(a) that the relevant audiovisual services (taken together) comprise a public service for the dissemination of information and for the provision of education and entertainment, (b) the range of audiovisual content genres made available by the public service broadcasters (taken together) include but not be limited to content about—(i) religion and other beliefs,(ii) science,(iii) arts and cultural content,(iv) social issues,(v) matters of international significance, and(vi) matters of specialist interest, and(c) there is a sufficient quantity and range of programmes within each genre.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment would statutorily require OFCOM to report on whether public service broadcasters have made available an appropriate amount and range of programmes in named societally valuable public service genres both on broadcast channels and on their online Broadcast Video on Demand (BVOD) platforms. Without specifying these genres in law OFCOM will not be required to monitor them.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

I declare an interest as a freelance TV producer who has worked for all four public service broadcasters. I thank the Voice of the Listener & Viewer and the Media Reform Coalition for their support in putting this speech together, and the commercial public service broadcasters for their information. I am also grateful to noble Lords who have attached their names to this amendment.

I welcome a lot of the Bill. However, I have tabled this amendment because I am convinced that the public service remit set out in Clause 1 is not worthy of the name. The White Paper says that it replaces the

“outdated set of fourteen overlapping purposes … with a new, shorter remit, focussed on the things that”

the PSBs

“are uniquely positioned to deliver”.

Unfortunately, this new remit does not deliver either of those things for audiences or for the industry.

I degrouped this amendment so that noble Lords would have a chance to direct their speeches specifically towards the need for genres within public service broadcasting. In looking at Clause 1, I ask the Minister: are the Government really not going to insist that our commercial PSBs commission and broadcast any content on science, on the arts, on social issues, any content of international significance—or, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds said earlier, any content on religion? In a society where there is a desperate lack of knowledge about those matters, surely the media, which has been so privileged and protected in this Bill, should be mandated to battle against ignorance and bring illumination and context to the lives of people in this country. It has never been more important than now to have reliable information easily accessible by everybody. Surely, this is the antidote to the swirl of fake news and conspiracy theories which so dominate the internet.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

I am very grateful to noble Lords for their support on this amendment. I think it proved that I was right to degroup it so that we could have a specific discussion about the need for genres.

The Minister said that it is going to be fine because we have Ofcom, which will oversee the remit and make sure that the PSBs give us good, broad content. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Foster, and the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, warned us, this does not give Parliament anything like enough power to hold Ofcom to account. This is an issue we have had in this Chamber a number of times, on different Acts. We discussed it quite a lot on the Online Safety Bill and were very concerned by the enormous powers that were given to Ofcom and the inability to control them. In fact, the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, suggested a parliamentary committee that could look at the way Ofcom carried out its powers.

There is obviously a battle between regulation and competition, as the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, said. The Minister is obviously content that new subsection (6) in particular is going to help direct the PSBs to deal with this problematical and knotty area. However, I remain unconvinced and extremely concerned that the fiercely competitive economic environment in which our PSBs find themselves will drive them inexorably away from serious factual programming and towards entertainment.

I hope that between Committee and Report the Minister will meet me and other noble Lords to discuss this issue, but in the meantime I beg leave to withdraw this amendment.

Amendment 9 withdrawn.

News Broadcasting: Regulation

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as laid out in the register. I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord McNally, for tabling this important debate.

I am aware of how careful Ofcom has been in the past about enforcing impartiality in broadcast media. The gold standard is its 2009 ruling against George Galloway’s presentation of two weekly programmes on the Iranian-based Press TV. Ofcom ruled that he had breached the Broadcasting Code on impartiality for failing to reflect a wide range of significant views and give due weight in each programme or linked programmes. That is especially important where a presenter such as George Galloway, who is known to have strongly held views, is being discussed.

The ruling added that, to comply with the code, when discussing

“matters of major political … controversy and major matters relating to current public policy”,

a broadcaster must have a range of significant alternative views in the programme. I have watched a series of programmes on GB News which did none of those things. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, said that GB News puts out some of the finest public service output. I disagree.

Andrew Doyle gives an opinionated monologue which then in most cases is supported by the studio guests and followed by questions from the audience which also support those views. In one episode, the audience asked questions of major public policy such as the Church of England’s support of critical race theory and Lee Anderson’s attack on the Mayor of London for being under the control of Islamists. There was no alternative view. In the case of “Dewbs & Co” on the night of the Budget, the programme was almost entirely critical; there was only one audience member who was a bit happy with the Budget. Otherwise, everybody in the audience attacked it and they were supported by the studio guests. I thought that maybe the presenter, Michelle Dewberry, would restore the balance the following night but instead she doubled down with an attack on the Chancellor for opening the Budget with a statement on his plan for a Muslim memorial. She then went on to discuss the threat of wokery.

Ofcom has launched a series of investigations into GB News, including Neil Oliver’s conspiracy theory about turbo cancer being linked to the Pfizer Covid vaccination. The complaint against Oliver was not upheld. In defence of Ofcom, it has investigated and found against GB News for breach of impartiality in one case, but in others it has not upheld complaints because the programme was defined as current affairs. This comes down to the difference in definition between “news programme” and “current affairs programme”. In paragraph 1.8 of the regulator’s guidance, there is a definition of the news genre:

“news in whatever form would include news bulletins, news flashes and daily news magazine programmes”.

That seems to cover many of the GB News programmes I am worried about. As if to reinforce the point, when Ofcom issued a warning of breach to BBC “Newsnight” presenter Emily Maitlis over a partial monologue, it classified “Newsnight” as news.

Apart from a small reference to current affairs in the code on sponsorship, there is no definition of current affairs programmes in the Broadcasting Code or the guidelines. This lacuna was filled by a small blog from former Ofcom executive Kevin Bakhurst, which described current affairs programmes as

“a more long-form programme … extensive discussion … interviews with guests”.

This is vague and has been included in neither Ofcom guidelines nor the Broadcasting Code, so we are left with impartiality requirements for “news in whatever form”. I do not regard it as a defence for Ofcom to say that these GB News programmes are current affairs. Even if they are not, they are certainly discussing:

“Matters of major political … controversy”


or

“major matters relating to … public policy”,

which are covered by the requirement for diverse views.

The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, raised the issue of politicians being presenters. The code is clear that presenters must not use the advantage of their regular appearances to promote their views in a way that compromises the requirement for due impartiality. To err on the side of free speech, Ofcom has left the interpretation to individual broadcasters. On LBC, there have been politicians such as David Lammy and Nigel Farage and presenters who have a partial political view such as Nick Ferrari. While broadcasting on LBC, Nigel Farage was impressive in his tough questioning of interviewees. He talked to a range of people with diverse views and asked them difficult questions. However, in his appearances on GB News, his trenchant views when discussing matters of major political controversy are supported in almost every case by interviewees who agree with him. Where is the range of alternative opinions demanded by the code and why has Ofcom done so little to enforce it?

I generally have huge respect for Ofcom, which does a great job of treading the tightrope of balancing free speech and enforcing the code in an increasingly polarised society. I would argue that maintaining that balance is the bulwark against increasing political polarisation, which we have seen in the USA with its editorialised news channels. However, I call on our regulator to look very carefully at channels presented by politicians or people with well-known political views. It needs to police them so that people with alternative views feel safe to express them and contribute to the free speech which is so crucial to a functioning democracy.

TV Licence Non-payment: Women

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

Yes. I commend the work that the BBC has done: it commissioned a gender disparity review, with which I believe the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Hornsey, from your Lordships’ House, helped assist. We welcome the 10-point plan that the BBC has set out, flowing from that review, but we will look more broadly at the issue of criminal sanctions as part of future funding.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a former BBC TV producer. The BBC has previously said that decriminalising licence fee evasion and switching to a civil system would cost it more than £1 billion over five years. Does the Minister agree that this would lead to huge cuts in programming and a big hit to an already struggling creative economy?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

No. We want to look carefully at the issue of how we make sure that the BBC continues to get the funding that it needs to produce the wonderful programming that is much admired. But, in light of the trend that I have outlined, in which fewer people are buying a licence fee in the first place, of course we will make sure that we speak to the corporation as part of that review—but we are doing so with its best interests in mind.

Media Bill

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 28th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a television producer who has worked for all the public service broadcasters.

Like many others, I welcome this long-awaited Bill. The television and film industry has been one of the great successes of our economy. Our public service broadcasters, together with the BBC, are national treasures and admired across the world. What I treasure most is their ability to reflect our country back to ourselves, to stimulate national discussion and to ensure a light is shone on unreported communities and unheard voices.

This view was so well expressed in the actress Samantha Morton’s very moving acceptance speech at this year’s BAFTA awards. She told the audience that watching Ken Loach’s film “Kes”, about poverty, was a seminal moment for her. She recognised her own upbringing and finally saw her own experience reflected on screen. She said:

“You see the stories we tell, they actually have the power to change people's lives”.


She added that the film had transformed her and drawn her into the industry.

Television has made wonderful strides in the last few decades since I joined the industry in the late 1980s. It has provided employment for people from many backgrounds and, thanks to the move out of London, brought work to the nations and regions. The stories they tell have indeed replicated Samantha Morton's experience. However, in the last 18 months the industry has been struck by a shocking downturn in commissions. They are few and far between. Independent production companies are closing down for want of work, and experienced technical and production staff are leaving the industry. Channel 4 has admitted that a 9% reduction in advertising revenue has forced it to call a slowdown in commissioning. In reality, this has meant vanishingly few new commissions. Channel 5 and ITV are not much better. ITV’s head of policy Magnus Brooke called it “past peak TV”.

The resulting effect on the workforce has been dramatic. BECTU, the television union, this week published a survey of workers in the industry, which has revealed that 60% of the respondents across the industry were not working, while 88% were finding it very difficult to make a living. The result has been an exodus of talent. The huge strides made in the last few decades in bringing women and people from ethnically diverse backgrounds into the industry are being reversed. The BECTU survey shows that 40% of women are thinking of leaving the industry and half of black respondents are thinking of following suit. This Bill must do everything it can to protect those unheard voices and ensure that the industry continues to shine a light into the corners of this country that are not normally seen.

I want to praise the Government for bringing forward measures in the Bill such as digital prominence for PSBs, which is so badly needed. However, the privilege of the status of public service broadcaster must be reciprocated by providing distinctive content, which is so important to our national sense of being. In this very competitive marketplace where streamers are bombarding viewers with drama and advertising revenue is declining, the pressure will be on the PSBs to commission only popular shows by big production companies with proven records. Like my noble friends Lady Kidron and Lord Birt, my concern is that the Bill is so vague in many areas designed to protect this distinctive content.

The last Ofcom review of PSB content was published in 2020, so it is already out of date, but it is the best official indicator of the state of factual programming. It said that PSB provision of and investment in arts, religion, formal education and children’s content is low. My fear is that the BBC is increasingly going to become the channel of market failure programmes, although even there it seems that the commissioning of factual science, arts and religion has almost dried up.

The Bill not only drops the “educate and inform” mission for PSBs; it is also particularly vague on their public service remit. The Government inserted Clause 1(6) in the other place in response to these concerns. It is a permissive clause calling for a range of “appropriate” genres of content to be made available by PSBs. It is one thing to permit PSBs to broadcast a range of genres, but being so vague about what they are supposed to be gives the measure no meaning.

I would be grateful if the Minister explained what an “appropriate” range of genres means in the absence of a mission to educate, entertain and inform. I am echoing concerns already expressed in the other place. The Culture Committee, in carrying out pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill, warned that replacing a list of specific commitments required of public service broadcasters with a general remit was “a step too far”. The Government’s response was that the amendment was a simplification. Without a firm list of genres that need to be covered, what is the incentive or capacity for Ofcom to judge whether the PSBs are sticking to their public service remit? I imagine that news and children’s content will be measured, but what about the rest?

I ask noble Lords to take these concerns seriously. These distinctive genres need to be protected, because they create commissions and jobs in the very communities which the Government say they want to foster. Channel 4 has a vision statement that talks of elevating unheard voices from diverse communities, to encourage emerging writers and producers from different points of view. I have to praise the Government for not going ahead with their policy to privatise Channel 4, but I want to ensure that the company recovers from its present commissioning drought, and that the Government, together with Ofcom, ensure that it continues to commission from as wide a range of small independent production companies as possible, because that is where the freshest and newest ideas are coming from.

Once again, the Bill is very vague on how this is to be achieved. It talks about

“an appropriate range of independent productions”,

and

“an appropriate range of programme made outside the M25”.

I applaud the sentiment, but I fear the vagueness. I know that the Minister will tell me that appropriateness will be decided by Ofcom, the expert regulator, but, as parliamentarians, I think we have a duty to steer Ofcom.

In 2022, production companies with turnovers of more than £25 million annually received 70% of Channel 4’s primary commissioning spend. The channel, despite its mission statement, has been too risk-adverse in its commissioning. Its new licence agreement states that 35% of productions for Channel 4 will be made by qualifying indies—those not partly owned by a UK broadcaster. But these indies could include Banijay, a huge production company with massive annual revenues. More needs to be done to guarantee that smaller indies are protected. There are various ways in which the threshold could be calculated, but I ask the Minister to engage seriously with protecting these small but unheard voices.

Similarly, I applaud the Government for emphasising the need for local radio, regulated by Ofcom, to be protected in the digital world and for encouraging locally collected news. As online listening hit over 26% of listeners last year, I encourage the Government to extend the scope of these protections to cover all online services and podcasts generated by these stations. I really would not like to see these digital offerings diluted by commercial interventions by the platforms, either in charging a fee for carrying them or superimposing endless advertising on them.

I also applaud the Government for focusing on regulating voice-activated services, and ensuring that the platforms do not have too much power to promote their own content over that of the audio provider. However, I think that the Government ought to bring into scope in-car entertainment systems that are not voice activated. It would be good to get a steer from the Minister on this and not to leave all future-proofing to regulations.

This Bill does so much to propel our world-class television and radio services into the digital world. I hope that it will pass with all speed, but I ask the Government to protect the small players in the audio-visual industry and to ensure that they have a place in the increasingly competitive digital sphere.

BBC: Royal Charter

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Monday 15th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

The royal charter sets out clear expectations for how the BBC impartially delivers news output. It is for the BBC to decide how it does this and through which programmes, however beloved they are in your Lordships’ House. I know that Members of your Lordships’ House have worked on “Newsnight” and many watch it and get their news that way. However, it is important that the BBC makes the decisions on how it adheres to the obligations set out in the royal charter and in its public purpose. It is also important that we do not have a Government who tell the national broadcaster how to report the news.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a former news editor of “Newsnight” and a freelance TV producer. In the last year, commissions for factual programmes on all channels have been massively reduced. Over 70% of freelance documentary television producers are said to be without work. Does the Minister agree that Ofcom should investigate how the massive reduction in BBC budgets over the last decade has adversely affected the commissioning of documentaries on the BBC?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

Ofcom has a role under the current royal charter to see how the BBC is meeting its obligations. It does this independently but will have heard the point made by the noble Viscount. More broadly, the Government are working on growing our creative industries so that there are many other avenues for brilliant documentary makers to add to the public understanding of current issues that are of interest to us all as globally engaged people, and many ways in which people can get their news and current affairs programming.

Loot Boxes in Video Games

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Wednesday 13th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for those comments. As I said in both my original and subsequent replies to the noble Lord, Lord Foster, we are working closely with academics to support independent scrutiny of the industry-led measures that are being taken, and we want to see how those work and bed in. We have developed and published a research framework so that there can be independent and rigorous analysis to give us the evidence that we need to inform policy-making.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, players who buy loot boxes, including young people, are often victims of well-known psychological techniques to nudge them towards purchasing ever-greater features in the loot boxes. These include special, time-limited offers, price anchoring and the obfuscation of costs. Is the Minister satisfied that self-regulation will stop these behaviours in the loot box market?

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

As the noble Viscount will know, we have taken action more widely to ensure that people at risk of gambling harm, including children and vulnerable people, are protected. We want to ensure that people are able to play video games safely online and to enjoy them, but also to be protected against any harms that may occur. That is why we are keen to see the industry-led guidelines being implemented and why we will monitor their impact closely.

Online Safety Bill

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

3rd reading
Wednesday 6th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, join noble Lords in thanking the Minister for the way in which he has addressed my concerns about aspects of the Bill and has wanted to enhance particularly the protection of women and girls from the kind of threats that they experience online. I really feel that the Minister has been exemplary in the way in which he has interacted with everyone in this House who has wanted to improve the Bill and has come to him with good will. He has listened and his team have been absolutely outstanding in the work that they have done. I express my gratitude to him.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for the great improvements that the Government have made to the Secretary of State’s powers in the Bill during its passage through this House. I rise to speak briefly today to praise the Government’s new Amendments 1 and 2 to Clause 44. As a journalist, I was worried by the lack of transparency around these powers in the clause; I am glad that the lessons of Section 94 of the Telecommunications Act 1984, which had to be rescinded, have been learned. In a world of conspiracy theories that can be damaging to public trust and governmental and regulatory process, it has never been more important that Parliament and the public are informed about the actions of government when giving directions to Ofcom about the draft codes of practice. So I am glad that these new amendments resolve those concerns.

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome Amendments 5 and 6, as well as the amendments that reflect the work done and comments made in earlier stages of this debate by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy. Of course, we are not quite there yet with this Bill, but we are well on the way as this is the Bill’s last formal stage in this Chamber before it goes back to the House of Commons.

Amendments 5 and 6 relate to the categorisation of platforms. I do not want to steal my noble friend’s thunder, but I echo the comments made about the engagement both from my noble friend the Minister and from the Secretary of State. I am delighted that the indications I have received are that they will accept the amendment to Schedule 11, which this House voted on just before the Recess; that is a significant and extremely welcome change.

When commentators outside talk about the work of a revising Chamber, I hope that this Bill will be used as a model for cross-party, non-partisan engagement in how we make a Bill as good as it possibly can be—particularly when it is as ground-breaking and novel as this one is. My noble friend the Minister said in a letter to all of us that this Bill had been strengthened in this Chamber, and I think that is absolutely right.

I also want to echo thanks to the Bill team, some of whom I was working with four years ago when we were talking about this Bill. They have stuck with the Bill through thick and thin. Also, I thank noble Lords across the House for their support for the amendments but also all of those outside this House who have committed such time, effort, support and expertise to making sure this Bill is as good as possible. I wish it well with its final stages. I think we all look forward to both Royal Assent and also the next big challenge, which is implementation.

Online Safety Bill

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 17th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, we are coming to some critical amendments on a very important issue relatively late in the Bill, having had relatively little discussion on it. It is not often that committees of this House sit around and say, “We need more lawyers”, but this is one of those areas where that was true.

Notwithstanding the blushes of my noble friend on the Front Bench here, interestingly we have not had in our debate significant input from people who understand the law of freedom of expression and wish to contribute to our discussions on how online platforms should deal with questions of the legality of content. These questions are crucial to the Bill, which, if it does nothing else, tells online platforms that they have to be really robust in taking action against content that is deemed to be illegal under a broad swathe of law in the United Kingdom that criminalises certain forms of speech.

We are heavy with providers, and we are saying to them, “If you fail at this, you’re in big trouble”. The pressure to deal with illegal content will be huge, yet illegality itself covers a broad spectrum, from child sexual exploitation and abuse material, where in many cases it is obvious from the material that it is illegal and there is strict liability—there is never any excuse for distributing that material—and pretty much everyone everywhere in the world would agree that it should be criminalised and removed from the internet, through to things that we discussed in Committee, such as public order offences, where, under some interpretations of Section 5 of the Public Order Act, swearing at somebody or looking at them in a funny way in the street could be deemed alarming and harassing. There are people who interpret public order offences in this very broad sense, where there would be a lot less agreement about whether a specific action is or is not illegal and whether the law is correctly calibrated or being used oppressively. So we have this broad spectrum of illegality.

The question we need to consider is where we want providers to draw the line. They will be making judgments on a daily basis. I said previously that I had to make those judgments in my job. I would write to lawyers and they would send back an expensive piece of paper that said, “This is likely to be illegal”, or, “This is likely not to be illegal”. It never said that it was definitely illegal or definitely not illegal, apart from the content I have described, such as child sexual abuse. You would not need to send that, but you would send the bulk of the issues that we are dealing with to a lawyer. If you sent it to a second lawyer, you would get another “likely” or “not likely”, and you would have to come to some kind of consensus view as to the level of risk you wished to take on that particular form of speech or piece of content.

This is really challenging in areas such as hate speech, where exactly the same language has a completely different meaning in different contexts, and may or may not be illegal. Again, to give a concrete example, we would often deal with anti-Semitic content being shared by anti-anti-Semitic groups—people trying to raise awareness of anti-Semitic speech. Our reviewers would quite commonly remove the speech: they would see it and it would look like grossly violating anti-Semitic speech. Only later would they realise that the person was sharing it for awareness. The N-word is a gross term of racial abuse, but if you are an online platform you permit it a lot of the time, because if people use it self-referentially they expect to be able to use it. If you start removing it they would naturally get very upset. People expect to use it if it is in song lyrics and they are sharing music. I could give thousands of examples of speech that may or may not be illegal depending entirely on the context in which it is being used.

We will be asking platforms to make those judgments on our behalf. They will have to take it seriously, because if they let something through that is illegal they will be in serious trouble. If they misjudged it and thought the anti-Semitic hate speech was being circulated by Jewish groups to promote awareness but it turned out it was being circulated by a Nazi group to attack people and that fell foul of UK law, they would be in trouble. These judgments are critical.

We have the test in Clause 173, which says that platforms should decide whether they have “reasonable grounds to infer” that something is illegal. In Committee, we debated changing that to a higher bar, and said that we wanted a stronger evidential basis. That did not find favour with the Government. We hoped they might raise the bar themselves unilaterally, but they have not. However, we come back again in a different way to try to be helpful, because I do not think that the Government want excessive censorship. They have said throughout the Bill’s passage that they are not looking for platforms to be overly censorious. We looked at the wording again and thought about how we could ensure that the bar is not operated in a way that I do not think that the Government intend. We certainly would not want that to happen.

We look at the current wording in Clause 173 and see that the test there has two elements. One is: “Do you have reasonable grounds to infer?” and then a clause in brackets after that says, “If you do have reasonable grounds to infer, you must treat the content as illegal”. In this amendment we seek to remove the second part of that phrasing because it seems problematic. If we say to the platform, “Reasonable grounds to infer, not certainty”—and it is weird to put “inference”, which is by definition mushy, with “must”, which is very certain, into the same clause—we are saying, “If you have this mushy inference, you must treat it as illegal”, which seems quite problematic. Certainly, if I were working at a platform, the way I would interpret that is: “If in doubt, take it out”. That is the only way you can interpret that “must”, and that is really problematic. Again, I know that that is not the Government’s intention, and if it were child sexual exploitation material, of course you “must”. However, if it is the kind of abusive content that you have reasonable grounds to infer may be an offence under the Public Order Act, “must” you always treat that as illegal? As I read the rest of the Bill, if you are treating it as illegal, the sense is that you should remove it.

That is what we are trying to get at. There is a clear understanding from the Government that their intention is “must” when it comes to that hard end of very bad, very clearly bad content. However, we need something else—a different kind of behaviour where we are dealing with content where it is much more marginal. Otherwise, the price we will pay will be in freedom of expression.

People in the United Kingdom publish quite robust, sweary language. I sometimes think that some of the rules we apply penalise the vernacular. People who use sweary, robust language may be doing so entirely legally—the United Kingdom does not generally restrict people from using that kind of language. However, we risk heading towards a scenario where people post such content in future, and they will find that the platform takes it down. They will complain to the platform, saying, “Why the hell did you take my content down?”—in fact, they will probably use stronger words than that to register their complaint. When they do, the platform will say, “We had reasonable grounds to infer that that was in breach of the Public Order Act, for example, because somebody might feel alarmed, harassed or distressed by it. Oh, and look—in this clause, it says we ‘must’ treat it as illegal. Sorry—there is nothing else we can do. We would have loved to have been able to exercise the benefit of the doubt and to allow you to carry on using that kind of language, because we think there is some margin where you have not behaved in an illegal way. But unfortunately, because of the way that Clause 173 has been drafted, our lawyers tell us we cannot afford to take the risk”.

In the amendment we are trying to—I think—help the Government to get out of a situation which, as I say, I do not think they want. However, I fear that the totality of the wording of Clause 173, this low bar for the test and the “must treat as” language, will lead to that outcome where platforms will take the attitude: “Safety first; if in doubt, take it out”, and I do not think that that is the regime we want. I beg to move.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I regret I was unable to be present in Committee to deliver my speech about the chilling effect that the present definition of illegality in the Bill will have on free speech on the internet.

I am still concerned about Clause 173, which directs platforms how to come to the judgment on what is illegal. My concern is that the criterion for illegality, “reasonable grounds to infer” that elements of the content are illegal, will encourage the tech companies to take down content which is not necessarily illegal but which they infer could be. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Allan, gave us a whole list of examples of where that might happen. Unfortunately, in Committee there was little support for a higher bar when asking the platforms to judge what illegal content is. However, I have added my name to Amendment 228, put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Allan, because, as he has just said, it is a much less radical way of enhancing free speech when platforms are not certain whether to take down content which they infer is illegal.

The deletion of part of Clause 173(5) is a moderate proposal. It still leaves intact the definition for the platforms of how they are to make the judgment on the illegality of content, but it takes out the compulsory element in this judgment. I believe that it will have the biggest impact on the moderation system. Some of those systems are run by machines, but many of the moderation processes, such as Meta’s Facebook, involve thousands of human beings. The deletion of the second part of Clause 173(5), which demands that they take down content that they infer is illegal, will give them more leeway to err on the side of freedom of speech. I hope that this extra leeway to encourage free speech will also be included in the way that algorithms moderate our content.

Online Safety Bill

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 12th July 2023 Lords Chamber

Overall, we need accountable decision-makers, not unaccountable regulators, and we need them to be subject to parliamentary scrutiny. That is the burden of my argument and the effect of my amendments. I hope that they will command the support of the House.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, the codes of practice are among the most important documents that Ofcom will produce as a result of the Bill—in effect, deciding what content we, the users of the internet, will see. The Government’s right to modify these drafts affects us all, so it is absolutely essential that the codes are trusted.

I, too, welcome the Government’s Amendments 134 to 138, which are a huge improvement on the Clause 39 that was presented in Committee. I am especially grateful that the Government have not proceeded with including economic conditions as a reason for the Secretary of State to modify draft codes, which the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, pointed out in Committee would be very damaging. But I would like the Minister to go further, which is why I put my name to Amendments 139, 140, 144 and 145.

Amendment 139 is so important at the moment. My fear is about the opt-out from publishing these directions from the Secretary of State for Ofcom to modify the draft codes, which will then allow them to be made behind closed doors between the Government and the regulator. This should not be allowed to happen. It would happen at a time when trust in the Government is low and there is a feeling that so many decisions affecting us all are taken without our knowledge. Surely it is right that there should be as much transparency as possible in exposing the pressure that the Minister is placing on the regulator. I hope that, if this amendment is adopted, it will allow Parliament to impose the bright light of transparency on the entire process, which is in danger of becoming opaque.

I am sure that no one wants a repeat of what happened under Section 94 of the Telecommunications Act 1984, which gave the Secretary of State power to give directions of a “general character” to anyone, in the “interests of national security” or international relations, as long as they did not disclose important information to Parliament. The Minister’s power to operate in total secrecy, without any accountability to Parliament, was seen by many as wrong and undemocratic. It was subsequently repealed. Amendments 139 and 140 will prevent the creation of a similar problem.

Likewise, I support Amendment 144, which builds on the previous amendments, as another brake on the control of the Secretary of State over this important area of regulations. Noble Lords in this House know how much the Government dislike legislative ping-pong—which we will see later this evening, I suspect. I ask the Minister to transfer this dislike to limiting ping-pong between the Government and the regulator over the drafting of codes of practice. It would also prevent the Secretary of State or civil servants expanding their control of the draft codes of practice from initial parameters to slightly wider sets of parameters each time that they are returned to the Minister for consideration. It will force the civil servants and the Secretary of State to make a judgment on the limitation of content and ensure that they stick to it. As it is, the Secretary of State has two bites of the cherry. They are involved in the original shaping of the draft codes of practice and then they can respond to Ofcom’s formulation. I hope the Minister would agree that it is sensible to stop this process from carrying on indefinitely. I want the users of the digital world to have full faith that the control of online content they see is above board —and not the result of secretive government overreach.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, not for the first time I find myself in quite a different place from my noble friend Lord Moylan. Before I go through some detailed comments on the amendments, I want to reflect that at the root of our disagreement is a fundamental view about how serious online safety is. The logical corollary of my noble friend’s argument is that all decisions should be taken by Secretaries of State and scrutinised in Parliament. We do not do that in other technical areas of health and safety in the physical world and we should not do that in the digital world, which is why I take such a different view—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, my name is also to this amendment. I am moved by a phrase used by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, on Monday; he said the passage of this Bill has been a “series of conversations”. So it has been. The way the Minister has engaged with the House on many of the concerns that the Bill tries to cover has been greatly to his credit.

It is somewhat unknown how much the new technologies will impact on our democracy, our privacy and the safety of our children, although they have all been discussed with great thoroughness. That is why the opt-out for recognised news publishers is something of a puzzle, unless you assume that the Government have caved in to pressure from that sector. Why should it be given this opt-out? It is partly because if you ask the press to take responsibility in any way, it becomes like Violet Elizabeth Bott in the Just William stories; it “thkweems and thkweems”—usually led by the noble Lord, Lord Black, whom I am glad to see in his place —and talks about press freedom.

My skin in this game is that I was the Minister in the Lords when the Leveson inquiry was under way and when we took action to try to implement its findings. It is interesting that at that point there was cross-party agreement in both Houses on how to implement them. I advise anybody intending to go into coalitions in future not to take the Conservative Party’s assurances on such matters totally at face value, as that cross-party agreement to implement Leveson was reneged on by the Conservative Party under pressure from the main newspaper publishers.

It was a tragedy, because the “series of conversations” that the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, referred to will be ongoing. We will not let the press off the hook, no matter how much it wields its power. It is just over 90 years since Stanley Baldwin’s famous accusation of

“power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages”.

It is just over 30 years since David Mellor warned the press that it was in the “last chance saloon” and just over 10 years since Rupert Murdoch said that appearing before the Leveson inquiry, with a curious choice of language, was

“the most humble day of my life”.

Of course, like water off a duck’s back, once the pressure was off and the deal had been done with the Conservative Party, we could carry on on our own merry way.

It was a tragedy too because the Leveson settlement—as I think the PRP and Impress have proved—works perfectly well. It is neither state controlled nor an imposition on a free press. Like the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, I greatly resent the idea that this is somehow an attempt to impose on a free press. It is an attempt to get the press to help the whole of our democracy and make things work properly, just as this Bill attempts to do.

Someone mentioned Rupert Murdoch’s recent summer party. The Prime Minister was not the only one who went—so did the leader of the Opposition. I like to think that Mr Attlee would not have gone. I am not sure that my old boss, Jim Callaghan, would have gone. I do not think that either would have flown half way around the world, as Tony Blair did, to treat with him. The truth is that, over the last decade or so, in some ways the situation has got worse. Politicians are more cowed by the press. When I was a Minister and we proposed some reasonably modest piece of radical change, I was told by my Conservative colleague, “We’ll not get that through; the Daily Mail won’t tolerate it”. That pressure on politics means we need politicians with the guts to resist it.

Those who want a genuinely free press would not leave this festering wound. I will not join in the attack on the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, because we worked together very well in coalition. I would prefer to see IPSO reform itself to become Leveson-compliant. That would not bring any of the dangers that we will hear about from the noble Lord, Lord Black, but it would give us a system of press regulation that we could all agree with.

On Section 40, I remember well the discussions about how we would give some incentive to join. A number of my colleagues feel uncomfortable about Section 40 making even the winners pay, but the winner pays only if they are not within a Leveson-compliant system. That was, perhaps innocently, thought of as a carrot to bring the press in, though, of course, it does not read easily. Frankly, if Section 40 were to go but IPSO became Leveson-compliant, that would be a fair deal.

This Bill leaves us with some very dangerous loopholes. Some of the comments underneath in the press and, as the Minister referred to, the newsclips that can be added can be extremely dangerous if children are exposed to them.

There are many other loopholes that this genuflection to press power is going to leave in the Bill and which will lead to problems in the future. Rather than launch another attack—because you can be sure another case will come along or another outrage will happen, and perhaps this time, Parliament will have the guts to deal with it—it would be far better if the media itself saw Leveson for what it was: a masterful, genuine attempt to put a free press within the context of a free society and protect the individuals and institutions in that society in a way that is in all our interests. As the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said, we are not pushing this tonight, but we are not going to go away.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I have been a journalist my whole career and I have great respect for the noble Lords who put their names to Amendments 159 and 160. However, I cannot support another attempt to lever Section 42 of the Crime and Courts Act into the Bill. In Committee I put my name to Amendment 51, which aims to protect journalism in the public interest. It is crucial to support our news outlets, in the interests of democracy and openness. We are in a world where only a few newspapers, such as the New York Times, manage to make a profit from their digital subscribers. I welcome the protection provided by Clause 50; it is much needed.

In the past decade, the declining state of local journalism has meant there is little coverage of magistrates’ courts and council proceedings, the result being that local public servants are no longer held to account. At a national level, newspapers are more and more reluctant to put money into investigations unless they are certain of an outcome, which is rarely the case. Meanwhile, the tech platforms are using newspapers’ contents for free or paying them little money, while disaggregating news content on their websites so the readers do not even know its provenance. I fear that the digital era is putting our legacy media, which has long been a proud centrepiece of our democracy, in great danger. The inclusion of these amendments would mean that all national newspapers and most local media would be excluded from the protections of the clause. The Bill, which is about regulating the digital world, should not be about trying to limit the number of newspapers and news websites covered by the protections of Clause 50; it would threaten democracy at a local and national level.

[Lord Black of Brentwood (Con)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to say a few words, because I do not want to disappoint my good friend the noble Lord, Lord McNally, who has obviously read the text of my speech before I have even delivered it. I declare my interests as deputy chairman of the Telegraph Media Group and a director of the Regulatory Funding Company, and note my other interests as set out in the register.

It will not come as a surprise that I oppose Amendments 159 and 160. I am not going to detain your Lordships for long; there are other more important things to talk about this evening than this seemingly never-ending issue, about which we had a good discussion in Committee. I am sorry that the two noble Lords were indisposed at that time, and I am glad to see they are back on fighting form. I am dispirited that these amendments surfaced in the first place as I do not think they really have anything to do with online safety and the protection of children. This is a Bill about the platforms, not the press. I will not repeat all the points we discussed at earlier stages. Suffice it to say that, in my view, this is not the time and the place to seek to impose what would be statutory controls on the press, for the first time since that great liberal, John Locke, led the charge for press freedom in 1695 when the Licensing Acts were abolished. Let us be clear: despite what the two noble Lords said, that is what these amendments would do, and I will briefly explain why.

These amendments seek to remove the exemption for news publishers from an onerous statutory regime overseen by Ofcom, which is, as the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said, a state regulator, unless they are part of an approved regulator. Yet no serious publisher, by which I mean the whole of the national and regional press, as the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, said—including at least 95% of the industry, from the Manchester Evening News to Cosmopolitan magazine—is ever going to join a regulator which is approved by the state. Even that patron saint of press controls, Sir Brian Leveson, conceded that this was a “principled position” for the industry to take. The net effect of these amendments would be, at a stroke, to subject virtually the entire press to state regulation—a momentous act wholly inimical to any definition of press freedom and free speech—and with very little discussion and absolutely no consultation.