BBC

John Grogan Excerpts

Monday 15th July 2019 Westminster Hall

[John Grogan (Keighley) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer), who spoke about science, which is an area in which the BBC has improved in recent years. It gives me even greater joy to participate in a debate started by my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones), who always speaks with such style and panache, which we can only envy, whatever the subject.

Given that it is a summers’ evening and we have hardly mentioned the great triumph in the cricket world cup yesterday, which was broadcast by “Test Match Special”, I want to find reasons to be cheerful, cherish the BBC and suggest some interventions to help not only the BBC but other public service broadcasters. I will refer to some ideas mentioned by other hon. Members.

The hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers)—by far the best town on the east coast, so I hear—mentioned the loss of sports broadcasting rights for the BBC. We have just had a tremendous weekend for sport. The cricket world cup was watched by a peak audience of 7.9 million on Channel 4 and Sky, but it was beaten by Wimbledon, which was broadcast on the BBC to a peak audience of 9.6 million. That happened not by accident, but because the Wimbledon tennis finals are part of the listed events that must be offered to free-to-air television.

In future, we should not have to rely on the public relations of Comcast or Sky to ensure that we can see those events. The women’s world cup attracted more than 11 million viewers. It is no good showing one event every 15 years; the story of a tournament has to be told over a number of months, possibly years. There is a growing call for events such as the women’s world cup, and the men’s and women’s T20 and 50-overs cricket world cups—particularly games involving England, the other home nations and the final—to be broadcast on free-to-air TV. The deputy leader of the Labour party made an interesting but underreported speech on this subject the other day. We should make that intervention.

Ofcom has been looking at the prominence of BBC channels and other public service broadcasting channels. It has made some rather good recommendations, including for public service channels to be prominent not only on traditional TVs, but on set-top boxes, streaming services and smart TV. I hope the Government will find time to put those recommendations into legislation quickly, so that the licence fee payer always finds it easy to see the BBC and other public service broadcaster channels.

Ofcom has said it is minded to allow the BBC to keep programmes on the iPlayer for up to a year. That would be a good thing. It is reflected among some of the BBC’s commercial competitors. Equally, I am hopeful that Ofcom will agree to the proposals for BritBox. Such services exist in the United States. It would entail the BBC and ITV, and hopefully other public service broadcasters, after a period, providing streaming packages for their big-hit programmes, providing an additional revenue stream. A similar project, Project Kangaroo, was rejected by Ofcom 10 years ago. I hope that Ofcom will recognise that the BBC is now operating in a completely different market. Netflix spends £8 billion a year on programming. There is also Amazon and Facebook to compete with. The BBC must be allowed to compete with those global media giants.

I have one or two other points to make. We heard about people being jailed for not paying the licence fee. The number of people who have gone to prison has gone down dramatically, from 50 in 2012 to 17 in 2017. They were sent to jail not by the TV licensing authority but by magistrates, often for multiple debts in addition to non-payment of the licence fee. It is wise to keep the issue in context.

The hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) made it clear that he does not like programmes being switched for the tennis, but when it comes to advertising he is rather more pro. As my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) said, allowing widespread advertising on the BBC would totally destabilise the traditional market. ITV and Channel 4 would lobby very hard against it, because it would destroy a large part of their income stream.

The question of bias was raised. Some hon. Members did not deal with the “Panorama” programme, but I am quite happy to mention it, and indeed the whole series. Recent and forthcoming “Panorama” episodes include one on relationships education, one on abortion in the United States, one on exiting the EU and on what a no-deal Brexit might mean, and one dealing with antisemitism in the Labour party. They are all perfectly legitimate programmes.

There is a gentleman who I think goes by the name of Seumas Milne, who I think works in the Leader of the Opposition’s office, and who I think might fit the public school-educated, south-eastern, Oxbridge profile that some of my hon. Friends are very agitated about. No doubt in all those institutions, as he was growing up, he was advised using a cricket analogy: play the ball, not the man. That is very sensible advice—attacking the credibility of a very distinguished journalist was not my party’s finest moment. I think of another Milne: Alasdair Milne, whose record Seumas should perhaps look back on. He was a man who defended the BBC against the Government, and probably paid for it with his job. That is a far better example to follow.

We have heard a lot about the voice of the BBC and about how its people come from the same background. That may have been true some time ago, but I think it has changed over the past couple of decades. Partly because of the move to Manchester, there is now a range of northern voices across 5 Live and BBC News. It is always a great pleasure to show BBC apprentices around Parliament; they reflect the diversity of our nation.

There is no point in repeating what other hon. Members have said about the substance of the petitions. I certainly think that George Osborne was to blame, but he was not the only Chancellor of the Exchequer who approached TV licence fee negotiations in the same way. I do not think that Gordon Brown, in his time, was particularly more forthcoming with consultation. It is up to this House to put greater rules in place for how the licence fee is determined. There should be more consultation, and everyone should know the time period; it should not just be the Chancellor or the director-general coming out of a meeting and an announcement being made.

The future of the licence fee and of the BBC is a big decision for the country. The BBC belongs to us all, not just to the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the day. That should be reflected in how we award the royal charter to the BBC and in how we set the licence fee.