Broadcasting

Andrew Bridgen Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Karen Bradley]

My hon. Friend exactly sums up the position.

The longer—11-year—royal charter will separate charter renewal from the electoral cycle, which has been widely welcomed. I reiterate that the mid-term review after six years will be a health check, not another charter review in all but name. It is surely eminently sensible to check how effectively new arrangements are working before 11 years have gone by. Moreover, article 57 of the charter states:

“The review must not consider…the mission of the BBC;…the Public Purposes of the BBC; or…the licence fee funding model of the BBC for the period of this Charter.”

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

Does the Secretary of State agree that there will be a further huge change in viewing habits from traditional television to online and on-demand viewing over the 11-year charter renewal period? Will she consider decriminalising non-payment of the TV licence for viewing the iPlayer and will she in effect implement decriminalising non-payment of the TV licence over the charter renewal period, which would be widely supported and welcomed?

[Karen Bradley]

I know my hon. Friend has campaigned strongly on this issue, and I understand the point he makes.

I will go through some further points about the new charter. The BBC will be regulated more effectively under it. The charter and agreement set out Ofcom’s new role as the BBC’s independent regulator. Ofcom will monitor and review how well the BBC meets its mission and public purposes, regulate editorial standards, hold the BBC to account on market impacts and public value, and consider relevant complaints from viewers, listeners and other stakeholders where complainants are not satisfied with resolution by the BBC.

--- Later in debate ---

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

May I begin by saying to colleagues around the Chamber that, since I stood down from the Front Bench in June, I have agreed to take on the secretaryship of the all-party parliamentary group on the BBC?

I welcome the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and the Minister for Digital and Culture to their places. Both of them are new to the job but not to government. I also commend my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson) for his debut at the Dispatch Box in this role, and I wish him well.

Although the new Ministers have come late to the process of BBC charter renewal, it is now for them to finish off all the work that has been done so far. I am glad to see that some of the more lurid fantasies of the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), whom I am really pleased to see in his place, will be well and truly finished off by the time the new charter becomes operational.

I am sure that the Secretary of State and the Minister have realised already the incredibly high esteem in which the BBC is held by our constituents, who pay for and consume its services, and the concomitant interest and campaigning about the process of charter renewal. There is a wish around the country, the nations and the regions that the Government get this charter right.

Let me give the Government some credit—not something I often do. The end result looks like it will be better than many of us had feared. Let me also be clear that one or two concerns remain, and I will come on to mention them in my remarks.

When we consider the future of the BBC, we should always keep in mind both its great history at the centre of our national life—Members do that when they make contributions to this debate—and the fact that it is one of our most loved institutions. It is behind only the monarch, our armed forces and the national health service in the esteem in which it is held, so loved and valued it most certainly is.

The consultation on the Green Paper as part of the charter renewal process review simply reiterated the extent to which that is so. Those of us who knock on the doors of our constituents and try to get them to approve of what we do in our jobs can only look on in awe at an 81% approval rating—81% of the public believe that the BBC does a good job. We would all wish for such a high level of approval from those for whom we seek to work. That high approval rate is combined with the fact that a very high number of people in this country—some 97%—consume BBC services for an average of 18 hours a week. That is an impressive set of figures, which we should all bear in mind when we consider the future of the BBC.

The public have taken part in the charter review period, in so far as they have been able, by way of the consultation on the Green Paper. As the Secretary of State mentioned in her own remarks, some 192,000 people have replied. Three quarters of them believed that the BBC should remain independent, and two thirds that the BBC has a positive wider impact on the market and that BBC expansion is justified. The BBC is also a lynchpin of our creative industries, and our broader creative industries, in the whole of the UK. It allows us to punch well above our weight as a nation in exporting creative output to the rest of the world, as well as being a key component in the soft power on which even our new Foreign Secretary has commented as he starts to get to grips with his new role. Both of those things are even more important after the referendum on 23 June than they were before when the former Secretary of State and I were both still in our places on the Front Bench. We all should be able to agree—I am sure we will—on how lucky we are as a nation to have the BBC. We should use the charter renewal process to make it fit for the future and enable it to continue doing the job that it is doing.

[Andrew Bridgen]

rose—

[Maria Eagle]

Of course I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, who has just come back to his place.

[Andrew Bridgen]

The hon. Lady talks about how popular the BBC is, and she is completely right, but when 75% of UK adults rely on the BBC for a large amount of their news does she agree that it is very, very important that the BBC is, and is seen to be, impartial?

[Maria Eagle]

I do agree with that, but it is also important that the BBC is the judge of impartiality and is held to account for it. We should not be able to override it from this Chamber, because we—on both sides of the House—are not impartial.

A good charter must guarantee that the BBC’s editorial independence is beyond doubt. It must guarantee that the BBC’s financial independence will continue and it has to help it to fulfil its mission to educate, inform and entertain. That is the yardstick by which we should judge this charter.

The 11-year length of the charter is a good thing because that provides stability and takes the next review out of the political cycle into which Parliament’s passage of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 had suddenly pitched it. I am, however, still a little concerned that the mid-term review—it will presumably take place after five and a half years—or health check, as Ministers have imaginatively dubbed it, might be deeply destabilising if there is a will in government to exploit that process.

We have been reassured that this will not be a mini-charter review, as is feared. The Minister in the other place, Lord Ashton of Hyde, said that it would consider only governance and regulation, not the scope and scale of the BBC. However, halfway through the charter, a change in governance and regulation from the current proposals could leave things looking very different from how they do at present. When the Minister replies to the debate, will he give us some reassurance about the kind of change that he envisages this mid-charter review—or health check or mid-term review—might seek to make?

The Minister in the other place said that Ofcom will

“have to stand the test of time and prove itself”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 October 2016; Vol. 774, c. 1995.]

Might this mini-charter review lead to Ofcom being stripped of its regulatory function, if it does not stand up to some test that that Minister seemed to be setting for it? Precisely what kind of review does the Minister for Digital and Culture envisage? When he responds about Ofcom, can he give us the assurance that the Secretary of State did not quite give me in my intervention on her about the resources that Ofcom will be given to carry out its considerably extended role? The right hon. Lady did not say that Ofcom would be given new resources or the resources of the existing trust. We need to know what resources Ofcom will have to do the important and completely new job that it is given under the charter.

[Andrew Bridgen]

The hon. Lady is extremely generous in giving way; I thank her for indulging me. We will have a new regulatory regime for the BBC. Ofcom will replace the BBC Trust, in which there was no trust. We talk about a health check. If I went to the doctor for a health check and he found that I had some horrible disease, I would expect him to take action. I would expect the Government to take action if, at the health check, the new regulatory regime was found not to be working.

[Maria Eagle]

The hon. Gentleman employs an extended metaphor. I do not quite understand how that would apply in respect of the mid-term review. I do not know why the mid-term review was not simply dropped. It seems to me that Ministers have been casting about to try to find some purpose for it because they did not want to accept that the mid-term review or the break clause had started out as something different from how it ended up. I am not sure what the role of the review is, so when the Minister winds up the debate, I hope that he will be able to give us a little more reassurance.

It was said in the other place that governance would form part of that mid-term review, so what kind of change to governance, if any, is it likely to make? To what extent might there be some change in the air? If the Government do not like how the arrangements that they set out in the charter are proceeding, will we see a wholesale change at mid-term to the governance of the BBC? What steps will the Government take to ensure that any such changes are as fully scrutinised as the arrangements for the new charter have been? There is not necessarily a parliamentary aspect of the mid-term review or health check.

We had an exchange about governance earlier. I welcome the fact there is to be a competition for the new chair of the BBC Board. I was critical that the chair of the BBC Trust had simply been appointed to what is a rather different role without any competition at all and at the behest, it seems, of the previous Prime Minister—though not, I suspect, at the behest of the former Secretary of State. I emphasise that I am not and was not commenting on the ability or otherwise of Rona Fairhead to do the job, but simply on the principle of the matter. In any event, she has decided not to put herself forward, so the BBC will have a new chair. Opposition Members are mindful of what the outgoing Commissioner for Public Appointments, Sir David Normington, said about the Government’s increasing propensity to appoint Tory supporters to important public roles, so we will be watching this particularly sensitive appointment with extremely close interest.

I welcome the fact that the Government have abandoned the previous Secretary of State’s attempt to enable the Government to appoint a majority of the unitary board, which I do not believe was a sensible proposal. The retreat that the Government have agreed to, following discussions with the BBC, is a good one, because they could have led themselves into criticisms that they would rather not have. I think that the development is entirely positive.

I want to say a little about the thorny topic of distinctiveness. What on earth does “distinctiveness” now mean in the context of the charter? We know what the right hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) thought it meant. Indeed, today he reiterated in part his view of what it means—we got the distinct impression that anything popular, commercial or with good ratings would not be distinctive enough. He thought that the BBC should be prevented from engaging in any kind of competition with its commercial rivals in this respect, but what does that mean in the context of the new charter?

I think that the definition in the White Paper is fiendish, because “substantially different” can mean whatever anybody wants it to mean. We are assured by Ministers that it will not be applied to individual programming. To be fair to the right hon. Gentleman, I never heard him say that he meant it to apply to individual programming, except in some lurid newspaper stories that seemed to be coming from his Department at the time. The Government have simply left it to Ofcom, which is not used to doing this kind of thing, to work this all out later. In my view, there is still a significant prospect of this being used mendaciously, either by politicians—perish the thought—or by the BBC’s commercial rivals, who might simply want to stop the BBC competing with them by making complaints about distinctiveness.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

I welcome the Secretary of State to this debate, although it is not her first as Secretary of State. I thank her for her consideration of the Select Committee’s report and the recommendations during the finalisation of the charter process. I also thank her predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), for the consideration that he gave to the Committee and its work in preparing the royal charter while he was Secretary of State. I welcome the hon. Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson) to his place. I know from our time together on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee in the previous Parliament that he will bring all of his great passion and energy to his new role. I look forward to seeing and hearing his contributions in these debates over the coming months and years.

The speech by the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) reminded me of the programme, “Civilisation”. In 1969, the great art historian Kenneth Clark produced an epic series of 13 50-minute-long episodes—a gargantuan undertaking—all about the nature of civilisation. He started off that great series by asking the rhetorical question, “What is civilisation?”, to which he replied, “I don’t know, but I think I recognise it when I see it.” The same formula could be applied to the idea of distinctiveness at the BBC. It is incredibly difficult to define, but somehow we recognise it when we see it. We want a BBC that, in celebrating its great ingenuity and creativity, takes risks that no other broadcaster would take. I am sure that the hon. Member for West Bromwich East agrees that putting Ed Balls in sparkly clothing and making him dance at peak time on a Saturday is something that no other broadcaster in the world would do. The BBC does it well and makes a success of it, and we celebrate its uniqueness.

It is right that along with assessing the BBC’s value for money, the decisions of its executives and how much money they earn, we also continue to apply the threshold of asking, “Is the BBC being true to its creative values? Is it continuing to be distinctive enough and to deliver across the great breadth of its programming, because of the unique way in which it is funded, something that no other broadcaster could do?” The BBC is one of our great national institutions. It is loved by everyone in this country, but that is because it has adapted and changed with the times. It has applied its creativity and ingenuity to the great breakthroughs in broadcasting, be it television, the internet, or the great breadth of digital services that it offers now. It has moved with the times and stayed close and true to its values.

The process of royal charter renewal every decade or so, the next one being in 11 years’ time, is about looking at not just what is best about the BBC that we should conserve and preserve for the future, but how we want it to adapt and change in the future. At the heart of the process has been a desire for much greater transparency in the way that the BBC operates. That is why I was pleased that the Select Committee consistently recommended that the National Audit Office should become the BBC’s principal auditor so that it had a chance to go in there and apply its forensic skills to see the ways in which the BBC is using its resources. That is the right approach to take.

The creation of the new unitary board recognises something that most people had already concluded for themselves—that the BBC Trust was not fit for purpose and not fulfilling its role correctly, and that we could do better. In particular, the dismissal of George Entwistle—which is, in effect, what happened—showed us that in a moment of crisis the chairman of the trust becomes, in effect, the chairman of the BBC, and steps in and intervenes in the way that the chairman of a board would do. That demonstrates that the BBC Trust was too conflicted to be an external regulator of the BBC as well as its principal champion and the representative of the licence fee payer’s interests.

The creation of the new unitary board is the right way forward. It also answers a question that has been asked consistently at Select Committee sittings over the past year, namely: who does the director-general report to? It was not particularly clear who he reported to, but now it is clear that he has independence of operation and his executive team to support him while he remains editor-in-chief, but that, post-transmission, he is answerable to a unitary board of the BBC. That is a much clearer management structure and it is welcome.

The other main proposal worth examining—the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood has mentioned this—is that relating to BBC Studios. The BBC clearly wants, and has got behind, that big initiative. I agree with the director-general’s analysis that making the studios more competitive and open will help make the BBC more creative and enable it to attract and hang on to some of the best creative talents who work not just on screen, but on taking ideas through to production and transmission. If the BBC recognises something that almost all other players in the TV market recognise, it is that the future of television for broadcasters lies not just in the growth of audiences and the transmission of content, but in owning and creating programmes and formats that can be exported around the world. The future of BBC revenues and its future creative success will very much be tied to the success of the BBC Studios proposals.

Alongside the BBC having that freedom to compete, independent production companies will also have more freedom to compete to produce programmes at the BBC. The former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon, was probably pivotal in pushing that forward; it certainly chimes with the things that he has said about the BBC in the past. The quotas for the BBC to commission out to independents remain, but much more of its commissioning work will now be liberalised, including that for repeat series. The BBC was not prepared to concede on that before, but it complements what it wants out of the studios proposals. I think that we may look back, not just during the review period, but during the next charter renewal, and say that the creative freedom and openness resulting from the studios proposal was one of the most significant reforms of the charter renewal process.

I want to pick up on one or two other points that have been made, particularly on the recommendations of the most recent Select Committee report. We support the decision to run a proper process for the appointment of the chairman of the new BBC unitary board. As other Members have said, it is a different and unique position, and there should have been a proper process to determine the best person. The Committee did not feel that Rona Fairhead should be excluded from that process. She has chosen to exclude herself, but nevertheless there should have been a proper process. The first chairman of the unitary board will hold a pivotal position and play a central role in appointing some of the independent directors, and it is vital that we have total confidence in the way in which they are appointed.

I also concur with the views of other Members—although there may be a difference of opinion on this—on the question of BBC salaries. The BBC had already conceded that executives who are paid more than the Prime Minister should declare their pay. It had also already accepted the principle of very highly paid on-screen performers and talent having their incomes declared, but it set the benchmark at the level of the director-general. Licence fee payers do not understand why on-screen talent is seen as being so different from off-screen talent, with one having to declare their salary and the other not. That layer of transparency was absolutely the right thing to do, and I am pleased to see it in the final draft of the charter.

[Andrew Bridgen]

On the need for transparency in appointments, what is my hon. Friend’s view of the appointment of James Purnell as head of radio? That has happened at a time when the BBC is bringing in diversity quotas across all its employment, and yet Mr Purnell got that job with no competition whatsoever. Anyone would think that the job had been made for him.

[Damian Collins]

It is a new post and it was literally made for him. It was not advertised widely for other people to apply for it. My right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon said in his speech—I said this in an intervention as well—that, regardless of people’s views of the capabilities of James Purnell, or concerns that people may have about his past political involvement, the key thing is the process that was run to appoint one of the most senior directors at the BBC. Why was there no competition within—or, indeed, outside—the BBC involving people who may have had the requisite skills to apply for the job? If we are going to be critical of the way in which Rona Fairhead was appointed as interim chair of the BBC—as I have said, that should have been a clear and transparent process—that should also apply to other senior executives, including those on the BBC board. That certainly applies in the case of James Purnell; I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen).