BBC

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Tuesday 10th July 2012 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Kawczynski]

Even I am allowed to watch a very important celebration like the special 60th anniversary of Her Majesty coming to power. I quickly tuned away from the BBC and switched to—

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

Al-Jazeera?

[Daniel Kawczynski]

No, not al-Jazeera—to Sky, because of the coverage.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

If that was the right hon. Member for Bath (Mr Foster) being a critical friend, I would hate to see him being sycophantic. I am afraid that the BBC’s uncritical friends do it as much damage as those, such as the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski), who would like to see it privatised and sold off to Mr Murdoch. However, I praise the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham for having secured the debate.

My vision is very different. I support the licence fee, and I want the BBC to succeed and thrive, because the alternatives do not bear thinking about. I am afraid, however, that the opportunity is given to extreme alternatives because the BBC constantly lets itself down. I only have a few moments to speak, and as the MP who represents White City and Shepherd’s Bush, I am going to be a little parochial and talk about my own experiences, which are somewhat emblematic of how the BBC has lost its way.

A May 2004 press release stated:

“The BBC’s new Media Village at White City in London will be officially opened tomorrow evening…by Jonathan Ross”—

no less. It went on:

“The Media Village development will play a central role in the regeneration of the wider urban area”.

It also stated that there would be five new buildings by distinguished architects, on a 17-acre site, providing 6,000 jobs for 6,000 people.

Three and a half years later, The Daily Telegraph reported:

“The BBC is to sell Television Centre, its headquarters in West London, to help plug the hole in its finances… Property experts say the site, which houses many of the BBC’s senior executives, could sell for more than £300 million.”

The BBC described the decision to sell as

“another milestone in the BBC’s property strategy”,

while Danny Baker called executives behind the decision “soulless crumbs” and “half-wits”. Of the two, my view is slightly closer to Mr Baker’s.

The situation is now much worse. By 2020-21, the entire media village site will also have been vacated, and 7,000 jobs will have gone from my constituency. Why? Because the BBC has failed to see the possibility of retrenchment and the need to cut back on costs. I was told by a prominent insider that the BBC had three gears for growth: fast, faster and tardis. It has built Salford—a soulless project—and the vanity project of Broadcasting House; consequently, the only site it can dispose of is White City, and 60 years of history there will go, through sheer poor planning.

The BBC was at the centre of a vision for the White City area as the media centre for not just this country, but probably Europe. Instead, we will have faceless developments of multi-storey luxury flats for foreign investors. In fact, the future of the first major BBC site, at Wood lane, would have gone before a planning committee tonight were it not for legal challenges by residents that have forced the report to be withdrawn.

The only silver lining might have been if the BBC was making a lot of money out of the disposals, to subsidise programme making and to avoid the sort of staff cuts that my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) spoke about. The BBC manages such things so badly; it has sold the sites at an undervalue. The proposal for the Wood lane site is what we call the poor man’s Shard—a 35-storey block of luxury flats. I am told that the BBC sold the site at an undervalue, and no doubt—it is in the press—it is also selling its TV centre site at an undervalue, getting a poor deal for licence payers.

I hope that the new director-general will change the BBC’s culture and management. The BBC’s history, certainly during the time that I have represented the area as an MP, has been tragic, in its service to licence fee payers and to my constituents. I wish that I had more time to talk about what I believe to be editorial and managerial mistakes made by the BBC. Three years ago, the BBC thought it was a good idea to bring Britain’s leading fascist to the centre of one of the most multicultural areas of the country, to appear on “Question Time”, and after the invasion of Gaza, it declined to broadcast the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal, despite the thousands of deaths and the destruction of infrastructure.

Those examples reveal deep problems at the heart of how the BBC is run, and the last thing that it wants is for us to say, “Carry on; you’re doing a wonderful job.” I genuinely want the BBC to continue as a leading world broadcaster, but that will not happen without major reform right at the top of the organisation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Goodman]

Diversity is the exact issue that I want to address. There are various dimensions to diversity. A big survey on how women are used in programming focused on the number of women employed by the BBC and the number of women experts whom it interviews. It found that the number of women used is way below that of men, which is not acceptable, because women also pay the licence fee. We cannot tolerate it.

Does having more men in management result in a better picture on the screen? The new director-general is, of course, a man—as Jack Lemmon was told at the end of “Some Like It Hot”, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”—but I hope that he will continue the process of enabling us to see more women on screen.

My final point on diversity relates to the regions, which many hon. Members have mentioned. With apologies to my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter), who made a devastating critique of the BBC’s property portfolio management—he seems to have renamed himself the hon. Member for White City—the BBC is, and is perceived to be, very London-centric. A major effort was made to address that by moving to Salford. The fact is that Salford and London are two places and there are many more places across the entire nation. We want to see programmes that reflect life in many other areas.

For example, it is the Durham miners ‘gala this Saturday. Eighty thousand people will be in Durham listening to speeches at this huge cultural festival, which has been going on for 125 years. I have never seen any national coverage of the miners’ gala. We will get it this year, because the leader of the Opposition, my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), will make a speech, but we should receive the coverage anyway. It should not require that speech for people to see such a major event. The regions and the issue of diversity are extremely important.

[Mr Slaughter]

I do not disagree with my hon. Friend. Had the BBC not gone to where it did in Salford, it could have gone into Moss Side or into a deprived area, which White City is, of course, although the BBC never engages with the community there. The development in Salford is utterly soulless and completely cut off from the rest of the world. Moreover, what does my hon. Friend think of the Broadcasting House development on one of the most expensive real estate sites in the world?

[Helen Goodman]

I have not yet visited the new building. There is more to say about dumbing down and received wisdom, but I am sure that the whole Chamber would like to hear from the Minister, so I will draw my remarks to a close.