Broadcasting

Damian Collins Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Karen Bradley]

I understand that point, but I think this structure will give the BBC more independence. The fact that the majority of directors will be appointed by the BBC makes it clear that the Government want the BBC to be independent, to be strong and to succeed.

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

On that point, does my right hon. Friend accept that the director-general remains the editor-in-chief and that the role of the unitary board is only to scrutinise, post-broadcast, decisions the director-general has made?

[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.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Whittingdale]

I am not sure that the fact that James Purnell was a member of Tony Blair’s policy unit is hugely reassuring to me. As for the right hon. Gentleman’s point about the need for diversity, it has already been covered in the debate, and I absolutely sign up to it. The right hon. Gentleman has acknowledged and welcomed the fact that we have included it in the BBC’s public purposes for the first time. I think that the BBC is committed to trying to increase diversity, but, as has already been said, there is more to be done.

[Damian Collins]

The appointment of James Purnell to his new role is important not just in relation to James Purnell himself, but in relation to the process. This is one of the most senior positions in the BBC, and there is no internal or external advertising of that position. There is a great deal of criticism of the way in which BBC executives are appointed and how much they are paid, and an element of transparency and competition is important in that context.

[Mr Whittingdale]

I entirely agree that that is an important issue, but I think that the issue of the political precedent is, if anything, even more important. People complained vigorously about the suggestion that the Government might appoint, as non-executive independent directors, people who might be political friends. That caused howls. This, however, is not an independent position. It is not a non-editorial position. It is a position within the management executive which involves responsibility for editorial content. Obviously, it is a much more directly responsible position, and it is therefore even more important that it should be politically independent.

--- 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).

[Sammy Wilson]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the transparency applied to those on top salaries should also be applied to those who are on contracts that enable them to avoid tax either by paying only corporation tax on money that is paid directly to them, or by participating in tax avoidance schemes, which the BBC now uses for hundreds of its well-paid employees?

[Damian Collins]

I completely understand the point that the hon. Gentleman is making. People must certainly pay the taxes that are due on the income that they receive, wherever it comes from. That applies to BBC executives as much as to anyone else. I note what the Secretary of State said in her intervention a few moments ago, and I believe that this is something that we must keep under close review. If BBC Talent is trying to use a loophole by channelling more of its income through independent production companies to avoid having to declare it—our concern, through the work of the National Audit Office, is that there has been an acceleration in that process and that people are trying to get around the rule in the new charter that those who earn more than £150,000 should declare what they earn—we should look again at the matter in the mid-point review.

I want to touch on the comments about the Scottish Six made by my friend on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (John Nicolson). As I was the acting Chair of the Committee and a member of the Committee when we discussed the matter, I was able to give my view on the significance of the Scottish Six. We felt—I certainly felt this, and I hope the hon. Gentleman agrees—that we were calling for the BBC in Scotland to be given editorial independence over the six o’clock news, so that it could reflect the fact that devolution made certain news items less relevant to the Scottish audience than to the rest of the UK audience. We envisaged that the BBC in Scotland would have the editorial independence to make those decisions and the freedom to change the running order of the programme if it chose to do so. The Scottish Six would still be a national news programme, but it would be broadcast from Scotland, it would be produced and edited in Scotland and it would have a Scottish perspective on the national news. We considered the fact that the BBC was comfortable to make that decision with radio, so why should it not consider doing so for television?

That is, of course, an editorial decision for the BBC to make, but one of the things that the Committee hoped to do with this recommendation in the report was to give the BBC a shove and say, “You have been looking at this for quite a long time, you have tried various different formats and you have tried to make a decision. Here is our view, but it remains something for you to do.” I agree with the comments made a few weeks ago by the Secretary of State. I think I am right in interpreting her as saying that, as others have discussed, the Government should not dictate to the BBC what it should do about this; it is a decision for the BBC to make.

Finally, I want to touch on the BBC iPlayer, which has been mentioned. It is important that we remove the loophole whereby people can get out of paying the licence fee by watching programmes—both catch-up and live—on the BBC iPlayer. This also takes us into important new territory that the BBC should explore. By far the most practical way to police such an arrangement would be to give each licence fee payer a PIN that they could put into a portable device to access the iPlayer, to prove that they had paid the licence fee. That is common in other digital services that people use all the time, and it would be the simplest and most logical way to proceed. It would certainly be a lot easier than having digital enforcement cameras—a modern-day version of the TV detector van—going around, trying to work out whether people were viewing the BBC online.

One of the reactions of people in the BBC to such a suggestion is that they do not like the idea of licence fee payers becoming subscribers, or of the BBC becoming a subscription service. I do not think that that would be the case at all. That suggestion is simply an acknowledgement of the fact that new technology allows people to access BBC services in a different way. Those services are still free to access and use for people who pay the licence fee. We would simply be using new technology to make them more readily available.

I believe that a sensible step forward would be to have complementary subscription services that gave people deeper access to the back catalogue and enabled them to stream other programmes that might not be available for broadcast. That would allow the BBC to grow its revenues from its back catalogue and to be innovative in its programme making. It would in no way represent a shift away from the licence fee-funded BBC; it would simply be a recognition of the fact that new technology, platforms and tools will allow the BBC to innovate in ways that simply were not possible in the past. Over this charter renewal process, I would like to see the BBC taking further steps in that direction.