Online Harms

John Howell Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

I want to offer some help to my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) in looking further afield for evidence of this sort of thing working well. That evidence comes from the Council of Europe, which has been very active in this policy area for many years. It works with its 46 member states, the private sector, civil society and other actors to shape an internet based principally on human rights. It aims to ensure that the internet provides a safe and open environment where freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, diversity, culture, education and knowledge can all flourish.

The key pillar for the protection of human rights online is the European convention on human rights. The European Court of Human Rights, which rules on applications, has already delivered landmark judgments concerning the online environment—in particular, in connection with the right to freedom of expression, the right to access information and the right to privacy.

The Lanzarote convention, which we have already ratified, deals in particular with child abuse, which is of great concern to me. It deals with the fact that the form of online abuse keeps changing by involving children in the whole of the process. That is adjusted according to their age. Children and young people who exercise their right to freely express their views as part of this process must be protected from harm, including intimidation, reprisals, victimisation and violations of their right to privacy.

I urge my right hon. Friend and the Minister to look at what the Council of Europe has been doing. It is not part of the EU—they do not have to get tied up with all that—and it represents 46 countries. The issue has been looked at in great depth across wider Europe. They could learn a lot from that experience.

BBC Charter: Regional Television News

John Howell Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. My hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Rob Butler) has been far too modest about his achievements in broadcasting. It may come as a surprise to some Members, but he taught me all I know about broadcasting on both sides of the table. I remember appearing before him at the BBC as an interviewee, and a little later succeeding him as the presenter for BBC World Service Television broadcasts. Being a presenter for World Service Television meant that we could walk down a high street in the UK and not be recognised. However, when we got off a plane in Delhi, we were absolutely mobbed—an interesting experience.

We need to look at what right the BBC has to organise its own services. I would not want to ban the BBC from organising its own services or looking at the competition that it faces, which includes, as we have already seen, things such as Facebook, which I will come back to in a minute. It is right for the BBC to look at how we as consumers use TV and radio, but it is important for us as politicians to stand up and say what we value most in our television broadcasting, and what it would be a great shame to see end. For me, that starts and almost finishes with investigative journalism at a local level.

I am not saying this because I use “South Today” and BBC Radio Oxford, as I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury does as well. It is not for want of another forum for expressing our views, but—I pick up the point made by the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner)—when both Oxford and Cambridge are expanding so quickly and so much, it is extraordinary to see the BBC turning its back on them.

I accept the point about costs, but one question that will have occurred to the BBC is that investigative journalism is not cheap to run. It requires a lot of human costs and takes an enormous amount of time to make it work. Journalists have to go out and see, talk to and film people. When they get back to the studio, there is all the editing of the tapes as well, but the product is much the better for that personal intervention. I wonder whether anyone at the BBC has undertaken an analysis of how it manages the important elements of the charter that we have already mentioned—the impartiality of the news and information—and manages to keep them current and in place in the fight with digital broadcasters.

If we compare television news broadcasts with Facebook, we are not comparing like with like. Facebook is incredibly biased, and Twitter even more so. If that is the way the BBC is going with its digital broadcasts, I want nothing more to do with it. Like the hon. Member for Cambridge, I no longer watch BBC TV news. It is anathema to me to see the values that my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury and I were imbued with simply wasted, and I do not see that as a good line for the future. The impartiality point is a crucial one, and one that my hon. Friend did not touch on much. However, I think it is a point that we need to get right if the BBC is to make a change. I have seen nothing in the thinking of the BBC about how, in a digital age, it will preserve its impartiality. If we look at today’s news online as an example of that, there is absolute relish in the idea that tomorrow there will be a vote of no confidence in the Government. There is no objectivity about it; it is a piece of gratuitous journalism—if I can call it journalism—that does the BBC no credit whatever.

There are many aspects to the problem, and we can only touch on a few of them. However, I think it is important that we restate our commitment to local investigative journalism, which I agree does a tremendous job. I have seen such journalism at a local level develop into large-scale news programmes, because of the careful work undertaken by local journalists. I have no idea what I am going to do when I finish in Parliament. I will probably not go back into broadcasting, but if I were to, I hope that I would find the values that my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury and I grew up with still alive and present in whatever form the BBC takes, but I sincerely doubt that that will be the case.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Matt Warman)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson, and it is a pleasure to be back, however briefly. I thank hon. Members for their kind words.

I feel that I should join the ex-journalist fest. As a former journalist, I never had the pleasure of working for the BBC, but my first job was to be paid to watch its output. I promise that, as a first job out of university, being paid to watch television is less fun than it sounds, but it is pretty unusual. Among a whole host of other things, I covered the launch of BBC iPlayer in 2007 as a journalist, and in some ways I think that tells us how far the BBC has come and how much it has changed since then. It is as much a technology company as a broadcaster.

The thread that runs through all of that period, and which predates it by some way, is the value of regional news output. I think that the continued preservation of that output is something we would all like to see the BBC look to. The Government would, of course, like to see it preserve and enhance its regional output as much as possible, but that is a matter for the BBC. We have all paid tribute to our local news organisations, but I could not stand here without mentioning the giant that is Peter Levy on “Look North”.

Turning to the substance of the debate, as the Secretary of State and many others have said, the BBC is a global British brand. The Government want the BBC to continue to thrive in the decades to come and be a beacon for news and the arts around the world. The royal charter, underpinned by a more detailed framework agreement, guarantees the BBC’s current model as an independent, publicly owned, public service broadcaster.

[John Howell]

Has the Minister been struck, as I have, by the similarity between what we are asking for for local investigative journalism and how the brand operates at a global level? It seems that at the global level the BBC has appreciated that it can only achieve its aim by investigative journalism and working in small groups, which is to its credit. We see that every day on the television.

[Matt Warman]

I wonder whether my hon. Friend has read my next paragraph. The value that we have seen recently from the BBC in the reporting on the crisis in Ukraine is not the whole story. We have to look at the huge value it adds in its heroic reporting and investigating of local issues just as much as its value on the world stage.

The charter and framework agreement set the BBC’s mission and public purposes, which establish the BBC’s responsibilities and what it must do. Those responsibilities include the provision of impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them—of course, that is a world that is experienced locally, nationally and internationally.

On 17 January, the Secretary of State announced in Parliament that the licence fee would be frozen for the next two years. The BBC will continue to receive around £3.7 billion in annual public funding, allowing it to deliver its mission and public purposes and continue doing what it does best. Under the terms of the charter, the BBC is operationally and editorially independent from Government—quite right, too. As Members have acknowledged today, there is no provision for the Government to intervene on the BBC’s day-to-day operations. That means that it is for the BBC, subject to Ofcom’s regulation, to decide how best to use its funding as it delivers its remit and meets its mission and public purposes. Of course, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Rob Butler) implied, as Ofcom is set up by the Government, there is a role for the Government within this. However, I have to stress that Ofcom regulates that aspect of the BBC, rather than the Government.

On 26 May 2022, Tim Davie set out his vision for keeping the BBC relevant and offering value to all audiences in the on-demand age, with a particular focus, as has been referred to, on a digital-first BBC. This included an announcement that while the BBC will maintain its overall investment in local and regional content, some services and bulletins will be merged or ended, as we have discussed today. In the BBC’s explanation for this change, it set out that a small number of changes to its regional TV output will help strike a better balance between broadcast and freeing up money to invest online.

The announcement also confirmed that the BBC will continue to support the local news sector through the £8 million it spends each year on the local news partnerships and the Local Democracy Reporting Service, and that it will increase investment in local current affairs by creating a new network of journalists to focus on investigative journalism in communities across England. Of course, the Government welcome the maintenance of support for the LDRS during this charter period. It is an effective model for collaborative working between the BBC and local commercial news outlets.

As the BBC’s independent regulator, Ofcom is responsible for setting out the regulatory conditions that it considers appropriate for requiring the BBC to fulfil the mission and public purposes that my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury referred to. Those conditions are set out in the operating licence, and Ofcom is conducting a public consultation on proposed changes to the current licence.

The Government firmly believe that public service broadcasting plays an important role in reflecting and representing people and communities from all over the UK. The BBC has a particular role to play and must ensure that it meets the responsibilities set out in its charter. That will be regulated by Ofcom, including through an annual assessment of the BBC’s performance.

Regional news and local current affairs play a vital role in bringing communities together—as the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) said—and providing shared experiences across the UK. In that context, we recognise the continued requirement for the BBC to produce and schedule regional news programmes on traditional platforms. The value of television remains immense; whatever the changing figures of its reach, for a large number of people, it is obviously hugely and uniquely valuable.

We also recognise that the remits of all PSBs, including the BBC, must be updated to reflect the rapidly changing sector, where that mixture of online and digital distribution is of increasing importance. We therefore welcome Ofcom’s consultation on the BBC’s operating licence to ensure that the BBC continues to be allowed to innovate and respond to changing audience needs through greater recognition of those online services. We look forward to seeing the consultation’s results in due course.

It goes without saying that the BBC needs to consider whether local news meets the needs of local communities. That is, of course, its ambition and what Ofcom looks to ensure that it achieves. However, in my own community for instance, people in Boston will think that Hull is a very long way away, just as people in Oxford and Cambridge may think they do not have much in common with the Isle of Wight, as the hon. Member for Cambridge pointed out.

Among the actions we are taking to support the sector, we have committed to a series of measures that we intend to deliver through a media Bill. It will support PSBs by updating decades-old rules to give them more flexibility in how they deliver on their remits across their services. They will also have their online prominence guaranteed.

While there are some excellent examples of effective news services provided by local TV, the picture is more mixed for local TV as a whole. A number of local stations have been granted permission by Ofcom over the past few years to reduce local news and local content production to sustain services. By the end of the year, we will consult on the process for licensing local TV after 2025, and will gather views on whether to offer renewals, and the terms under which they should be offered. We will consider whether to set minimum local news requirements as a condition of renewal.

The Government also fund the community radio fund, which gives grants to help fund the core costs of running Ofcom-licensed community radio stations, such as management and administration. As my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury mentioned, those radio stations reflect a diverse mix of cultures and interests and provide a rich mix of mostly locally produced content, typically covering a small geographical area. Their value in the mix cannot be overstated. However, specifically on the BBC, we are evaluating how the BBC and Ofcom assess the market impact and public value of the BBC in the local news market through the mid-term review.

To conclude, noting our manifesto commitment to support local newspapers as vital pillars of our communities, it is important, in a debate about regional TV programming, to consider the sustainability challenges faced across the broader local news market, and the extent to which the BBC can help. My hon. Friend will be aware that the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee is conducting an inquiry into the sustainability of local journalism, and I look forward to seeing its report in due course.

We all know that the BBC is a great national institution; we all want to see it thrive. Over the past 100 years, as has been said already, it has touched the lives of almost everyone in the UK and made a unique contribution to our cultural heritage. The Government are clear that the BBC must continue to adapt if it is to thrive in the decades to come, but, of course, we all want to see it serve local, regional and international audiences to the best of its ability. I think we would all like to see it define that in ways that are understood by the general public.

The BBC needs to represent, reflect and serve audiences, taking into account the needs of diverse communities of all the UK nations and regions. It is vital that the BBC continues to meet that requirement, and it is vital that it is held to the highest standards in doing so. On that note, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury on securing the debate, which has been an important part of holding the BBC to those standards, alongside the work of Ofcom and others.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

John Howell Excerpts

Monday 8th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

There is much to welcome in this Budget, particularly the help that has been given to business. We have heard that this includes an extension to the furlough scheme, new grants and loans, as well as additional support to hospitality, cultural activities and leisure. There are two things that I want to concentrate on in particular. As the MP who helped to introduce the concept of assets of community value, which helped stop pubs being sold off and allowed them to become available to communities, I commend the £150 million community ownership fund, which provides grants of £250,000 to allow communities to have the money to buy them. The original scheme has saved many a pub and I have a number in my own constituency. They are doing rather well, providing good food and drink, and are owned widely by the community.

The second issue I wish to raise is the culture funds which are there to help in the cultural sphere. I hope that the funds will be adequate to support national museums—not just the British Museum, but museums throughout the land, which provide a valuable window on the history and culture of an individual area.

I also want to draw attention to the support for elite sports, as, of course, I have rowing in my constituency. The Henley regatta is intended, hopefully, to be run in August, but it is a sport that is much wider than the elite label that is often given to it. Along the banks of Henley itself, there is great support for rowing for children.

I also hope that the culture recovery fund will support the sector, but it is very sad that room was not found in the Budget to help out the courtyard societies in Burlington House, which are fighting to be allowed to stay, often after maintaining a presence there for several hundred years. I declare an interest in this as a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, which is one of the learned societies there. They contribute so much to society, and the work that they do for society, teaching people about their cultural place in the world, is of enormous value. I hope that the Government will still do something positive for the antiquaries and the other learned societies.

Finally, I echo the comment that was made at the beginning of this debate about the directors of companies who take their income in dividends. We must do something for them. As an inspector of taxes, I fail to understand the arguments put forward by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs on this issue. It really is a question of fairness that we do something to help them.

Online Harms Consultation

John Howell Excerpts

Tuesday 15th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Oliver Dowden]

The right hon. Lady raises important points. On private channels, companies will be expected to use emergent technology to check for this sort of thing happening. The point about proportionality is that clearly we cannot expect them to individually, through human activity, spot this kind of thing; they will have to rely on artificial intelligence and so on. So as the regulator becomes confident that those technologies work, it will expect the firms in question to use it. There is a slightly separate issue about end-to-end encryption, and she will be familiar with the sort of conversations the Home Secretary and I are having with Facebook, for example, on that. Encryption cannot be used as an excuse to get out of being subject to this legislation, and we would expect firms that use end-to-end encryption still to take measures to protect against child abuse and exploitation, for precisely the reasons the right hon. Lady sets out.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

In 2007, the Council of Europe produced a convention, which I understand we have signed, that deals with the online abuse of children. Will my right hon. Friend work with me and other members of the Council of Europe to strengthen that convention, in order to make sure that the regulators are genuinely robust and can deal with this problem?

[Oliver Dowden]

Yes, of course I would be delighted to do so. As Members will know, child abuse, sadly, knows no boundaries—the child abuse viewed by people in this country is often generated around the world—so it is important that we have a co-ordinated approach.

Professional and Amateur Sport: Government Support

John Howell Excerpts

Wednesday 30th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Huddleston]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his focus on the power of sport; I agree completely with him about that. He is correct that sport is a devolved matter, but we work closely with the devolved Administrations. I believe I am meeting my counterpart this Thursday to discuss some of those issues. As I said, we are working on the details of the package of support. If it is a package where there are Barnett consequentials, there will be Barnett consequentials, but it depends on the package, and I am afraid I cannot give him any more details at the moment.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

I agree totally with the Minister’s assessment of the role that sport plays in this country. He will be aware that the Henley regatta was cancelled in July. Will he assure me that he is doing all he can to ensure that that and other iconic events will take place next year?

[Nigel Huddleston]

Rowing is also a very important sport in my constituency, with lots of raving fans. My hon. Friend is right: these iconic events do so much for the local constituency and have a knock-on impact on tourism and so many other sectors that we want to get going. As I say, we want to open these sectors as soon as it is feasible to do so, working with local authorities, which are taking their responsibilities very seriously. We will endeavour to get the Henley regatta and other sports going as soon as it is safe to do so.

Arts, Culture and Heritage: Support Package

John Howell Excerpts

Tuesday 7th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Dinenage]

I have met with orchestras almost weekly over the past few weeks as we try to navigate our way through some of the particular challenges that they are experiencing. We will certainly look at some of the hon. Lady’s suggestions.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

What impact does the Minister think the £120 million of capital investment will have on arts bodies continuing with projects that they had paused?

[Caroline Dinenage]

We know that many projects were stalled because of covid, and that the workforce—the creative experts and craftsmen—have been sidelined while that work could not take place. We hope that the capital investment will kick-start some of that work so that people are employed in the here and now and these incredible cultural and creative venues are protected for future generations.

Virtual participation in proceedings concluded (Order, 4 June).

Economy and Society: Contribution of Music

John Howell Excerpts

Tuesday 21st January 2020 Westminster Hall

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McDonagh. It is also a great pleasure to participate in a debate with so many members of MP4 here on the Front Benches. I feel humbled in their presence and I hope they will give us a rendition later in the debate.

I am well aware of the economic benefits of the music industry; my son composes music for films, so I see the inside of that industry from a family point of view. However, I will concentrate here on the benefit to society. People may remember that Edward Elgar once said:

“My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us! The world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.”

However, I think those days have long passed.

A good example of that is in the availability of organists. I happen to be an organist myself, so I speak from personal experience. The lack of organists is much more important than the lack of people going to church, and shows the inability of young people’s education to pick out the talent that exists and to encourage young people to go on to play the organ and to develop it. That must be tied in with what the Arts Council has asked for in terms of a diverse and appropriate potential workforce—a point that it is making very forcefully.

There are two other examples that I would give of how music affects society, both from my own constituency. The first is an organisation called Not a Choir. It is actually a choir, but it is for people who have never sung before, believe that they cannot sing or in some way feel embarrassed about trying to sing. It has given the people who sing with it a tremendous amount of solidarity with each other. It has taken away a lot of the loneliness they feel by allowing them to participate and perform together. They perform publicly together, and their performances are very much appreciated by the people who listen to them and in the villages around them.

The second example is a charity in my constituency called Music for Autism, which is run by the conductor of the Orchestra of St John’s. He gets members of the orchestra to work with young autistic people and provide them with a good music therapy experience. It is a delight to watch not just the young autistic people’s ability to latch on to the music and their being helped with it, but also how much the musicians who participate get out of it. We only have to see their faces when they are performing to realise that this is something worth doing.

I suggest to the Minister that more needs to be put into education for musicians and talent spotting of musicians, and also that more needs to be put into efforts to ensure that music is at the heart of our communities, both now and in the future.

BBC

John Howell Excerpts

Monday 15th July 2019 Westminster Hall

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Wilson. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.

I suppose I should start by declaring an interest. For a number of years I worked as a presenter for BBC World Service television. I presented such well-known programmes as “World Business Report” and “World Business Review”, which I am sure trip off the memory of those who managed to catch them. I was not one of the mega-rich presenters. The hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) spoke of people in the talent pool who do not have much talent. I like to think that I did have the talent but was not paid enough for it. However, anyone who had that role realised that it was a wonderful role to have, because they could walk down any high street in the UK and nobody would recognise them, but when they got off the plane in Delhi they would be mobbed, because that was the distribution of the programme.

As a presenter at the BBC, I was made very aware of its editorial policies. I like to think that I did not infringe those policies at all during my time as a presenter, so I do not think an accusation of bias on my part would have been either made or appropriate. I fully accept that the BBC is not a perfect organisation. I fully accept that it makes mistakes. However, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) said—he is no longer in his place—it is an enduring British institution that carries much weight and is held in much esteem by people in this country.

When I was a presenter at the BBC, few would have doubted that it was value for money—I cannot recall the issue ever being raised. However, it is raised in the BBC’s annual report for 2018—and it is glossed over somewhat. That report states that, based on the BBC’s survey of people who watch it, its value for money rating was six out of 10. The very next words of the report state that that is “within target”. That is an absurd thing to say. It is absurd to describe getting only six out of 10 as remaining “within target”. Far more needs to be done before the BBC can achieve value for money.

I suspect that the value for money argument is influenced principally by three factors. The first is the news coverage and whether there is an appreciation of bias in that. I suppose that comes down mostly to whether the BBC is biased in one way or the other in its coverage of Brexit. Personally, given the way Brexit has divided the country, I think it would be difficult not to see BBC presenters divided in the same way.

The second factor is the range of content. A constituent contacted me to say that he objected to the way a programme he was watching on one BBC channel suddenly switched to another so something else—I think it was the tennis from Wimbledon—could be run. That is not an acceptable way of behaving.

The third factor is the arguments about salaries and the gender pay gap. Going back a few years, the 2013-14 annual report asked for a reduction in the overall cost of talent. I cannot see that any appreciable change took place between the publication of the 2013-14 report and the current year. I happen to know that the director-general is working on that, but we need to see progress pretty quickly.

Looking at the range of content, which is one of the arguments I suspect people may have used to justify the BBC’s value for money, I shall point out two programmes. The first is “Bodyguard”. I thought that was a fantastic programme, and it will have been of interest to all of us in the Chamber, covering the subjects it did, but it was made by a production company owned by ITV. I will say a little more about that, and about how the nature of the media industry is changing, in a minute.

Secondly, in the field of investigative journalism, I praise the “Panorama” programme that covered the issue of antisemitism. I watched it from end to end and became more and more disturbed as I watched. I noticed that the hon. Member for Warrington North said bias can be seen when we hear what we do not want to hear. That is a prime example of bias being shown, because it is clearly something that people do not want to hear. I thought that was a very good programme, and it is one that I have recommended that people should watch on iPlayer.

I mentioned that “Bodyguard” was produced by an ITV production company. That illustrates in part the changing nature of the media industry. When I was the chief executive of a production company, I went over to New York to see the foreign editor of Fox. I said to him, “I’ve come here to sell you some lovely programmes that I’ve made about foreign and interesting places”—places such as Mongolia. I was the first journalist into Mongolia to interview the new democratically elected president. He looked at me and said, “Foreign—you mean Californian?” That line would not be appropriate today. The world has changed, and the media world has completely changed.

One area in which the BBC competes is online programming. We have seen it compete fully against Netflix, with quite a lot of dissatisfaction in working out the value for money score from Netflix. BritBox is coming online shortly from ITV, so there will be even more competition in this area. Whether in such circumstances the BBC can maintain its position on the licence fee is certainly open to question.

The commercial element in the BBC is not new. We tend to think of the BBC as having no commercial advertising. That is simply wrong. BBC World Service television carried substantial commercial advertising, and I did not find that it interrupted the flow of my presenting in the slightest, and nor did viewers find that it interrupted their enjoyment of the programmes.

[Andrew Bridgen]

Would my hon. Friend note that Channel 4 is also a public service broadcaster but it is not in receipt of any of the licence fee? It funds itself completely from advertising.

[John Howell]

I thank my hon. Friend for that comment. The idea of keeping out commercial advertising was fine 50 years ago, and even 20 years ago, but in today’s world it needs to be looked at again in the context of how the BBC will function.

I was going to say a few things about free TV licences, but the hon. Member for Warrington North has said many of them already, so I will not comment.

[Mr Edward Vaizey (Wantage) (Con)]

Do you agree with her? That is what we want to know.

[John Howell]

I think this is a fault of both the Government and the BBC. I have told the director-general that—he happens to be a constituent of mine—and that is the position I will take. Just before my right hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey) comes in with a witty comment, that is not sitting on the fence; it is a position that I fully hold. The BBC has done itself no good at all in how it is has gone about dealing with the TV licence.

Free TV Licences: Over-75s

John Howell Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Wright]

As I have said, the Government’s view as to what we expected of the BBC was clear. It was expressed clearly a number of times, including by me and indeed by the Prime Minister. However, the statutory fact of the matter is that this is a decision for the BBC to take. We made our view very clear, and other hon. Members made their views clear too, but it remains the BBC’s decision to take. I regret that it took the decision it did, and we must now speak to it about what more can be done.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

Lord Hall is quoted today as saying that many feel that

“the Government should continue to foot the Bill.”

Does the Secretary of State have an idea of what caused the change of thinking in the BBC? Would he like to say a little more about what he expects the BBC to do to support older people?

[Jeremy Wright]

I do not know what caused the change of view. There has been a gradual process—a transition—during which public subsidy has diminished and the BBC’s responsibility for covering the cost has increased, so this is not an immediate, overnight change. The BBC has covered such costs in larger and larger amounts for two years. It is up to the BBC to determine what more it feels it can do to support those must vulnerable pensioners.

For those asking what more can we do, I think I have made it clear. The Government have already done a huge amount for pensioners. We have made substantial inputs into ensuring that the poorest pensioners in our society are properly supported. The BBC needs to talk about and think about what more it can do. That is exactly the conversation I intend to have.

Leaving the EU: Mobile Roaming Charges

John Howell Excerpts

Thursday 7th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

Does the Secretary of State agree that consumer protection is behind his announcement today and that that has been the great strength of the way in which he has approached this issue?

[Jeremy Wright]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who is right. The Government have a responsibility, where we can, to continue consumer protection measures that currently reside in European law but that we think are sensible and desirable and that we will transfer into our own law in the event of our departure. Of course, as he will know, if there is a deal that includes an implementation period, the position will continue exactly as it is now during that period, which is one reason why such an implementation period and such a deal are desirable and one reason why it would be good for the Opposition to take their responsibilities seriously in this regard.