Future of the BBC

John McDonnell Excerpts

Monday 21st October 2013 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

I, too, welcome you to the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker. I also fully concur with some of the ideas that the hon. Member for Manchester, Withington (Mr Leech) put forward at the end of his speech. I was about to say that this debate is extremely timely because the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), is here, but he is just leaving the Chamber. Not to worry; I am sure that he will read Hansard in the morning. The debate is also timely as the Select Committee will have the BBC director-general and the chair of the BBC Trust before it tomorrow.

I want to concentrate on the subject of BBC news. I am the secretary of the National Union of Journalists parliamentary group, which is a cross-party group that works closely with the NUJ and naturally has concerns about the role of journalists within the BBC. It is worth reminding ourselves that the BBC still has a 74% share of national and international news consumption and a 31% share of all television news. It is the largest single investor in TV news production and it spends £120 million on radio news, compared with the £27 million spent in the commercial sector.

I was around at the time of the licence fee settlement three years ago. I was there on that dark autumn weekend when the deal was stitched up—largely influenced, I think, by Murdoch—in which the BBC took on the freeze over the next six years, the 20% cuts and, as the hon. Member for Manchester, Withington said, the additional £340 million of expenditure on other services. That deal has resulted in 2,000 job lay-offs. It has also had a dramatic effect on the BBC news service. Last year, 140 jobs were lost in BBC news, and that was the eighth consecutive year of cuts in that area. That has hit investigative journalism and political coverage.

The National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee have criticised the BBC for implementing the cuts to the news service without making any assessment of their impact on quality. Last month, a further 75 job cuts were announced in BBC news and current affairs. The impact of these cuts is to degrade the BBC’s unique selling point, which is the quality of its journalism and news provision.

There are also real worries about an element of creeping commercialisation in the BBC news service. I agree with the hon. Gentleman about the importance of BBC Worldwide. The £1.09 billion income that it brought in during 2011-12 has made a significant contribution to the BBC. However, we are beginning to see the incursion of a profit motive within the BBC Worldwide’s service delivery. Peter Horrocks, the director of BBC Global News, which includes the BBC World Service. reportedly told news journalists that they would be required to come up with ideas

“to strengthen our commercial focus and grow income”

as part of their job appraisal process.

That came hard on the heels of the scandal in which the BBC was forced to issue an apology for accepting £17 million from the Malaysian Government—for “global strategic communications”—after running documentaries about Malaysia. The BBC has also broadcast material on Egypt made by FBC Media (UK) Ltd, a public relations firm that was working for the Mubarak regime at the time. There is therefore a real concern that BBC Worldwide’s search for income is affecting its editorial and journalistic decision making.

I agree that it is galling for journalists to see their jobs being cut and the service being reduced while expenditure is going into other areas, particularly into pay-offs for senior managers and others. I welcome Lord Hall’s introduction of some form of cap on redundancy payments. He has a real job on his hands, however, in tackling the BBC management style. The Chair of the Select Committee raised the issue of bullying at the BBC, and I shall go into that matter in more detail.

The investigation by Dinah Rose QC, known as the Respect at Work review, was launched more than a year ago. It revealed

“a culture where inappropriate behaviour has gone unchallenged and become normalised”.

It found that staff were often too afraid to use the complaints service. The NUJ provided the BBC management and the inquiry with a dossier containing eye-witness accounts of bullying at the corporation, some of which were leaked to the media. It is worth putting on record some of the experiences that the staff endured.

The NUJ dossier, which was seen by senior executives at the BBC, claims that a female journalist was offered a job promotion if she had sex with her boss in his country cottage, that a senior manager was given a pay-off despite allegations that he had sent sexual messages to two female graduates, that women working in the World Service’s Afghan department in the BBC's London headquarters were criticised for wearing western clothes and expressing opinions, and that a black radio presenter was told by his manager that his voice was “not black enough”. That is what went on at the BBC. Those are some of the complaints in the dossier that was submitted to the management.

Michelle Stanistreet, the NUJ general secretary, has said:

“It is quite clear that bullying has become an institutionalised problem at the BBC, one that has taken hold over many years. The report’s findings underline the fear factor that exists, particularly for those staff on freelance and short-term contracts, who know that speaking out could damage their career prospects. Many see how bullies have been allowed to get away with shocking behaviour right under the noses of senior management, so have no faith that complaining will bring any redress. Our submission was eye-watering stuff: people have been bullied because of their sexuality, or their race; women have been subjected to the most awful sexism; journalists have been openly reviled because of their age; and there are many others whose lives have been made unbearable for no discernible reason. People have been picked off simply because their face doesn’t seem to fit.”

What also came out of this dossier was that a former human resources manager turned whistleblower alleged that the BBC adopted underhand tactics during the 2010 pensions dispute with the NUJ. He claimed that, during those negotiations, the management were putting active union members under pressure, monitoring union ballots and e-mails. That was from the dossier submitted to management. Individual cases are now being taken up and formal complaints are being investigated. However, many of the formal complaints lodged nine months ago have still not come to any conclusion. That is a long period of time in which to investigate a case and then not come to a decision.

I thus believe that Lord Hall has a job to do in sorting out this atmosphere of bullying and intimidation within the BBC, and I doubt whether BBC management will be able to focus properly on the organisation’s future unless it restores morale, which is at an all-time low as a result of some elements of mismanagement that have gone on. When the Select Committee meets tomorrow and interviews the director-general of the BBC and the BBC Trust chairman, it must first of all get a grip on those matters of executive pay and excessive pay-offs, and it must then challenge the bullying culture revealed by the Rose review. It is important to recognise that the BBC lost the confidence of the work force because it was distant from the work force—not listening to the trade union representations made to it about a number of these issues and not understanding that the workers within the organisation wanted to make a contribution. I would welcome it ensuring that, whatever structure is established, if things continue with a board as at present, staff representation must be part of that board so that the workers can be involved in the future direction of the BBC.

I fear for BBC news in particular. I fear that if these cuts go on, they will undermine the very product for which the BBC has become famous. That is why, in the build-up to the renegotiations of the licence fee, I agree that we cannot have a continuing freeze. There should at least be inflation proofing and we need a proper discussion about the levels of investment needed for the future of journalism within the BBC. It is too good a service to lose and too good a service to undermine in the long term by the year-on cuts that have been endured over the last eight years.