TV Licence Fee

Debate between Julian Knight and Peter Heaton-Jones

Monday 20th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

I thank the hon. Gentleman—he did do the maths. That is a lot of money, and the BBC needs to be held to account for it. I do not, for one minute, stand here and say that everything about the BBC is perfect. We absolutely need more transparency and more accountability, and the hon. Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell) made that point extraordinarily well. It frustrates me that the BBC seems to show an extraordinarily defensive attitude whenever complaints are made about it. Whenever a member of the public or, indeed, a Member of this House, raises a perfectly reasonable concern about something the BBC has done—how it has covered a story or how it has spent public money, for example—its first thought is defence: “Fold the arms and try to pretend it didn’t happen”.

[Julian Knight]

Does my hon. Friend think that the BBC sometimes co-opts its talent in its defence, so to speak? Is that really the right way to go about things, rather than with the openness and transparency he rightly talks about?

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

There is sometimes a tendency, I think, for BBC managers not to be front and centre or, when they are, if they appear on a programme like “Feedback” or “Points of View”, the defensive attitude is the one that comes to the fore. What we need sometimes, just sometimes, is for the BBC to say, “We got this wrong. We didn’t do it right and we’re gonna do it differently next time”. I do not see enough of that.

When I worked for the BBC as an editor, and then again as a programme presenter, my manager would come to me once a week with a spreadsheet of the complaints I had received. He used to say, “As long as I’m getting about equal numbers of complaints, Peter, from either side in politics, you’re probably getting it about right.” That is probably as good a yardstick as any. The BBC does get stick from all sides.

The BBC is an organisation that gets a lot of our money and we need more analysis of how it chooses to spend it. There is one particular area of the BBC that I know best, and that is radio, particularly local radio, as that is where I worked. After all, I have the perfect face for radio. As has been mentioned, regional telly and local radio—in my area, BBC Radio Devon and “Spotlight”—do a fantastic job of covering news, which no other broadcaster would be able to do without that public service funding input. That is why I welcome the recent announcements by the BBC director-general at the Gillard awards, which celebrate local radio broadcasting. The first of the two main decisions he announced was that the £10 million of funding cuts he had asked the BBC to find from local radio will not now have to happen. He has found that funding from other sources, and I welcome that. Secondly, the national shared evening programme that local radio has had to have for three years now will be scrapped and local services restored. That is an example of the BBC listening, doing the right thing and saying, “We understand we have all this money and that we’ve got to spend it in a way that benefits the majority of licence fee payers”.

The alternatives do not stack up. Subscription or advertising would be extraordinarily retrograde steps. If we allow the BBC to take advertising, not only do we immediately raise questions about impartiality and neutrality but, frankly, come midnight most nights we will have a live roulette wheel, which is exactly what we have on ITV most nights.

On subscription services, I have been undertaking a text conversation with a constituent of mine in North Devon ever since I said I would be taking part in this debate. He said, “Netflix costs me half as much as the BBC and has five times the content”. Here is what Netflix does not have: radio, regional broadcasting, news and current affairs, and huge educational programmes. It does not put computers into schools or cover live sport. It does not have the huge community events that bring the country together, like Children in Need, which raised £50 million last Friday. That is what Netflix does not give us.