Public Service Broadcasting: BBC Centenary

Lord Bassam of Brighton Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, in common with other noble Lords today, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Foster, on securing this debate and giving us something of a tour de force of a speech. There have been many tours de force this afternoon—probably too many to list—and I have enjoyed them all. While we are on the business of congratulations, I join others and reaffirm my earlier congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, on his bouncebackability. It is a good cause for celebration. Whatever the reason for his departure under the Truss regime changes, we all feel reassured by his return.

This has been a wide-ranging debate, all about modernisation and modern media, and quite a lot about nostalgia. We should remind ourselves of some things about public service broadcasting. In recent years, particularly during the Covid pandemic, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, touched on, its value has been brought home because of its trusted nature and its ability not only to provide news and advice at the same time but to do much more than that—to entertain us when we need it most and to act as a key tool for children and young people in the absence of their usual school day.

TV these days is a formative part of a child’s experience, as the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, reminded us, in a way that is very different from my childhood. Indeed, when I was thinking about this debate today, I was reminded that I did not watch a television until the age of eight—something unthinkable today, when TV screens are everywhere and catch-up enables us to tune in to whatever, whenever.

Indeed, I recall my mother being deeply sceptical about the merits of children watching TV at all. She was oddly rather relieved when we moved to a house served only by gaslight rather than electricity. Later, when I was older, she said that at least she did not have to think about the issue.

My early broadcasting experience as a consumer was with radio, in the days of the Home Service, the Light Programme and the Third Programme—which I was told was only for posh people. Then, of course, there was the Empire Service, later rebadged as the World Service. Now it is a very widely respected output, one that—as many colleagues this afternoon have said—is trusted for its reliability but has, unfortunately, been threatened by the decreases in funding over the years.

I knew nothing of current affairs and politics until TV arrived in our household and the outcome of the 1964 general election became a topic of conversation. Nowadays we can have all this as a wall-to-wall subject, manipulating content to suit our personal preferences. Of course, today the modern Conservative Party has seemingly done its best to keep BBC News and Channel 4 busy with wall-to-wall coverage of its own soap and psychodrama, particularly over the last year—something that I must say I have greatly enjoyed. It is a form of entertainment.

More seriously, the broadcasters have played out the game of politics in front of us in a way that I think has been incredibly balanced, informing while trying to keep us up to date with the latest twists and turns. In a strange way, I think they have proven their value as impartial observers, casting questions in the right direction, by the way in which those stories have panned out.

We had excellent coverage following the sad passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in September. The BBC reports that 32.5 million people tuned into the Queen’s state funeral. That was an enormous number of people paying close attention, far more than watched the Queen when she was crowned back in 1952. Huw Edwards was a calming, reassuring, measured presence during that tumultuous time and, as something of a national treasure, many will share his sentiments on the BBC. As he says, it offers

“very good value for money”

and represents

“100 years of incredible achievement and some of the best programming in the world.”

It is hard to dispute those words.

As well as celebrating the BBC’s centenary, as many noble Lords have said today, we should also congratulate Channel 4 on its 40th anniversary, which was marked yesterday. Contrary to assertions made by the Government in recent years, Channel 4 continues to reinvent itself. It has the biggest free streaming platform in the UK and is constantly evolving its offering, supporting independent production companies and emerging talent across the whole of the UK. As noble Lords have reminded us this afternoon, if we privatise Channel 4 and go down that route, many of those production houses and companies will simply disappear.

If left by Ministers to get on with its work, Channel 4 is well positioned to continue playing an important public service role for many years to come. Yes, the Government have raised questions about its future funding, but privatisation is not the only answer. Channel 4 has a well-advanced alternative business plan that addresses the issues the Government claim exist as a threat to its success. As others have said, we know that the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has been reassessing the business case for its privatisation. Can the Minister confirm where the Government have got to on this? Either they have gone very quiet or a review has found its way into the long grass.

Can the noble Lord please reassure us that we shall have the much-needed media Bill? The noble Lord, Lord Foster, made that point very persuasively and the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, and others followed. We need to know because there is so much uncertainty out there. Some of the issues that are very much alive, such as prominence and a sense of mission for our media, need to be dealt with in a modern and updated piece of legislation.

I also want the noble Lord to take the opportunity to correct the record concerning Channel 4’s chief executive officer’s remuneration package. On 21 July, he told the House that Channel 4’s boss receives

“more than the chief executive of ITV”,—[Official Report, 21/7/22; col. 2032.]

yet, according to both organisations’ annual reports, that is simply not the case, so perhaps the noble Lord can offer a correction. Channel 4 may be a specialist in commissioning alternative programming, but discussions about its future should not be based on alternative facts.

Of course, neither Channel 4 nor the BBC is without its faults. Just this week, we heard of the BBC’s plans to radically shake up its radio offering. Local BBC radio stations inform and entertain millions across the country. We also saw during Liz Truss’s short spell in office that the BBC local radio presenters are excellent journalists. They were asking the hard questions, putting the Prime Minister on the spot and holding her to account perhaps more effectively than we are used to. It was a service to the nation.

The BBC has not covered itself in glory in recent days with its announcement and we should not shy away from saying that, but one answer is for the Government to provide it with greater clarity about its long-term future. The plans it outlined do in part have a direct relationship to the Government’s decision to cap the licence fee at £159 and effectively take some £250 million of revenue out that would otherwise have been available to the BBC for its programming. That reduction made it inevitable that change to service levels would take place, but whether they are the right ones must be open to debate.

Just as Ministers have threatened Channel 4 with privatisation, the BBC has been threatened with the withdrawal of the licence fee, with no feasible alternative proposal in its place. We know that licence fee payers have been diminishing in number—a challenge that the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, and others raised in their plea for us to think big in the future. We need to understand why those licence fee numbers are shrinking and what that means and implies for the future funding of the BBC. It is for the Government to lead the debate there, in a constructive way that recognises the value of this great institution.

The BBC has served our country well for 100 years since its inception. We benefit from its history and legacy and, as others have said, we undermine it at our peril. Not only is it rightly admired worldwide, rather like our National Health Service, but its reputation, despite periodic political attacks, remains high. For a whole variety of reasons, many of which have been given clear and distinct voice during the debate, we should cherish and nurture our public service broadcasters, guaranteeing their future rather than throwing it into doubt. Broadcast media, like all others, live in an era of rapid change. As the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, said, our role is surely to create a framework in which we as parliamentarians provide opportunities for change and renewal and encourage it in a way that strengthens, rather than weakens, the broadcasting ecosystem.

We can only hope that the arrival of the third Prime Minister in as many months, who we are told is a grown-up, will see a ratcheting down of the threats to public service broadcasting outlets and a more mature discussion about the issues that currently face all broadcasters. There are decisions to be made about funding, listed events, new markets, prominence, missions, purpose and so on, but they must be taken in the national interest, not in a narrow party-political interest, with the widest possible public debate and engagement in a well-informed way. There is much in that menu for the Minister to respond to.