Broadcasting: Recent Developments

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Fowler on introducing this debate. It is a great pleasure that both at the end and the beginning of my career in your Lordships’ House I can call him “my noble friend.” I declare that I am a trustee of the fact-checking charity Full Fact.

When the Broadcasting Bill of 1996 was given its Second Reading, the then Minister concentrated more on the future it was opening up than on the nuts and bolts of the text under discussion in his opening speech. What the House did not know then was that I had metaphorically torn up the first draft, because the Bill was clearly presaging a technological revolution. It is revolutions like this that change the world we live in, not legislation giving them effect, and it is the changes that matter. That revolution is still going on.

I would like to touch on a number of points that I think are important about the current state of broadcasting in this country. First, public service broadcasting matters in a world of disinformation. The question posed by Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?”, is ever more important. For a free democratic society to function, truth and facts are the essential element that our fellow citizens need to form judgments for themselves, their families and society more widely—it is no accident that in the old days when there was a revolution the first thing the revolutionaries did was capture the radio station or television station. A public service stream of news and appropriate investigative journalism matters, and since there are sometimes criticisms, we need at least two separate elements to this in the interests of pluralism. Secondly, all this must be kept at arm’s length from government, factional politics and proselytising pressure groups of all kinds.

Realistically, the age in which we live is one where the influence and great overarching presence of Lord Reith has gone, and the importance of the wider media industry has evolved commercially, economically, socially and societally. We are now moving into a new era where territorial jurisdiction is seen and treated differently from the past. All broadcasters, both at home or abroad, are recognising this, and the obligations, opportunities and activities both of international services and domestic services, and content suppliers and all involved, need to recognise that.

Against this background, in a rapidly changing Britain, public service broadcasting must be thought through again carefully. I do not think it is any more necessary to begin from a position of a hybrid of Lord Reith’s high-mindedness and my noble friend Lord Hennessy’s “good chaps” theory of government. Britishness is contentious and is the subject of widespread discussion, but it is essential—indeed existential—to public service broadcasting. It must command popular acceptance, but not be populist, and material within a range of public service broadcasting programmes must remain available free-to-air to UK listeners and viewers. As I said earlier, technology and, in particular, delivery systems will determine all this; content follows. It is what the public receive and not how they get it that matters.

Finally, I have a few comments about the BBC’s current legal action brought against it by Donald Trump, which, as my noble friend Lord Fowler has pointed out, was clearly initiated by poor editorial control on the part of the corporation. We ought not to forget that public life is, on occasions, a rough-and-tumble business. It is not, in the words of Ernest Borgnine in the film “The Wild Bunch”, a church social. Some years ago, when I chaired a regional newspaper company, I went through a series of circumstances which, while very much in microcosm compared to this, shared many close similarities with this current litigation and the way it is playing out. It was not a pleasurable experience, but I am clear. First, if you make mistakes, admit it and apologise. Secondly, decide with your advisers whether you have any legal liability. If the answer is yes, admit it and face the financial and other consequences. If the answer is no, explain it, defend your case, and hold your ground and do not be bullied.

Whether any individual likes or hates the BBC, it is one of our defining global attributes, and it is a symbol of a lot of our best national characteristics. We did not achieve global respect and give hopes to the oppressed in the period 1939 to 1945 when the BBC broadcast under the strap line, “This is London calling, this is London calling”, with messages that were craven. Once a broadcaster or journalist loses his, her or their journalistic integrity, they lose everything. It is not a matter of triangulation or negotiating deals.

Telegraph Media Group

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Wednesday 19th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

The UK is most certainly open for investment. It is probably premature for me to do a review of a sale that has not yet taken place, but I assure your Lordships’ House that any lessons that can be learned from what has happened over the past year or so will be.

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, in response to the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, the Minister said that it was premature to look into this unless and until the sale took place. Surely part of this sorry story—the “will she, won’t she?”—relates to the pre-sale process, and that is something that should be looked at just as much as what has happened after any hypothetical sale that may or may not occur.

[Baroness Twycross (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes a fair comment, and I will pass on his comments to the Secretary of State.

Enterprise Act 2002 (Mergers Involving Newspaper Enterprises and Foreign Powers) Regulations 2025

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, I have been listening quietly to the debate, and I think I am the first person to rise who has actually chaired a newspaper company, albeit a small regional company, in this country.

It is my view that, where someone has 15% control, they have a presence in the boardroom; it depends on other circumstances exactly how that presence may work out. But nobody, with the possible exception of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, has really addressed what is a very serious point, which is that people who own things—and everything has to be owned by somebody —can change their minds. There is an underlying assumption behind much of what we have heard this afternoon, that if you are a foreign state, you can say, “I won’t use my ownership to exercise influence”, or you might be one that thinks, “I want to promote my own country in the receiving country”.

Of course, the problem we face is that the investment market for media is international and most media, particularly some of the papers we have been discussing this afternoon, are essentially nationally focused. There is a disjunction between the regulatory regime and the realities of the capital markets that lie behind a lot of these projects. All I would say is that it behoves us to be very cautious. As the Queen said before the Scottish referendum, “Be careful”.

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, I never in my wildest dreams thought my last speech as leader of the Liberal Democrats in your Lordships’ House would be to express my concern about the future of the Daily Telegraph. Politics is a funny business.

The arguments that we have been hearing this afternoon fall under two broad headings: the substance and the procedure. On the substance, there is no need to rehearse the argument about why foreign influence on our media is thought to be a bad thing. There is agreement about that. The logical way in which we stop there being foreign influence is to make sure that there is no foreign ownership. But we have heard this afternoon, first from the Government and then from others, that it is better to have some foreign ownership than for the press to face an existential threat.

This argument, one would have thought, was not entirely new. Yet, when the digital markets Bill was being debated in your Lordships’ House, amazingly, our media did not face an existential threat—nobody argued that. So, in the course of a year, we have gone from a point where a 5% stake by a non-state foreign actor was thought to be acceptable to where we now find that our newspapers face an existential threat unless foreign Governments are allowed to own 15%. As the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, asked—although he did not put it quite like this—if the stake has gone from 0% to 15% in a year, where are we going to be next year, given that we are told that the traditional media are on a slippery slope? I find that a very curious and uncompelling argument.

The question, though, is whether to accept the assurance that a 15% foreign-government stake will not influence or be allowed to influence the editorial stance of a newspaper. The first argument is that this 15% stake is merely passive: you are buying 15% in a newspaper in the same way that you might buy 15% in an oil company or conglomerate. However, given that we are told equally by the same people that these newspapers are facing an existential threat, is it likely that a hard-headed Government will decide that the best use of their funds is to buy a newspaper or part of a newspaper on a passive basis? Having looked all around the world, is that the best return that they will find for their funds? The answer is palpably “No, it is not”.

The next argument in defence of what is proposed is that there is a backstop and that the DCMS will be able to intervene when there is undue influence. However, as the Minister said only last week that, in those circumstances,

“it is likely she”—

the Secretary of State—

“could intervene”.—[Official Report, 16/7/25; col. 1827.]

I emphasise “likely” and “could”.

Suppose that the influence was being exercised in a manner to which the Government were sympathetic; would a Secretary of State intervene in those circumstances? If they did not, what pressure from whom would cause a Secretary of State to intervene? We know that influence over the way a paper presents itself is a subtle thing. In circumstances where you have a Government who are sympathetic to that influence, my contention is that those exercising the influence would get away with it. They amount to the substantial arguments against the proposition before us.

The question about procedure relates to how this has been undertaken. There was a consultation to which there were four responses. Normally, if a consultation receives four responses, you start again, because clearly more than four entities have a view. But, blow me, the four entities all have a similar and partial view, because they potentially stand to gain from this change, and the Government accept that as a reason to change their mind. This is extraordinary to me. I can think of no other consultation where four entities peddling their own argument would get a Government to change their mind. This is an extraordinary consultation, if we can think of it as consultation at all.

The next thing, as has been pointed out, is that this SI is amending primary legislation. I think everybody agrees that this question of press freedom is quite important, so what happened when this SI was debated in the House of Commons? Did they spend this sort of time on it? Did they have impassioned argument with people changing their mind? They spent 18 minutes on it, the vast bulk of which was the Minister at the start and the end. There were literally a couple of speakers in the entire debate. Either the House of Commons is not interested in the issue or it did not realise what was going on, because it is an SI and, as we know, MPs regard being put on an SI committee as a bit like being sent to Siberia for a month. So, in reality, this issue has not been debated at all in the House of Commons, which is extraordinary. If most MPs had realised what they had agreed to, without actually agreeing to it themselves, they would have opposed it.

The whole thing seems to be potentially very damaging and shows parliamentary scrutiny to be non-existent, except in your Lordships’ House in this case. For it to proceed would be bad for freedom of the press and for the way we deal with these things. When, on 3 June, the noble Earl, Lord Minto, urged people to vote for a fatal Motion on the Chagos Islands, he said that it was his

“duty to bring this fatal Motion to the House”.—[Official Report, 3/6/25; col. 614.]

We think that it is our duty to bring this fatal amendment to the House, and we urge noble Lords to support it.