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BBC: Charter

My Lords, on a hot, sunny afternoon and when one is speaker number 14 out of 14, one might be forgiven for concentrating on those areas on which one disagrees with the many excellent speeches that have been made this afternoon, rather than on those with which one agrees—particularly as those speakers will have absolutely no right of reply. I start with the process, and I do so, as the noble Lord, Lord Gordon, pointed out, as a member of the Davies committee, which undertook part of this job last time round on the licence fee. This time, the process has been quite good—certainly better than last time. We have had a Green Paper; a White Paper; very importantly, the Burns seminars and the excellent work that went into them; PKF on the efficiency of the BBC—a fascinating and under-read report; and reports from the Commons Select Committee; and reports from the excellent committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler. We have also had a good deal of public consultation. On the last point, I was reminded of the moment in the work of the Davies committee when we decided to find out what the public think and carry out a public opinion poll. A senior BBC executive rang the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, saying, ““You have to stop them doing that; they won’t know the right questions to ask””. This time the BBC has been much more open in the debate, which I welcome. The committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, has made a number of criticisms of the process, some of which I wholly agree with. I strongly agree with what it said about the role of the NAO. I am disappointed that the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, did not indicate that today the BBC is deviating from its, ““We’ll die in the last ditch”” opposition to the NAO, moving it back a trench at a time, with the line eventually crumbling after a long, hard pounding on the way. I am not quite as sure about the role for Parliament, recommended by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler. I am inclined to think that the Government should make proposals and answer to the country for those proposals. I believe that there is a touch of the Mandy Rice-Davies about the report of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler: ““We are parliamentarians. We would, wouldn’t we?””. I have two reservations about the process, one of which is serious. It is very disappointing that the licence fee decision has been put back until after the Summer Recess and, therefore, is separated from the decision on all the other matters. Those two issues are intrinsically interlinked and they should be dealt with together. My second reservation is more a fear. At the end of the Davies committee process—it was not a bad process, although not as good as this—there was a stitch-up between the Secretary of State, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Prime Minister, which was never adequately explained to the public. When reaching conclusions on the charter and, more importantly, on the licence fee, the Government owe a full explanation of precisely how they got there and not just an assertion that X is the figure and Y is the charter. My second point concerns the charter and, in particular, the relationship between the new trust and the executive replacing the governors. This was strongly criticised by the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord King, and I do not disagree with much of what they said. The noble Lord, Lord King, rightly said that nobody much supports these new arrangements, and he read out a whole list of people. But, as he did so, there were two categories of people; those wanted to go very much further than the Government are going and those who wanted the status quo. That is why the Government have alighted on this particular compromise. I think that the previous position was completely indefensible. The only people I know who defend it are some former governors. The Davies committee said that the position of the governors is ““problematical””—some of us would have put it more strongly—so there had to be change. But, on the whole, I accept that there is a good case for the evolutionary change we are now seeing. It may not, as many noble Lords have said, stand the test of time. We may need a further change. I am quite open to that. But a further change at this point would have been over the BBC’s dead body, whereas what we have at least, more or less, has its acquiescence. I must say that if anybody can make this arrangement work, the BBC will. An extraordinary combination of inflexibility and flexibility makes it a world-class institution. I think that this has at least enough of a chance to be worth having a go with. So, while I accept that in logic it does not have a lot to be said for it, in practice it may have rather more. I turn to the licence fee. Of the two broad decisions around us, the licence fee is the more important. In asking what is going to stop the BBC doing something that perhaps it should not do, and in thinking of the Ofcom process, the public value test and the trustees, my own long experience is that it finds a way around those things. That was certainly true with BBC3, which the Secretary of State resisted. The BBC signed up to change its original proposals. If anyone can explain to me the difference between BBC3 as we have it and BBC3 as originally proposed by the governors, I should be delighted to hear. The thing that stops the BBC doing too much is shortage of money. You have to get the amount of money right for what it should be doing and not give it so much that it starts doing all sorts of thing—““sufficiency without excess”” was the Davies committee’s undramatic description of what you are after. Last time around the BBC got a pretty full settlement. It received RPI plus 1.5 per cent, much less than it bid for but a pretty full settlement. There are many things I could give in evidence of that, but the main thing was the huge increase in staff—23,640 in the year 2000 when the settlement was reached and 27,000 in 2004–05 when Mr Dyke left the corporation. The PKF report suggests that it failed to deliver on efficiency. I see signs that it may already be reckoning that it will get an awful lot of money this time around. The recent revelations about the—I am sorry, I am old Labour—really obscene figures being paid to certain presenters by the BBC suggests to me that perhaps it is being given a bit too much. I do not know whether it is true, but yesterday I read in the newspaper that the BBC is thinking of starting a current affairs magazine. If that is so, it is certainly being given too much money. That is not the role of the British Broadcasting Corporation in any sense. So I think that the Secretary of State is right to describe the BBC’s bid as an opening bid and will be right to finesse it down. But not too far because in the present broadcasting environment there ain’t nobody but the BBC to do certainly kinds of things. The noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, knows very well the ground-lapping Norma Percy programmes such as ““Death of Yugoslavia”” and ““Elusive Peace””, and there is a whole list of them. Nobody in Britain but the BBC will commission such programmes. To me, they are more than just wonders to watch; they are treasures of our national history and show what television can do in communicating. So it must have enough money to do things like that and to continue to be at the forefront technologically, which is an incredible strength of the BBC. If anyone had said that a nationalised industry would be at the forefront technologically, one would have doubted it, but the BBC has managed that time and again. Its changeover to the digital revolution has been quite extraordinary. I do not know why we are having digital switchover, but the BBC will make a contribution there, whether or not we think that it should pay for it. So while must have enough money for that, I have some worries about it having too much money. I worry about crowding the private sector and that there can be an incipient imperialism in the BBC which thinks that it must conquer everything. Getting that balance right is extraordinarily tricky. Personally, I think that it may sometimes be right to make minor adjustments to the licence fee settlement during the course of five and 10-year periods, depending on what has emerged, although we must be careful about that because the BBC must have reasonable scope to plan. However, I share the worry of my noble friend Lord Bragg that if you give the BBC too much money when ITV is struggling, ITV will abandon its public service remit, which would be a great tragedy. The BBC is trying to have it both ways here: when ITV is doing very well from advertising revenue, it says, ““You must give us lots more licence fee so that we can compete with it in spending money on programmes””; when ITV is doing very badly, it says, ““You must give us lots more licence fee because ITV cannot do it any more, so we must do it all””. That is the nature of the beast. I think that the answer to the ITV problem is not to cut back on the BBC, it is to deal with the problems of ITV. I would not mind a bit of contestability on some of the licence fee. The two big problems that ITV has, which could be dealt with reasonably easily, are the sum north of £100 million that it is still paying to the Government for its licences, which no longer have any justification in truth, and the conditions imposed at the time of the merger, in quite different market conditions, on how it can sell and price its advertising. If those two inhibitions were taken away, many of the problems to which my noble friend Lord Bragg rightly drew the attention of the House would be alleviated, at least for the time being. I would rather that that was done than that we end up in one of the most unhelpful rows, with our two public service broadcasters fighting with each other day and night about who should get what. I enter the view, which is a bit soft-hearted, that both could get something. As I said, the BBC is a great national institution. It is one of the relatively few British institutions that can rightly be described as world-class. Many others would die to have it. It has shown an extraordinary capacity to adapt during its history. Its ways are sometimes wily. Its conservatism—with a small ““c””, of course—is sometimes infuriating. Occasionally, the sheer weight of BBC briefing makes you long to rip its arguments to tiny shreds and throw them out of the window. But the truth is that even when it overdoes it in those ways, it does so out of a passionate belief in what it does. From our debate this afternoon, it has been clear that that passionate belief is shared by nearly every Member of your Lordships’ House. I hope and believe that we can rely on the Secretary of State to settle the issues before her in a reasonably balanced way, and I hope that that will have the effect of leaving the BBC in a position where it can continue to do for us, for our children and for our grandchildren, the very great service that it does today.