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BBC: Chairmanship (Communications Committee Report)

My Lords, I speak as a member of the Communications Committee, but as a new bug who is not speaking with the benefit of having been a member of the previous committee; I was highly privileged. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, our greatly esteemed chairman, for introducing the report so elegantly. I do not want to detain the House long because I want to address only one issue in the report. In doing so, I intend to amplify a point already raised by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler. It relates to the first recommendation of the report which concerns the lack of clarity about the role of chairman of the BBC Trust. We noted that: "““Article 10 of the new Royal Charter states that there is no longer a formal Chairman of the BBC ‘The Chairman of the Trust may also be known as the Chairman of the BBC. In view of article 8, this is an honorary title, as the members of the BBC will never act as a single corporate body, but only as members of the Trust or Board to which they belong.’””" That is a rather curious form of words, in my estimation, but what it really means, as the report points out, is that the chairman of the BBC trust and the director-general, who chairs the executive board, can no longer stand together representing one organisation. The report observes at paragraph 7: "““This is a radical change and one that concerns us””." The committee spent quite a lot of time with a number of witnesses trying to figure out how that relationship worked or will work in practice. In particular, we were concerned to understand the implications of the trust’s primary responsibility to represent the interests of the licence fee payer. I think that it is fair to say that we were not a whole lot clearer at the end than we were at the beginning. Even Sir Michael Lyons, who gave us a generally robust and lucid account of his new responsibilities, when talking about the new governance arrangements, conceded that: "““there is no doubt that this is a complex arrangement””." One can only agree with him. The question at the heart of the matter is whether the trust, under the new arrangements, is or is not a de facto regulator. The then Minister, my honourable friend Mr Woodward, Mr Ramsay, the civil servant who gave evidence with him, and Sir Michael Lyons himself all strove in various ways to convince us that it is not, but the way in which recent controversial events at the BBC have been handled suggests that the role of the trust in its affairs is closer to regulation than to anything else, as the report notes at paragraph 16. In the wake of the cataclysm that overtook the BBC after the Hutton report, it is no surprise that the Government and the BBC sought through the charter provisions to protect against any such disaster occurring again. I have no problem with that and accept that some change is inevitable. The question is whether what is now in place has created a new set of problems. In particular, I am concerned that, in the new order, the BBC is more vulnerable than it was before—in this respect, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Fowler—because its sovereign body, the trust, has as its principal responsibility not the interests of the BBC but the interests of licence fee payers. In its response to recommendation 1 of the report, which states: "““It should be clear whose job it is to represent the BBC itself, as distinct from the licence fee payer, what it means to represent the licence fee payer””," the Government say: "““the Trust and the Executive Board both have a responsibility for representing the interests of the BBC within the context of the particular functions of each body. By representing the licence fee payer, we mean taking on the role of understanding and bringing to bear the public interest on the activities of the BBC ””." I am tempted to say, pick the bones out of that. My question to my noble friend is this. The BBC has been much in the spotlight since the committee's report was published is he satisfied that the new governance arrangements have stood up well to the challenges that they have faced? In carrying out its duty to represent the interests of licence fee payers, has the trust in fact been acting primarily as a regulator? If so, has that left the BBC itself—and the director-general in particular—without a robust champion?