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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

That is about right; on reflection, he has made rather more. In any event, I was rather put in my place at the State Opening. The cameras roamed over those of us waiting and, I am told, for a moment or two dwelt on me, which noble Lords might think was rather good—and it might have been had the BBC commentator not chosen to add the remark: ""Ah, there’s a face from the past"." So my first complaint about the Bill is that it does nothing to curb the excessive salaries paid to BBC commentators. In introducing the Bill, the Secretary of State wisely left to one side some of the rhetoric he uses outside this House, particularly the charge that this party has entered into some kind of pact with Mr Murdoch and News International. Given that his old boss travelled half way round the world to gain Murdoch’s support, that seems a rather fanciful criticism. Yet it is useful to recall this because in the Bill there are a number of commercial interests at stake. The House will need to be precise in defining what is the public interest. That is the acid test. This is a major Bill, dealing with a wide variety of issues from how you strengthen the communications infrastructure, on which the noble Lord dwelt, to digital security and public service broadcasting. In principle, I agree with much of it. However, the Bill is also behind time. In their Creative Britain paper, the Government committed to having legislation in place on illegal file-sharing by April 2009. That was not an aspiration; it was, in their words, a commitment. Self-evidently, the Government have fallen behind on that timetable. An election looms and the position is made no easier by the lack of detail in many of the clauses of the Bill. We should certainly make all speed with it, but not at the price of letting through bad legislation. That would not be carrying out our duty. I will deal, briefly, with three aspects of this Bill. First, and most contentious, is illegal file-sharing. The United Kingdom has a real interest in seeing the creative industries develop and prosper. Films, music, broadcasting, publishing and video games already make an enormous contribution to the economy. The exact scale of that contribution depends on definition, but the Government estimate that the sector contributes some £60 billion per year to the British economy and that the creative sector has grown at twice the rate of the economy generally. To put it in more manageable terms, the music industry estimates that they account for more than 100,000 jobs. The film industry employs an estimated 35,000 to 40,000. Broadcasting employs another 50,000. Those jobs are not just actors, writers and directors; they are the scene-makers, the plasterers who work at Pinewood, the skilled animators who have produced everything from Wallace and Gromit to Fantastic Mr Fox and the skilled engineers who work in the post-production studios. It is not just artistic talent that is employed in these industries. There is a wide range of technical skills and skills at the highest level. In other words, these are serious industries making a serious contribution to the United Kingdom economy. These industries also depend on innovation, new ideas and the willingness to back those new ideas with investment and with risk capital. Most films that are made never get shown in the cinema. Many films make a loss for the investors who have backed them. But the incentive always is that those who have created and financed the content should have the opportunity of reward for their initiative. They back their judgment. "Slumdog Millionaire" is a prime example of that. That is why illegal file-sharing piracy is such a threat to the creative industries. It means that legitimate business aims are undermined. If you have invested heavily in a film only to find that this is being distributed free on the internet, clearly your whole business plan is put at risk. The Select Committee on Communications, which I chair, has been taking evidence from the film industry. One piece of evidence which sticks in my mind was from James Clayton, the chief executive of Ingenious Investments. He said: ""One of the films we co-financed recently was ‘Wolverine’, a spin-off of the ‘X Men’ series, released at the start of May. Shortly before release in April, a partially completed version of ""the film found its way onto the web. It was downloaded four million times and Fox, who are our partners on the film, estimate that it probably knocked $20 million to $30 million off the box office"." That is the kind of challenge that such producers face. The internet has achieved many good things, but it is equally clear that it has made that kind of abuse possible. It is clear that public interest heavily argues for action to be taken to prevent such abuse taking place. I understand that there are other views. We have all been inundated with advice on this matter. If you go to a recent BBC blog, you will see that three pages of what was intended as an objective discussion of the position was followed by 23 pages of comment, mostly from people who were passionately opposed to action being taken. The argument is that the Bill is illiberal, that file-sharers are those who spend most in the legitimate commercial market and that the industries would help themselves by making more material available legally and legitimately, which is an important argument to which I shall come in a moment. Against that, as far as the music industry is concerned, the British Recorded Music Industry says, ""that online copyright infringement seriously threatens the sector … record companies stand to forgo something like £200m in lost sales due to infringement in 2009"." Many of the figures who gave evidence to the Select Committee on Communications also warned very much of the dangers. Tim Bevan, the head of Working Title Films and the chairman of the UK Film Council, made very much the same point. David Kosse, the president of Universal Pictures International, said: ""We would perceive piracy as the number one threat to the industry for everyone—studios, independents, everyone around the world"." It seems to me that that is the case, and that it is not just films. It can be books and video games, and Premier League football, which is free-to-air in China and then transmitted here. Too often, what we are talking about is theft and a kind of theft which can have a devastating effect on industries where Britain is a leader and where the challenge is to develop more. We are also talking about organisations transmitting illegally and getting advertising revenue as their reward. We would be mad not to take some action in this respect. Obviously, the crucial question is how we do that. I think that the step-by-step approach set out in the Bill is correct. We will have to examine the implications in Committee and seek to obtain more detail at times, as the British Library has argued. My support is also subject to two qualifications. The industries must take action of their own to make their products accessible, legitimately and legally. What the music industry has now done, perhaps belatedly, is encouraging. Today there are now 35 legal music services available in the UK. My other qualification has to do with camcorder crime. Here, there is no sensible argument of justification. It simply means a small team going to one of the first performances of a film, recording it and then putting it on the net. Specific legislation is enacted in a number of other European countries but here the Government’s position is that we must wait to see whether the Fraud Act covers it. A test case is imminent, we are told. We will have to see the outcome, but if it is not covered then I think that there will be a very strong case for specific legislation. The second area, to which I turn briefly, is public service broadcasting. I declare an interest as a lifetime member of the NUJ and a past chairman of two regional newspaper companies. No one should be in any doubt about the crisis we face in regional news. ITV has been quite frank. It cannot afford to produce regional news programmes—in spite of the big audiences it attracts—and it intends to withdraw them. As it stands at the moment, we face the prospect of a return to the 1950s, with the BBC having a monopoly of regional television news. I say return to the 1950s but it is actually worse than that. At that time there was a thriving regional press. There were strong morning regional papers as well as big circulation evening papers. There has been a steady decline since then and the position has markedly worsened. Competition from the internet for advertising, particularly houses and jobs, has hit the regional press, as too has the financial crisis of the past few years. The result is that the whole industry is fighting for its future. Faced with that position, the Communications Select Committee proposed a reduction in controls on newspapers taking a stake in regional television and also contestable funding in which a news consortium could bid for public funding. Ofcom shared its view. I would not have financed digital switch-over in the way it has been financed. I would have preferred it to be, and I think it would more properly have been, social security spending, but that advice was ignored. Licence fee money has been used. There is an estimated £130 million a year underspend. That is one option for the public funds that would be required without going back to the taxpayer, but it is not the only one. It would be possible, for example, in the longer term to use the money the Government are going to get from the sale of analogue spectrum—there will be very real value to them in that in spite of switch-over. We will have to look very carefully at this in Committee, but on the principle of public support, there is nothing new. Broadcasters such as ITV have received an implied subsidy from the analogue system from which we are moving. Competition was limited; the financial benefit was undoubted. As for the BBC, which opposed the use of licence fee money in this way, in my view the public interest requires a more generous response from it. I do not want to see a BBC regional monopoly. My third area is the proposals affecting Channel 4 and ITV. I welcome the abandonment of the Government’s plan for putting Channel 4 and BBC Worldwide together in a new company. I never thought that made sense and it was a piece of institutional engineering that was not going to work. I hope that instead there can be a more meaningful partnership between the two companies. I also welcome the fact that Channel 4 has been given an explicit duty concerning film. I welcome the liberalisation of controls on ITV. I make one point about this. The significant feature of the changes proposed for ITV and Channel 4, covering Clauses 21 to 28 of the Bill, is that they have been proposed only a few years after the Communications Act 2003. The Act is being amended to bring it up to date. Changes are much more difficult to make with the BBC. The BBC is controlled by royal charter. It sounds very grand, but actually it means that a deal is done between the Government and the chairman of the BBC. There is no vote in Parliament and the charter, as the Minister said, lasts for 10 years. The implication is basically this. Most people now agree that the corporate governance arrangements for the BBC are a mess. There is no chairman and there is a fatally divided structure between the main organisations in the BBC Trust. It is not only I and my committee who have said that; Mr Bradshaw, the Secretary of State, makes entirely the same point. However, because it has a royal charter, we cannot do what we can do with ITV and Channel 4. Technological change is taking place in a time of severe economic turbulence. Broadcasters are having to adapt rapidly and policy makers are having to be flexible. Against that background, an agreement setting down BBC policy 10 years in advance seems to be wildly out of date. In general, I welcome the Bill. My criticism is that too much is left to regulation; my concern is that some fundamental issues about the media and communications, especially with regard to the BBC, have not been tackled; and my warning would be that if we want efficient and modern industries in the new digital age, after the election these issues will need to be tackled by the incoming Government with new legislation.