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Digital Economy Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am not wholly persuaded by what the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising, has just said. An old leadership maxim runs: ""If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it"." I believe that removing the need for broadcasters to publish their statements would be a retrograde step at a time when public service content is under serious threat. In the debates leading to the Communications Act 2003, in which I took part, your Lordships were at pains to create a mechanism that provided the public with the opportunity of seeing what their television channels intended to do over the coming year to fulfil their public service remits and how they performed against what they had said they would do in the previous year. Looking back over the past few years of programme policy statements, we can chart the decline that many viewers are noting. They may not help us to do a huge amount to halt the decline, but they provide something of an automatic braking system on the more savage cuts that might befall public service content if such an annual check were not in place. The statements include information on how channels are providing public service content in non-linear ways, most obviously through their websites and on-demand services; how they are promoting media literacy; how they are engaging with public input and feedback. These policy statements are evolving as the communications landscape changes. I do not believe they are redundant. We need to be clear that we are not expecting legions of highly paid executives to pore over output figures for days on end to produce reports. In fact, a check on these last statements suggests that most are well under 10,000 words long. The 2003 Act did not demand rigid calculations, it looked for self-assessment—a reflective look back on how the channel had delivered on core purposes. The statements should, at their best, speak in a way from the heart of the channel about its aspirations for serving the public—its consumers. We cannot afford to forget, just because times are tight, that we hand a huge privilege to our licensed public service channels. The marketplace for the commercial public service broadcasters is undeniably a challenging one, but the economic context does not devalue the privilege of being a licensed broadcaster on a channel received by the vast majority of the population. With that privilege comes responsibilities, not just to your Lordships or to another place, but to the public as a whole. The simple measurement tool of how the channels are measuring up against those responsibilities is, in my view, not too much to ask.