Collective action & intervention can save public service

CPBF National Council member, Tom O'Malley of the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, discussed the Green Paper on BBC Charter Renewal at the CPBF's recent conference on the future of the BBC. He made a plea for “collective action and intervention" to preserve public service broadcasting. We reproduce the text of his speech below.

Good morning.

Broadcasting and mass communications are bound up with the kind of society we want.

If we want a society where public culture and debate about politics is dominated by commercial ends, then we can move to the kind of commercial system which exists in the USA.

We can take the cue from Ofcom and sit back and watch broadcasting becoming an increasingly commercial affair, with public service redefined in ever more narrow terms and stuck at the margins of the system.

If we want a society where there is a public culture and debate about politics that is heavily influenced by independent thought and non-commercially dominated motives, then we have to look to an expansion of the public service element within it.

We will need to build on the achievements of the BBC, ITV, C4, C5 and S4C to ensure a wide range of public service broadcasting content on the emerging digital platforms.

And we must democratise the structures governing mass communications.

It is within this context that I want to say a few things about the Green Paper published on Wednesday 2nd March.

The Context

Since the late 1980s we have seen a massive expansion of under-regulated commercial broadcasting in the UK.

A succession of Acts, notably the 1990 Act and, more recently, the 2003 Communications act have overseen this process.

The BBC has been redefined by successive governments. It is now not just one part of the public service broadcasting system – as it used to be, with the ITV and ILR system – but increasingly as the cornerstone of public service broadcasting in the UK.

At the same time ITV has been gradually stripped of its programming obligations, particularly since it has come under the control of the Office of Communications – OFCOM.

Throughout this period the commercial lobby – by which I include sections of ITV, the Murdoch empire, other media corporations, the larger independents and their supporters in think tanks and the press, have howled for more liberalisation.

They have also called for the BBC to be cut back – asserting, without any substantial evidence , that the BBC’s activities cause unfair competition.

In the meantime the growth of an independent sector in the UK has led, as I am sure we will hear later, to a growth in casualised labour, short term contracts, poor training and a decline in equal opportunities in the sector.

Who has benefited from this?

It has to be, on balance, commercial enterprises in the broadcasting industry. Their revenues are now huge.

Ofcom has pointed out that in 2003 total TV broadcasting revenues, including the licence fee amounted to £9.5 billion.  Of this the BBC took about £3 billion, ITV around £2.6 billion, and subscription, sponsorship and pay-per view around £3.4 billion.  Subscription/pay-per view/sponsorship revenues, now outstrip the old ITV advertising revenues and the licence fee as income streams.

Green Paper

The Green Paper has arisen in this context.

It has many positive points.

The BBC is to continue to be required to ‘inform, educate and entertain’. – in spite of the spin from Tessa Jowell, and the headlines in Thursday’s papers – I can find nothing in the Green Paper that says the BBC should not be involved in audience maximising, peak time entertainment programming.

The BBC is to maintain a brief to address the diversity of UK culture and to contain within it a commitment to high quality news and current affairs.

The GP proposes a new ‘Trust’ to replace the Board of Governors. This is much better than the proposals made by Lord Burns in his recommendations. Its call for a debate about how to make the Trust’s meetings open to the public allows for something we have argued for for years – a more open and democratic system.

The Government seems to have stood its ground against the extreme proposals put forward by Ofcom about the way S4C should be organised. Ofcom is pushing for a greater degree of private involvement in S4C– but the Green Paper seems to be saying that the way forward is, in part, about negotiating a new settlement with the BBC.

Most importantly it retains the licence fee as the key source of funding for the next decade.

The next phase

There are many issues that need resolving prior to the White Paper.

Licence Fee

Ofcom wants the total spend in the UK on public service broadcasting to be frozen at around £3 billion over the next ten years. In other words the Ofcom strategy is to limit, if not freeze BBC income whilst commercial revenues grow.

The government should not allow this sectarian view to hold the floor.  It must produce a licence fee settlement that allows the BBC to sustain and expand into new areas over the next decade. It must rule out subscription as a source of funding now.

Equally it must make the commercial sector pay, via a levy, for the digital roll out or pay directly from taxation. The licence fee cannot be used to pay for this, especially as it will, in the medium term be a benefit that will accrue to commercial operators.

In addition the BBC should not be made to carry the cost of paying for digital switchover for the poor. This should come from direct government grant aid.

Ofcom

The Green Paper says that Ofcom should be allowed to market test new BBC services and  it ‘might also be given a power of approval over the BBC’s internal rules’.

We would be aghast if we substituted the Public Schools or the Private Medical Sector for OFCOM and said that they should be allowed vetoes over the expansion of state education and the NHS into new areas of provision. 

We should take a similar view about Ofcom having a role in vetoing BBC practices and plans.

Ofcom is an organisation that, like many an evangelical church in the present and the past, wants to spread the good news. In this case the news is about pushing markets into as many corners of the UK system as possible and corralling public service. 

Ofcom is currently allowing ITV to walk away from its public service broadcasting obligations in the UK, for very spurious reasons. It is not a body to be trusted with any decisions about the BBC.

Indeed Ofcom plans to remove ITV from the market – worth around £2.6 billion a year, and to replace this massive outflow of cash from public service broadcasting with a mere £300 million – about 3% of the current worth of the broadcasting market.

That is the kind of vision that Ofcom has for public service broadcasting and as such the organisation should be kept well away from the BBC.

Independents

It is nonsense to argue that the BBC should, in one way or another, be made to outsource up to 50% of its non-news productions.

This will have a major effect on the continuity of training and equal opportunities. It will also lead to timidity in programme production and the further growth of large so called independents.

Both Ofcom and the government need to take a very long and hard look at the working practices, ownership and employment practices in the independent sector, before they start slicing up the BBC and giving chunks of it away.   Common sense should prevail here over ideology.

Accountability

Firstly any new, more progressive forms of organisation applied the BBC have also to be applied to Ofcom.

Secondly, the reverse must not be true. Ofcom is a narrowly based body, based on a particular idea of a tight business model. It has no democratic representation on its main board – not least of all,  none from Scotland or Wales.

So, any Trust must have places specified for particular constituencies of interest. It cannot be appointed by the Secretary of state.

Elections must be used as way of deciding who sits on the Trust, but it must be a mix of elections within  nominated  constituencies of interest (trade unions, educational bodies, industry bodies, community bodies, etc) and an element of direct election. 

The new Executive Board must not have outside non-executive directors on it. If advice is needed then it can be sought. The ‘non-executive’ model in my mind speaks of a staging post towards the kind of Ofcom board model.

The BBC’s trust should have an open and explicit commitment in its terms of reference to promote plurality and diversity of opinion and to remain resolutely independent of commercial and political pressure.

Ofcom

The government should subject Ofcom’s proposal that ITV should be allowed to effectively withdraw as a public service broadcaster to critical scrutiny. The BBC and S4C and C4 should not be left alone to be the carriers of public service broadcasting into the digital era. That is too heavy a burden and allows ITV shareholders off the hook.

S4C’s independence needs to be preserved. Its budget increased. And none of this must be done at the expense of income, production facilities of jobs at BBC Wales.

Conclusion

Given this government’s predilection for spreading markets into public services.

Given the pressure the government has been under to strip down the BBC.

Suprisingly this Green Paper has much going for it.

But there is much that needs to be done to prevent the BBC being reduced to a desiccated, minority appeal, small scale organisation virtually alone in an expanded commercial market.

This can be dealt with  by addressing some of the issues I have raised.

It can also only be addressed by dealing with the problem posed by the model for public service broadcasting generated by Ofcom in its latest reports.

More importantly, it will only be through our collective action and intervention – as well as that of many other public interest bodies concerned with this issue –that we can hope to preserve a broadcasting system which generates an open, non-commercial, diverse approach to our lives in society.

The stakes are high. And there is much left to discuss.

Thank you.