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Keep broadcasting public - Tom O'Malley
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CPBF National Council member, Prof. Tom O'Malley, says the White Paper is not what it seems to be...
On the surface the White Paper appears to support public service broadcasting as delivered by the BBC. It backs, albeit with the some slight hesitancy, the idea of the licence fee. It supports the BBC as an organisation, delivering a wide range of content across a variety of delivery systems from digital TV and radio to the internet. It praises the organisation’s achievements, its creativity, its innovation and its contribution to UK life. Yet, if we leave aside these elements and look at the document a little closer another story emerges.
For just as NHS money is being partly disposed of to private hospitals offering surgery at inflated prices - just as the education system is being prepared for privatisation with fee paying at Universities, the emergence of academies and specialist schools and the undermining of local accountability by reducing the powers of Local Authorities over education - so, too, the BBC is being partly stripped of its autonomy as a free standing public service institution, is having to channel (like the NHS) increasing amounts of public money to the private sector, and is being transformed into an organisation that does research and development for commercial companies.
Doom and gloom you might say – perhaps.
But just consider the evidence.
The key to the White Paper appears in Tessa Jowell’s foreword where she asks:
‘How can the BBC be a strong broadcaster with universal reach while not stifling innovation elsewhere, or using its unique advantages to compete with others?’1
The White Paper assumes that the BBC may use its ‘unique advantages unfairly to compete with others’.2
It then proceeds to put the Corporation in a straightjacket designed to prevent it from doing this, and to make it behave in a manner calculated to subordinate it to the interests of its competitors by increasing the power of Ofcom over the BBC. Ofcom is – of course - the chief lobbyist for the commercial sector in matters of communications policy.
Yet the point is that most of the important proposals in the White Paper, some of which will be outlined later, are based on an assumption that the BBC will – not, does -‘unfairly.’..compete with others.
Even the arch-deregulator, Ofcom found no evidence that the BBC prevented the development of other commercial services by its presence in the sector. . In September 2004, Ofcom investigated allegations that the BBC was crowding out its commercial rivals in the market place and concluded that there was not, and I quote from Ofcom - ‘sufficient evidence to prove or to disprove the existence of overall “crowding-out”’.3
Yet, true to form, Ofcom has continued to press for powers over the BBC in order to stop it doing something which even Ofcom accepts it does not do!
So what are the measures in the White Paper?
Ofcom is now to be given a role in deciding the very nature of the existing BBC services, and new ones, by doing so called, Market Impact Assessments of BBC proposals for new services. The Trust will have to take these into account when deciding if the service has public value and whether or not it should be established.
The Trust will have to set up service licences for existing BBCC services, and it is not clear whether Ofcom will be required to do Impact assessments for these. If it does it means it will soon be able to radically influence the scope of those services. It will, however, definitely be doing market impact assessments for significant alterations to services and for new ones.
This means that Ofcom can determine through its advice and influence which types of programmes and services the BBC can provide.
Ofcom will have to be consulted when the Trust draws up codes of practice in areas where competition issues might arise, such as questions of copyright on BBC programmes. In addition, in order to avoid costs the Trust is urged to ‘take advantage’ of the advice Ofcom offers when drawing up the codes.4
Ofcom in its dealings with the BBC will act to protect the interests of the commercial sector because that, in practice, is what its main function has been. But this assumes that the commercial sector should be protected from the BBC by special rules. The BBC is subject to ordinary Competition Laws like its competitors. The only reason for these special measures is to actively favour commercial companies by shrinking the capacity of the BBC and constraining creativity and innovation in the Corporation.
The White Paper extends this thrust by accepting that the percentage of BBC TV programmes that have to go out to competitive tender should be raised from 25 to 50% - a measure euphemistically dubbed the Window of Creative Opportunity by Mark Thompson the DG of the BBC – and that the amount of online content which goes out to tender should be at 25%.
Yet the White Paper offers no data, on what the impact of this will be on the BBC’s long term skills base, and on what the impact this weakening of the skills base will have on creativity and innovation?
Perhaps the government should have commissioned its own impact assessment in this area before agreeing so readily to the idea of the ‘Window’. But, it continues to support the independents, regardless of the concerns people have about the sector. These include, the poor conditions of service, the growth of very powerful large independents, and problems with equal opportunities. It seems very disinclined to scrutinise the workings of this area lest it should reveal the independent sector as an inadequate substitute for properly funded public service broadcasting.
The ‘Window’, like the PFI, is a way of diverting money out of public resources into private hands. It would not be so bad if the government allowed us, as licence fee payers, to retain economic control over the products that our money finances. This could be done by allowing the BBC to retain rights, in perpetuity ,across all platforms for programmes commissioned using public money. But as we all know that is not what happens and that is not what is likely to happen.
So, it goes on.
The BBC Trust is to be made up of appointees with ‘expertise’. Yet this expertise is narrowly defined as experience of the broadcasting industry, law, finance and corporate worlds. It gives Wales and Scotland a national representative and yet, almost in the same breadth, implies that these representatives will not have to be Welsh or Scottish!!
The model for this is, of course, the streamlined, business friendly Ofcom board, which has exactly that kind of expertise on the board – and look at the damage that kind of expertise is doing there.!
Ofcom has demanded that there be a review of public financing after 5 years or so of the new Charter.
The government has bowed to this pressure and gone, with breathless servility, one step further by pre-empting this review and asserting that it may redirect licence fee money to fund commercial Television – Channel 4. – something that Ofcom has been pushing for.
So, the White Paper accepts the self-interest of the commercial sector as the main policy driver in communications and uses that sector’s main enforcer, Ofcom, to do the necessary work.
Ofcom is pushing, ultimately, for the disposal of the licence fee to a variety of commercial concerns, so that all can bid for it. This solution to the changing technological environment is in a sense, the PFI of broadcasting – farming out content to people whose main, and legitimate interest, is making money, not prioritising public service, but whose interests are so narrowly focused on their own concerns that they cannot act in the interests of the community as a whole.
These measures are there because the government is too weak to stand up to the lobbying of the commercial sector. Yet if you give into a bully that bully will come back for more. For, no sooner was the government’s knife wielded against the BBC in the White Paper, drawing considerable blood, but the commercial lobby started calling for more..
The tone of the calls from ITV the commercial radio sector, and the Newspaper Society was summed up by the Financial Times which declared that : ‘Commercial rivals to the BBC said that they were concerned the new BBC Trust would not restrain the publicly-funded corporation’s impact on competitors…’5
We are only really at the start of a fresh campaign by these interests and Ofcom to further constrain and diminish the financial and creative autonomy of the BBC.
There are other glaring problems with the White Paper.
The wording of the draft Charter places 6 public purposes at the centre of the BBC’s remit, relegating information education and entertainment to second level activities operating within those purposes.
Thus Tessa Jowell’s assertion to Parliament that ‘the White Paper makes entertainment central to the BBC’s mission. The BBC should continue to take fun seriously, engraining entertainment into its services’ 6is really misleading. ‘Engraining’ something into a service is not the same as making that thing the main object of the service. Here we have yet another capitulation to the commercial lobby.
There is no imaginative response to calls made by the CPBF and others for democratising the BBC or broadcasting governance more generally The Trust is narrower than the existing board of Governors and the Executive will be populated by at least one third of non-executives who are likely to be commercial clones of the type we find on the Ofcom board, unless I am very much mistaken.
The Licence Fee Payer has to foot the bill for digital switchover and there is no offer of help to pensioners for the costs of buying the equipment.
One strange omission is words about equal opportunities either in determining the composition of the Board or the executive or of enforcing it through commissions in the independent sector.
But what is wrong with all of this?
Continuity - it is continuity of talent, skills, confidence and resources that builds innovation and creativity. The White Paper sanctions a continual erosion of this by supporting the infamous ‘Window’ and allowing Ofcom to limit and constrain BBC staff.
Accountability – For all its rhetoric on accountability, the White Paper proffers elaborate mechanisms for making the BBC accountable to its commercial competitors and very vague assertions about the Trust being accountable to licence fee payers, which it characteristically dubs ‘shareholders’. It is a lopsided kind of thinking in which accountability has been stripped of its democratic overtones and stored in a money making box.
We need some basic changes to this White Paper to ensure the health of our cultures and democracy.
We must alter the policy assumption that the commercial sector needs to have protection from the BBC. Let competition law do this and let the commercial sector, so often the propagandists of self-reliance and entrepreneurship, stop leaning on the government and Ofcom.
We must get Ofcom out of BBC affairs, except where BBC commercial operations are concerned.
We must work for the suspension of the Window of Opportunity until a full, non Ofcom and independent assessment on the long term impact of the developments is made, in conjunction with an independent enquiry into ownership and employment practices in the independent sector.
We must reinsert the wider public interest into the currently narrowly defined idea of accountability that pervades the document
We must press for the withdrawal of the commitment to a mid-term review of the justification for the licence fee
We must examine ways of making ITV pay back the money given to it by the privileges granted through its monopoly control of terrestrial advertising for nearly 50 years – in the form of passing the rights of programmes made up to 2003, the date of the Communication Act, over to the public and giving the logo to the public – unless that it is prepared to reinstate the public service obligations it has so blatantly ditched in recent years with, of course, Ofcom’s active approval. A measure such as this would bolster public resources across the sector, and support the expansion of public services in the digital era.
Mostly, and this is perhaps a forlorn plea, it means trying to persuade the politicians and civil servants who drew this document up and who are clearly committed to the underlying neo-liberal thinking, to think differently. This will be very hard.
In reality this will need campaigning by ordinary people,over time, to change the bizarre fixation with the idea that markets are the best way of organising mass communications in the UK. We need to persuade the government that what is needed is a large, diverse, well funded, accountable public service broadcasting sector in the UK. That should be the driver of policy.
We are watching the slow absorption of the BBC into the commercial sector, and the transformation of UK broadcasting towards a market centred system, with bits of psb tagged around the edges.
We need to campaign, initially, to reverse this trend, by arguing for change in the White Paper proposals.
Only then will we be able to move forward to extend, democratise and build a diverse public service sector in the digital age.
Tom O’Malley
1 April 2006.
NOTES
1 White Paper, 2006: 3
2 White Paper, 2006:2
3 Ofcom, Phase 2. - Meeting the Digital Challenge: Ofcom review of public service broadcasting (London, Ofcom, 2004):45.
4 White Paper, 2006: para 6.1.13
5 A.Edgecliffe-Johnson & E. Terazon, ‘BBC’s rivals fear new regulations will have little effect on competition’ Financial Times 15 March 2006. See also, S.Jenkins, ‘the BBC will never cut its cloth to suit any cloak but big’ Guardian March 15 2006.
6 DCMS,’Tessa Jowell – BBC Charter Review White Paper Oral Statement to Parliament’ Press Notice, 15 March 2006.
DATELINE: 25 January, 2010
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