Broadcasting — House of Commons, 2016-10-18
Topic: Government Operations
Maria Eagle (Labour, Centre-left): The hon. Gentleman employs an extended metaphor. I do not quite understand how that would apply in respect of the mid-term review. I do not know why the mid-term review was not simply dropped. It seems to me that Ministers have been casting about to try to find some purpose for it because they did not want to accept that the mid-term review or the break clause had started out as something different from how it ended up. I am not sure what the role of the review is, so when the Minister winds up the debate, I hope that he will be able to give us a little more reassurance It was said in the other place that governance would form part of that mid-term review, so what kind of change to governance, if any, is it likely to make? To what extent might there be some change in the air? If the Government do not like how the arrangements that they set out in the charter are proceeding, will we see a wholesale change at mid-term to the governance of the BBC? What steps will the Government take to ensure that any such changes are as fully scrutinised as the arrangements for the new charter have been? There is not necessarily a parliamentary aspect of the mid-term review or health check We had an exchange about governance earlier. I welcome the fact there is to be a competition for the new chair of the BBC Board. I was critical that the chair of the BBC Trust had simply been appointed to what is a rather different role without any competition at all and at the behest, it seems, of the previous Prime Minister—though not, I suspect, at the behest of the former Secretary of State. I emphasise that I am not and was not commenting on the ability or otherwise of Rona Fairhead to do the job, but simply on the principle of the matter. In any event, she has decided not to put herself forward, so the BBC will have a new chair. Opposition Members are mindful of what the outgoing Commissioner for Public Appointments, Sir David Normington, said about the Government’s increasing propensity to appoint Tory supporters to important public roles, so we will be watching this particularly sensitive appointment with extremely close interest I welcome the fact that the Government have abandoned the previous Secretary of State’s attempt to enable the Government to appoint a majority of the unitary board, which I do not believe was a sensible proposal. The retreat that the Government have agreed to, following discussions with the BBC, is a good one, because they could have led themselves into criticisms that they would rather not have. I think that the development is entirely positive I want to say a little about the thorny topic of distinctiveness. What on earth does "distinctiveness" now mean in the context of the charter? We know what the right hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) thought it meant. Indeed, today he reiterated in part his view of what it means—we got the distinct impression that anything popular, commercial or with good ratings would not be distinctive enough. He thought that the BBC should be prevented from engaging in any kind of competition with its commercial rivals in this respect, but what does that mean in the context of the new charter I think that the definition in the White Paper is fiendish, because "substantially different" can mean whatever anybody wants it to mean. We are assured by Ministers that it will not be applied to individual programming. To be fair to the right hon. Gentleman, I never heard him say that he meant it to apply to individual programming, except in some lurid newspaper stories that seemed to be coming from his Department at the time. The Government have simply left it to Ofcom, which is not used to doing this kind of thing, to work this all out later. In my view, there is still a significant prospect of this being used mendaciously, either by politicians—perish the thought—or by the BBC’s commercial rivals, who might simply want to stop the BBC competing with them by making complaints about distinctiveness.