Broadcasting — House of Commons, 2016-10-18
Topic: Culture
Maria Eagle (Labour, Centre-left): May I begin by saying to colleagues around the Chamber that, since I stood down from the Front Bench in June, I have agreed to take on the secretaryship of the all-party parliamentary group on the BBC I welcome the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and the Minister for Digital and Culture to their places. Both of them are new to the job but not to government. I also commend my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson) for his debut at the Dispatch Box in this role, and I wish him well Although the new Ministers have come late to the process of BBC charter renewal, it is now for them to finish off all the work that has been done so far. I am glad to see that some of the more lurid fantasies of the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), whom I am really pleased to see in his place, will be well and truly finished off by the time the new charter becomes operational I am sure that the Secretary of State and the Minister have realised already the incredibly high esteem in which the BBC is held by our constituents, who pay for and consume its services, and the concomitant interest and campaigning about the process of charter renewal. There is a wish around the country, the nations and the regions that the Government get this charter right Let me give the Government some credit—not something I often do. The end result looks like it will be better than many of us had feared. Let me also be clear that one or two concerns remain, and I will come on to mention them in my remarks When we consider the future of the BBC, we should always keep in mind both its great history at the centre of our national life—Members do that when they make contributions to this debate—and the fact that it is one of our most loved institutions. It is behind only the monarch, our armed forces and the national health service in the esteem in which it is held, so loved and valued it most certainly is The consultation on the Green Paper as part of the charter renewal process review simply reiterated the extent to which that is so. Those of us who knock on the doors of our constituents and try to get them to approve of what we do in our jobs can only look on in awe at an 81% approval rating—81% of the public believe that the BBC does a good job. We would all wish for such a high level of approval from those for whom we seek to work. That high approval rate is combined with the fact that a very high number of people in this country—some 97%—consume BBC services for an average of 18 hours a week. That is an impressive set of figures, which we should all bear in mind when we consider the future of the BBC The public have taken part in the charter review period, in so far as they have been able, by way of the consultation on the Green Paper. As the Secretary of State mentioned in her own remarks, some 192,000 people have replied. Three quarters of them believed that the BBC should remain independent, and two thirds that the BBC has a positive wider impact on the market and that BBC expansion is justified. The BBC is also a lynchpin of our creative industries, and our broader creative industries, in the whole of the UK. It allows us to punch well above our weight as a nation in exporting creative output to the rest of the world, as well as being a key component in the soft power on which even our new Foreign Secretary has commented as he starts to get to grips with his new role. Both of those things are even more important after the referendum on 23 June than they were before when the former Secretary of State and I were both still in our places on the Front Bench. We all should be able to agree—I am sure we will—on how lucky we are as a nation to have the BBC. We should use the charter renewal process to make it fit for the future and enable it to continue doing the job that it is doing.