Unrevised

Members present

Lord Inglewood (Chairman)

Baroness Deech

Lord Dubs

Baroness Fookes

Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill

Bishop of Norwich

Lord Razzall

Lord Skelmersdale

Lord St John of Bletso

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Ric Bailey, Chief Adviser, Politics, BBC, Michael Jermey, Director of News and Current Affairs, ITV, and John Ryley, Head of News, BSkyB

Q1 The Chairman: I welcome everybody to this session of the Communications Committee taking evidence in the inquiry on the leaders’ debates at general elections. Before we get going, it is important for Members of the Committee to declare any interests they may have. We discussed this among ourselves and we recognise that some but not all Members of this Committee are actually members of political parties and so would seem to have an interest in this. It is not absolutely clear whether this, in fact, constitutes an interest for the purposes of the House of Lords rules of procedure and we are going to take further instructions from the clerks to see whether we ought individually to register this. Nevertheless, I want to put on record that we recognise there is if not an actual conflict of interest a perceived conflict between some of the Members of the Committee and the subject matter of the debate. I hope that clarifies the position for everybody concerned.

What I would then like to do is to welcome our three witnesses who are, first of all in the order they are on my piece of paper, Ric Bailey, who is Chief Adviser, Politics, at the BBC; second, there is Michael Jermey, Director of News, Current Affairs at ITV; and third, John Ryley, Head of News at BSkyB. You have kindly provided us with brief descriptions of your careers and so on, which has been very helpful, so what I would like to do is to embark on the evidence session proper. What I sometimes do is ask people to make an introductory statement, but in the context of this particular inquiry the way we have formulated our questions will obviate the need for that. I hope that is all right from your collective perspective. There is no need for everybody to answer every question if you think the points have been covered. On the other hand, if there are points that matter to you, then please feel free to make them. In general, we will address the questions to the three of you collectively and you can decide among yourselves how you wish to answer.

If I might begin to set the scene, I will ask each of you in turn whether you would very succinctly tell us whether and why you think the debates last time were in general terms a success, which I think is what you feel from your written evidence. What evidence is there, polling or otherwise, for the claim—which I think you all probably support but it was made explicit by ITV—that there is public expectation that they should happen again? Perhaps since ITV made that explicit in its written evidence I could ask Michael Jermey if he would like to start.

Michael Jermey: Yes, let me answer both questions. I think the debates of 2010 were a great success. You saw for 90 minutes at a time the leaders of the three major UK parties debating directly with each other. Over the course of the three debates you saw 24 questions addressed, with real discussion about serious policy issues, in which tens of millions of viewers engaged. Nearly 10 million people saw the first debate. The reach of the debates overall was above 15 million. The total of the three audiences was above 22 million. All the polling data at the time suggested that people had found the debates useful and that they had enjoyed them. Among young people in particular there was a sense that they understood more about the election than previously. It is interesting to note that among young voters, turnout at the election itself went up differentially compared with other groups.

In answer to your question about supporting evidence for the claim that there is a public expectation that the debates should happen in future, there have been a number of polls in this area. The most recent was conducted this month, February 2014, by YouGov, and shows that 57% of adults in the UK agreed with the proposition that live debates should happen before the next election. This increased to 63% among 16 to 24 year-olds, and only 8% of adults disagreed with the proposition.

The Chairman: That is a very helpful and useful starting point. Who would like to continue?

Ric Bailey: For public service broadcasters covering an election, it is quite easy to make people who are already interested in politics interested in an election. We have all set out some of the facts and figures around how successful we thought it was, but the real success and what we are all jointly proud of is that the debates reached people who would not normally perhaps have become engaged in the election. Obviously, there were some facts and figures around young people, and one of the most interesting, I thought, was that of the young people who saw the debates, more than 90% talked to other people about them afterwards, which I thought was an extraordinary statistic. That alone is a reason for us to want to do them again and to think that they were a good thing for democracy and that the way they were done was very much in the public interest, which is at the heart of what we are trying to do in election periods. It is the holy grail for political broadcasters in the circumstances of an election to reach people who might not otherwise become engaged. My sense over a series of elections was that public engagement was getting lower and lower, and you certainly could not say that about 2010. There was a real sense of excitement and we felt very proud of that.

John Ryley: I think they were a success because they achieved their objective, which was to regenerate and reinvigorate the relationship between the electorate and those seeking office. If you remember, the debates happened on the back of the expenses scandal, and I felt very strongly at the time that politics had been denigrated and that there was a need for the debates. I think the debates really nailed that. What you had, as Michael suggested, was millions of people in prime-time TV, four and a half hours of it, devoted to election issues: domestic policy, international policy and economic policy, at a time of economic uncertainty. The audiences were able to see simultaneously and compare and contrast the answers of the three leaders.

As Michael said as well, turnout was up. Michael Thrasher, the psephologist at Plymouth University, estimates that turnout was up about 5%. I have one big memory from the night in Bristol when I was walking around the harbour where we did the debate. There was a very big screen and sitting down watching the screen outside were about 200 youngsters, teenagers, watching it. That bore out the statistics afterwards that the debates really secured the interest of young people. I think that is very important; we did public good.

Then a point about why we think they are going to happen again; it is for two reasons. Sky News carried out back in August some polling with YouGov. About 1,700 people were polled online; 69% of those polled said they hoped the debates would happen in future; 15% said they did not really know; and 16% said they did not want them to happen. But 69%, nearly seven out of 10 people, wanted those debates to happen again.

The other thing where there is public expectation is David Cameron, the Prime Minister, Ed Miliband, the Leader of the Opposition, and Nick Clegg, Leader of the Liberal Democrats, have committed on camera, saying that in principle they want the debates to happen. You marry those two things together and I think there is a public expectation.

Q2 Lord Razzall: If we can drill down a little from your obvious welcome of the debates and the wish that they should happen again—and we will hopefully look in a minute at where they could be improved—perhaps you could articulate what the important aspects of last time are that need to be repeated, both in the organisation and management of the debates. What are the essential components that should be built on and continued?

Michael Jermey: The essential elements are in a sense perhaps slightly obvious. It was a programme structure where you saw the three party leaders able to engage absolutely directly with each other without excessive mediation on serious policy issues and at some length; a programme structure that allowed exploration across the wide range of issues that the electorate were interested in; and also something that, being in prime-time television, created a sense of occasion, that the electorate wanted to watch, and wanted to see what the leaders who were aspiring to be Prime Minister had to say on those major issues. In a sense, after 50 years of waiting for the debates to happen, I think all of us experienced a feeling of some excitement when that occurred. So many things that have happened over recent years in election campaigns I would not say the electorate was excited about. This really managed to engage the electorate and it is key that the format and the structure and the staging, if you like, of the debates next time around should capture that same sense of importance and significance that this is the nation coming together to consider its future.

Lord Razzall: You do not think you should move to a more “Question Time” format with bigger audience participation?

Michael Jermey: No, I did not say that. Greater involvement of the studio audience and of the electorate is probably a desirable thing. I do not think it is necessarily an essential thing and you would not want that if it was at the expense of the exchange between the party leaders. But as an addition, as a development, I think it would be a welcome one.

Lord Dubs: When you say how well it worked last time and how there was more interest and more public involvement, to what extent, though, was that due to the fact that the election was a much closer thing? It was not a foregone conclusion. Would what you say now have applied if we had had a broadcast in 2001 or 2005? Possibly not. What do you think?

John Ryley: I think there would have been similar excitement whether the election had been close or not close. The debates were a new political event. A lot of people were interested in them and they delivered the audiences.

Ric Bailey: It is worth saying that we had to work very hard to make them happen. There is a slight sense that now they have happened, we can take it for granted that they will happen. I have looked back at a lot of the previous elections when they did not happen, as perhaps you may have read and remembered. A lot of the factors that stopped them happening have not gone away. That sense of having to work very hard at making sure that you paid the sort of attention to detail and planning that we had to do to make them happen, and the format in terms of talking to parties, doing things in the right order—there are some very important things around editorial independence and about how they were set up that we had to be very careful about, which has perhaps not got into the public debates too much. It is quite important, certainly from the BBC point of view, to preserve that way of doing it, so that we are not in some way handing over editorial responsibility.

To a certain extent, these are like normal election programmes. They are subject to the same rules. We are setting up in the same way. Of course, they had a much higher profile, but they have to fit into the general context of how we are making judgments about election coverage all the time. Not just high-profile BBC1, ITV and so on but across all of our output we are making these judgments about how to make election coverage interesting, who to include—all those difficult issues—and this fits very much into that.

Q3 Baroness Deech: What we have heard from you so far, of course, is very much, understandably, in favour of having the debates and it sounds as if you think the previous formula was good. I just wondered if there were, say, three elements of the way that they went last time that you would change this time around. Somebody mentioned audience participation. I have the impression just from watching “Question Time” that audiences have got much, much rowdier in the last few years. I personally would not want more audience participation because I think people would just seize their chance to heckle and grab the nation’s attention. Are there other things that you think ought to be looked at and maybe changed?

John Ryley: Audience participation is a wide phrase. If you acknowledge that the aim of the debates is for those in the studio and the wider public to hear the political leaders put their point of view on different policy aspects, you want to encourage a bit more discourse. While I agree with you that you would not want a rowdy crowd, I would like perhaps to see a bit more free-form discussion between the party leaders and possibly the opportunity for the audience member who has put their question to come up with a secondary question. I felt the format was a great starting point and it was put together at high speed by the likes of Mr Jermey and Mr Bailey on the negotiating group, but when we come to look at it again, maybe there should be a little bit more free-flow discussion.

Michael Jermey: I think it is possible, for instance, to look at the town-hall style debates in the States where there is more audience participation but which you could never call rowdy or in any sense heckling. It is a chance for leaders and the electorate to have a proper, intelligent exchange around the issues. There is nothing about the format of 2010 that I think we would want to lock in aspic and say that is the only way you can do it. There are numerous ways you could have debates. I equally do not think that we should in any way be apologetic about the format of 2010. It gave a forum for proper, intelligent debate on the major issues of the day and clearly connected with the audience and the electorate and delivered very good value. While I would be in favour of exploring whether we could innovate in 2015 and perhaps even have a different style of debate in each debate, as a fallback position I think it would be great if the political parties and the broadcasters would acknowledge that 2010 was a success and as a minimal position that we at least achieve that again in 2015.

As Ric Bailey says, I do not think anybody should absolutely assume the debates will happen. There are lots of positive signs. All three party leaders have accepted the principle. The broadcasters are working closely together again. There is absolutely no reason why they should not be delivered in 2015, but we should remember, for instance, that there was a 16-year gap between 1960 and the Kennedy/Nixon debate and the next debate in the United States.

There will always be things that could derail a debate. Lord Dubs talked about a close election. It is perhaps no coincidence that the first debate in UK history was in a close election when all three party leaders felt that it was a sensible thing to take part in, as in the United States the close election of 1960 had prompted the debates. There is absolutely no reason that the debates should not happen next time, but there are plenty of things that could derail them. Having broadcasters working together with the support of the wider public increases the chances of us seeing the sort of intelligent engagement we had in 2010.

Baroness Deech: Mr Bailey, anything that you would change or revisit?

Ric Bailey: I pretty well agree with all of that. One of the reasons, for instance, the format was identical across the three debates pretty well—and that was quite hard for three different, normally competitive broadcasters to agree to—was it was one of the things that we felt was necessary to simplify what was happening and to make sure that they happened. I do not think any of us are wedded to that as having to be the way that we do it in the future. Similarly, I have some sympathy. I used to run “Question Time” and I know very well how the dynamic works. One of the good things about what we saw in the last election was that we saw different ways of scrutinising the parties, not just the party leaders but the parties generally. One way to do it is, of course, having a debate between them, but for the public to be served properly they need to hear other ways of the party policies being scrutinised. Some of that is by in-depth tough interviews on the “Today” programme or “Newsnight” or on Adam Boulton and so on, and some of it is by audience programmes. It is quite right that there is some interaction. From my point of view, I would rather have a range of different sorts of programmes, of which the debates are one, but I certainly think there is some scope for increased audience participation because that comes a bit more naturally to us now and I think audiences expect that.

Lord Skelmersdale: Nonetheless, these debates do eat into, do they not, the time that you can allow for normal election broadcasting?

Ric Bailey: No.

John Ryley: For our news channel, I would not agree with that, with respect. We have 24-hour broadcasting seven days a week through the campaign, so we would probably be devoting the airtime we give to the debates to other election reporting. In our case, I do not think they do eat into the programming.

Q4 Lord Skelmersdale: Can I move on to another specific question? It is easy to see who the political parties are because they all announce themselves. It is easy to see who their leaders are. You have your own judgment. You have Ofcom recommendation. You have the BBC Trust’s recommendation. How does this sort of mix come to a concrete setting, if you like?

Ric Bailey: To start with, I think it is important to say that although we, as three broadcasters, came together in the organisation of the debates, one thing we were very clear of from the beginning was that each of us separately and independently had to make sure we were doing them in a way that was properly regulated and according to our normal impartial guidelines, and to that extent that was separate—and we had to accommodate that separately. We do those things slightly differently.

From the BBC point of view, we have a set of election guidelines that we work to during elections, which we produce for each set of elections. Part of that sets out how we will achieve due impartiality in an election campaign. All of our election coverage, including the debates, has to be consistent with that. That is challengeable if we do not get it right, as indeed it was on this occasion, and can be appealed to the BBC Trust and then, of course, ultimately to the courts if necessary. What we do during election periods is absolutely subject to that and is obviously parallel to what is happening to those broadcasters that are regulated by Ofcom, but is different.

Michael Jermey: I would say that in 2010 in the run-up to the debates we at ITV conducted a transparent process. Along with the other broadcasters, we published in the week before Christmas of December 2009 the principles under which we were operating. We then continued discussions with the parties and published a very clear codification of what the structure of the programmes was going to be in what became known as the 76 rules—although only a handful of them were rules; more of them were a description of programme. We did so in the context of the Ofcom code, which again is a public document and is clear to see. When challenged about some of our decisions, we published our explanation for them. Ofcom’s special election committee considered those complaints ahead of the election and published its findings. In the run-up to the debate itself, we published the list of names of the people who were selecting the questions and the criteria for selecting the questions. In comparison with all sorts of other public processes it was, in fact, a very transparent process.

John Ryley: To use your analogy of concrete, I think it is a very good mix. Sky News had its own editorial guidelines. We cherish very much our editorial independence, but on top of that we have the rules set out by Ofcom, our regulator. There is a very particular bit of the Ofcom guidelines that refers to election debates. It is very specific in the code and that mix works very well.

Q5 Lord Skelmersdale: In the back of my mind, obviously, is the purported rise—because we have as yet had no proof—of UKIP and Nigel Farage as its current leader. What would be your thinking on incorporating him?

Ric Bailey: Well, the process that we have when we are deciding all of our election coverage is to make a judgment about who to include and who not to include. That is on a whole range of coverage, not just debates. When we are considering that, we have, as I say, our election guidelines. We have specific guidance to programme makers, and what that sets out is the context in which you make those judgments. That would be the case with debates.

Initially, you might take as a starting point the last equivalent election because we take the view that the best way to make a judgment about these things is to look at how real people vote in real elections. Our starting point would be the last general election, but we would also look at subsequent elections. We would also look at any other evidence that might be relevant to setting out the political context. That might include a consistent, robust trend in opinion polling. All of those things we will take into account and, just as we do with any other election and any other coverage, we would make an editorial judgment based on that. That is something that we do at each and every election. Here we are in February; we will be making that judgment about the European elections in May. At each election we are making that judgment based on consistent, objective evidence.

Michael Jermey: A similar process happens in ITV. We will look at the evidence of what we think are the relevant elections. We will make an editorial judgment. In 2010, we were seeking to create a programme in which you heard from the three party leaders who were most likely to have an influence on forming the Government. We would make a similar judgment at each election. We would take cognisance of Sections 5 and 6 of the Ofcom code that sets out the appropriate weight and due impartiality that we are under an obligation to follow through, and we would make that decision at a timely moment. You refer to one particular political party. We will make a judgment about inclusion of parties when we come to consider the debate shortly before the election rather than more than a year out.

Lord Skelmersdale: Do the other political leaders have a veto on this or not?

Michael Jermey: Which political leaders are you referring to?

Lord Skelmersdale: For example, it may be that Mr Clegg does not want to have Mr Farage included, or a member of the Green Party or whoever.

Michael Jermey: In a sense, any political programme is a voluntary activity when it comes to whether you are going to take part in it or not—any programme at all. We follow our own editorial judgment but we cannot compel people to take part in a programme. It is possible that the actions of a particular party make it quite difficult for us to conform with the letter of the code if people are not willing to take part. There is a discussion and a negotiation about participation in all forms of programming. I am not sure I would describe that as a veto but broadcasters are not in a simple place to click their fingers and make politicians or any other participant appear in programmes. If they had been, I suspect debates would have happened 50 years earlier than 2010.

John Ryley: Mr Jermey makes a very good point. The election debate programme is no different from other current affairs programme where the same editorial decisions have to be taken that abide by the Ofcom code. In that sense, the election debate in 2010 was no different to other current affairs programming that has happened since.

Q6 The Chairman: That is helpful. One thing that we have not touched on in this questioning is that Ofcom and the BBC respectively refer to “major-party status”—or, in the case of the BBC, the Trust designation is “leading-party status”. Is that a crucial signpost for you? Do you make your decisions based on that or do you make your decisions in parallel to that? Is there in practice collusion so that you all end up at the same place?

Ric Bailey: Sorry, Ofcom designates major parties; the BBC does not designate. So the parallel between leading and major does not exist. We do not have a group of parties—

The Chairman: But there is a set of rules?

Ric Bailey: There is a set of rules but that is different.

The Chairman: They do not apply the rules to the evidence in the way that Ofcom does, is that right? It is up to you to apply the rules to the evidence.

Ric Bailey: We do it the other way round, if you like. Each and every election we look at the evidence and make a judgment on relative levels of coverage of parties. We do not have a designation that then says, “This is a group of parties that will be treated in a different way”.

The Chairman: But the leading party concept is one that derives from the Trust, does it not, or not? It derives from the editorial.

Ric Bailey: The word “leading” is simply descriptive.

The Chairman: It is not a qualitative thing, it is merely a descriptor?

Ric Bailey: It describes a party that has won an election or that has done well in an election. It reflects who has done well in an election. That is the only sense in which it is used. It is not used in the same sense as Ofcom uses the word “major” at all.

The Chairman: Major, no. It is a special group.

Michael Jermey: Let me answer for ITV. We make an editorial judgment in the way that I described earlier. We apply to that, if we are talking about a debate and including the major parties, a set of criteria and judgments that are very similar to those that Ofcom apply when determining a major party. It is not determinative, what Ofcom has said, in a mechanistic way, a straight read-across. I suppose I would be surprised to find circumstances in which our decision about who to include was very different from Ofcom’s definition of a major party, but it is not a simple cause and effect.

The Chairman: No, it is not them doing it on your behalf, no.

Michael Jermey: No, exactly, and at least in a theoretical world I could think of circumstances and ways in which you could broadcast—compliant with the code and compliant with the law—debates that did not absolutely mirror Ofcom’s major party rules, although I cannot think of circumstances that have occurred in the past 20 years where that would have been the case. I think it is likely to be a rare exception.

John Ryley: Very similar. Sky as a broadcaster will make the final decision about who would take part in a debate, but we would be guided by the guidance from Ofcom. It is unlikely, I think, that we would disagree.

Baroness Deech: I cannot get my head round who has the last word or who the authority is on all of this. I know the BBC have their impartiality rules.

John Ryley: We as the broadcaster do.

Baroness Deech: Each of you separately?

John Ryley: Yes.

Baroness Deech: Is that not rather messy?

Michael Jermey: Our view is that we are ultimately responsible for our own programmes. We had conversations about what we were doing but we make our own decisions. They are then open to challenge. In the first instance, they are open to challenge to the broadcaster, and two parties complained at the last election. We considered their complaints and decided what we thought we were doing was right. There was then a complaint to Ofcom. Ofcom supported our view. In theory, Ofcom’s views could probably be challenged under judicial review. What we do and Ofcom’s code obviously ultimately are rooted in primary legislation passed in Parliament.

Ric Bailey: We are looking to find due impartiality and, although we have different routes to it, in the end we are looking at the same sort of evidence to make those judgments, so it is not surprising that we will come to a similar conclusion. It is not about collusion. It is about looking at the same sort of evidence.

The Chairman: I am going to move on to Lord Dubs in a moment, but when I say “collusion” I am not using this in any bad sense. Do you sound off between each other during this process or are you just making these decisions internally?

Michael Jermey: We are making the decisions internally, but I would feel very open to talking to colleagues about what we were deciding and what our thought process was. We are a fairly open organisation. I would probably have those discussions with anybody who wanted to listen.

John Ryley: Just as we would on other sensitive stories or coverage, the debate in that sense is no different. We have to exercise our own editorial judgment as a broadcaster on all sorts of things, 365 days of the year. It just happens to be the leaders’ debate that we are talking about.

The Chairman: This just happens to be the one for those particular three days in the calendar, but you have other things where you have similar exercises to carry out?

John Ryley: Yes, we make the final call.

The Chairman: No, I appreciate that.

John Ryley: The buck stops with Sky in our case, yes.

Lord Dubs: The buck stops with Sky or ITV or the BBC. It is, therefore, theoretically possible that one of you could decide to have the four party leaders and the others would have three party leaders?

Ric Bailey: It is theoretically possible but, as I say, we are all looking at the same evidence and we all have a similar goal of due impartiality. But it is theoretically possible.

The Chairman: Presumably, to go back to where we started, namely the agreement and the 76 rules, it is difficult to see, is it not, how you could have a framework of rules that enabled this particular form of discrepancy to take place?

Michael Jermey: It is, and by the time we had signed off, if you like, on the 76 rules, which was around 1 or 2 March 2010, we had each made an independent judgment that the appropriate parties to include in the debates were the three that we call the major UK parties.

Q7 Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: I think you have covered a lot of this ground, but if you could not agree, what would be the consequences of a diverging regulatory judgment of this nature in the context of election debates? Further, what would be the consequences if you as the broadcasters were to include candidates in the debates who have not been given major-party or leading-party status by your regulators or vice versa and you want to exclude candidates who have been given that status? You could not empty-chair a debate, could you, if another party said if you had them they were not going to take part? I am just wondering if you have thought about all these difficult implications. Will it derail the whole process?

Michael Jermey: There are difficult decisions to make in every scenario. As we know, people have tried to have debates before and have hit some of these barriers along the way. I do not think that a difference in view between the broadcasters need necessarily lead to the debates not happening. We each individually will have to make a judgment at each election as to what we think is compliant with the code and the law and the way we are regulated and our editorial judgments of what is right for our programmes and for our viewers.

Ric Bailey: If I may say so, in terms of making the debates happen, that is the least of our problems.

Q8 Lord Dubs: Can I turn to impartiality and the role of the devolved nations? What role do the devolved nation debates and, indeed, the more general election coverage play in ensuring that even if you exclude one particular party from the Westminster election debates you give them due weight to compensate in other programmes?

Ric Bailey: This was very important to us and was, indeed, tested in court. The starting point is that the UK political system is not symmetrical and, therefore, there is no mathematical answer to how you achieve impartiality. We are making the best judgments we can. As Michael said at the beginning, we were taking a judgment initially on who were the candidates to be Prime Minister of the Westminster Parliament in a Westminster election. Of course, people in different parts of the UK are voting about different things in a general election. You could say that people in Scotland have a vote on something different but, of course, the geography of politics is that it is quite right for people in Scotland to recognise that there are four big parties there who are competing against each other in a Scottish context.

We link very directly. The BBC UK-wide debate was on the Thursday night. We trailed specifically to debates in each of the nations in the following week and made it clear that part of the package we were offering to viewers across the UK was the opportunity to hear these different voices in different debates. We also trailed to other programming as well around the debates. In the following news bulletin, in “Newsnight”, in the “Today” programme the next day, we very explicitly linked our debate to different sorts of coverage to make sure that other parties that were not involved directly in the debate were given a voice and that the electorate did have the opportunity to hear from them in a way that was linked specifically to the debate.

John Ryley: During the course of the election campaign in April 2010, Sky held three debates in Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh on successive Sundays where the key parties in those areas were given 90 minutes to discuss the issues that were relevant to those parts of the UK. They were trailed very heavily across our output in the preceding days.

Michael Jermey: We took a similar position to that described by Sky and the BBC. On the night of 15 April 2010, after the hour and a half debate, we had another hour and a half of broadcasting both the news and a programme presented by Jonathan Dimbleby in which we heard from a range of other parties. We flagged the fact that there was a debate in Wales that ITV Wales was hosting, and likewise that STV was hosting a debate in Scotland. We also in our debate made it clear which policy areas were affected by the UK Parliament covering England and which issues were devolved. We were very conscious of the issue of the nations.

The Chairman: Presumably, the key to all this is the exact configuration of the electoral landscape at any one particular time. We have been in a period when we have had two big national parties, using the word “nation” to mean the UK, with a third party, which was a smaller party, that might have held the balance of power, together with various regional manifestations. That may not be the future and, if that is not the case in future, presumably the way in which you resolve these difficulties would change accordingly.

Michael Jermey: Yes, you address the facts as they approach you at the time. In some sense, it is easier to look back historically. I said earlier that I think the same conclusions would have been reached for the past 20 years. What you would have done in 1951 I really do not know, but it might have been a different judgment. What you might do in 2015 or 2020 or 2025 may be different and it will be based on the facts.

Lord Dubs: Could I pursue the question, Chair? There are two other sub-questions. One is: now that we are going to have fixed election dates, does that enable you to plan impartiality better because you know against which date you are setting impartiality? Secondly, you do not all cover the country similarly, the three of you. Does that affect how you handle these issues?

Michael Jermey: On the first question, the fixed election date makes planning generally a little easier. On the day that the fixed date was announced I went into my BlackBerry and put the date in and found a recurring meeting already there, so it does give you some certainty.

In terms of impartiality, I am not sure it makes an enormous difference in that the special rules that apply to elections get triggered from the date of the dissolution of Parliament, which presents the same issues that we have always had. Us behaving the same or differently goes back to the issue of us making our own editorial judgments.

Q9 Baroness Fookes: You have indicated in evidence that it was essential that there should be confidentiality while you were negotiating among yourselves, if I may put it that way. Is it, therefore, possible to have greater transparency for the public to understand how you have come to these decisions?

Ric Bailey: We tried to be as transparent as possible in the sense that we published what we could as we went along. I think everything was put into the public domain. We published the principles on which we were negotiating at a fairly early stage and then we published the so-called 76 rules or clauses in the March ahead of it. We were pretty up-front in terms of trying to set out for the public how we were going about it. The other side of that is that, of course, the nature of any negotiations, when people are being asked to make compromises and come to agreements, is that you need a measure of trust and confidentiality around that to make it happen, but I do not think that means that what happens in the long run is not perfectly transparent.

John Ryley: I suppose I would argue that the confidentiality was vital to building up trust; this was the first time that this event had happened. But I agree with you that perhaps next time around—and I very sincerely hope there is a next time around—we should look at trying to make it a little more transparent. Remember, these debates were put together at high speed and were a big success, and things improve through doing them more than once.

Baroness Fookes: Is there any way in which you could help to educate the public on another occasion in all these matters?

Ric Bailey: Yes, absolutely. Part of the nature of it was, as John said, that they happened quite late. We did not know until quite late in February that they were going to happen. They could easily not have happened even at that stage. Do not forget that it was not a fixed Parliament. The election could have come at any moment and only one of the people around the table had any power over that. Next time, of course, I think we would want to use them as a way of building more ways of informing the public and giving more information. Because they were such a focus, that is a tremendous platform that you could make greater use of, and I am sure we would want to, yes.

Baroness Fookes: I gather that you have made sufficiently firm foundations already after that first set to be able to build on those more easily if, as we assume, there will be further debates?

Michael Jermey: I think that is a fair observation. The first thing that needed to happen in 2009 was for the first time to get the parties and the broadcasters around the table. I am not sure in any of the previous attempts we had even got that far. We have ensured that since 2010 there have been continuing conversations and the framework for the discussion of the debates has been established. That will make it easier—not inevitable but easier—to achieve success in 2015.

Q10 The Chairman: One thing arising out of all this was that you said, in my judgment rightly, that, of course, these debates are only part of the wider general election coverage. Do you think the public—and perhaps particularly the public who were re-engaged, if I can put it that way, with the political process through the debates—see them as part of something bigger? Or do you think they are perceived by quite a lot of viewers as being a stand-alone phenomenon?

John Ryley: I think they see them as part of the narrative of the whole campaign. There were three debates. They happened at one-week intervals. They were an integral part of the campaign. I do not think people saw them as separate events.

The Chairman: Certainly, the informed and educated—and when I say “educated” I am not using it in a strict sense—people did, but there is this group that you think were re-engaged to vote. Do you think they saw them that way or do you think they just saw them as a one-off rocket going up into the sky, for want of a better way of putting it?

John Ryley: My own view is that the debates were part of the narrative of the month-long campaign.

The Chairman: So the point of the debate was in a sense that it drew people back into engaging with the wider narrative?

John Ryley: Remember, turnout at the election was up.

The Chairman: Yes, absolutely.

Michael Jermey: None of us should forget that there is individual choice in this. We scheduled other programmes about politics and about the election in peak time that people did not come to in such large numbers.

The Chairman: Do you know whether it was the same people?

Michael Jermey: There was an overlap but there is no doubt that the debates reached some viewers that were not reached in other ways. It was not the broadcasters saying that this is the only thing you must watch, it was the viewers coming to it probably in bigger numbers than most people would have predicted.

Baroness Deech: The thing that worries me slightly is that we live in a society now where you expect to turn on your television and vote for somebody or other, whether it is dancing or whatever it might be—well, I do not, but everybody else does, I suppose. We are getting into that kind of situation.

John Ryley: We are not asking people to vote on an instant take on what they have seen and heard from the party leaders on that night of the debate. In the case of the first debate, the actual polling day was three weeks later.

Ric Bailey: One of the striking things, and I alluded to it before, was the number of people who talked about it afterwards with their friends and families, but there was also this phenomenon of two-screen engagement, which is very different from the passive sense of television where you just sit there and absorb it. Obviously, this was more something among young people, but it really did take off, this idea that you are watching the debate on television because that is the right place to watch it but you are talking to your friends with your other screen. You are exchanging information. You are challenging what is being said. You might be making jokes about it, but it is an engagement that in 2010 was quite a new phenomenon for us. You see it in other programmes now, but certainly in 2010 it was quite a change. There is evidence that this was not just something that people were receiving passively and moving on. It was a real event that they got involved in.

Michael Jermey: It is worth remembering that these programmes were a very, very long way away from entertainment formats or what have you. This was an hour and a half of very serious political debate on issues that matter, uninterrupted on the commercial channels by television commercials, and uninterrupted by any gimmicks or what have you. People stuck with it in their millions and the average viewing time was the majority of the debate. People did not switch off; the graph is pretty steady all the way through. It was an extraordinary phenomenon; perhaps we thought it was part of a bygone era of people engaging in that way.

The Chairman: Did you expect that?

Michael Jermey: No, I do not think we did expect that. I thought they would be a success. I did not think they would be a success on that scale.

John Ryley: Last night I watched the Sky News debate again to remind myself what had happened. After each debate finished on the BBC, ITV and ourselves there was then a very serious discussion with politicians about what they had heard. I think it did incredible public good.

Q11 Lord St John of Bletso: You all appear to agree that third-party involvement would not help the organisation of debates from those responsible for broadcasting them. John Ryley, in your written evidence you said it would add an extra layer of complexity to an already convoluted process. Can you explain how you reached these views, and in particular how you see the disadvantages of the third party being involved?

Ric Bailey: There are two things from my point of view. One is exactly as you have outlined, as John said, the level of complexity. In the end, the way we made these happen was to keep it as simple as possible. We as broadcasters have talked about the regulatory system. Whatever organisation there is of the debates, we still have to do that. If you remove it from the people who are making those judgments and have third-party involvement, you are not preventing us having to do exactly the same thing. That is the complexity.

I have a slightly bigger worry, which is around editorial independence. I do not mean this as a criticism at all of the commission in the United States because the context in the United States is very different. It is chaired by a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former press secretary to President Clinton. Those are the people who run the commission. They are in charge of it. Whatever system you have that is third party inevitably moves the system towards more political influence. A number of you are party politicians. I do not think that we should be moving the influence over the debates further in that direction because it inevitably moves it towards the biggest parties. In the end, that takes away from our job in making editorial judgments about what due impartiality means. That is why we are sceptical about whether a commission or a third party in any way is appropriate for the way that the UK political and media environment works.

Michael Jermey: The television debates are serious political programmes. They matter an awful lot, but they are not different in kind from everything else we do. In a sense, we are structured to bring to the public a range of programmes, including political coverage. We are regulated in a form to ensure that we do that with due impartiality, and I think that is what we achieved. In practical terms, adding a debates commission would probably add a level of complexity that we do not need. I see it certainly at the moment as an answer to a problem that does not exist. We achieved the debates in 2010. I think we can achieve them again. I do not have an absolute theological objection. It is more a practical one. If we fail to deliver the debates in 2015 I think it is worth looking at the question again. If there is a way of getting there in 2020 that we did not succeed in making happen in 2015, by all means let us have the discussion. It is interesting that this debate has become active after the broadcasters have succeeded and was rather less active in the 40 years when it might have been helpful. Let us see where we get to next year. I very much hope we can do much as we did in 2010 and produce engaging, serious political debate. I think a commission would not add to the likelihood of that happening and may diminish it.

John Ryley: We have at Sky our own editorial guidelines. On top of that, we have our regulator’s guide. I think it would add a layer of complexity. A more subtle point to make, perhaps, is that this third party is going to have no more oomph power to bring the broadcasters and the politicians together to make sure the debates happen than the broadcasters and the politicians themselves. The big thing is that we want these debates to happen and that adding a third layer is not going to make that a certainty at all.

Lord St John of Bletso: You all seem to agree as well that the Commission on Presidential Debates in the US is not workable and that their model could not work here. Obviously, in the United States there is a specific legal restriction, and we do not have a comparable situation here. Can you elaborate on your main rationale for why you believe the commission in the US just would not work here?

Ric Bailey: It originated when the League of Women Voters, who had been organising it before then, were found not to be able to have the clout, as it were, to withstand the power of the two big parties. That was why it was formed, I think, in the late 1980s. Essentially, what happened was that the two big parties came together to find a way of making it happen and the commission was the vehicle for that.

Over the years it has obviously established itself with a separate identity, but in the end that is the way it was formed and that is the basis on which it operates. Now, I think it does some tremendously good work around public interest and engaging people in politics—and that is absolutely excellent and I am sure we should do that building on the debates. It is a large permanent administration. It requires an awful lot of funding from donors and big institutions and so on. I just do not think that it is relevant to the way that we do politics here.

The Chairman: Bishop, do you want to come in now?

Q12 Bishop of Norwich: Thank you. I understand your point about a third party, but who finally decides which broadcasters and broadcast channels are included in this process if there is no third party?

Michael Jermey: In a sense, any broadcaster is free to set up a debate. Our grouping has no special authority or privilege to do that and any broadcaster who can persuade parties to take part can have a debate. The three broadcasters represented here were the only three broadcasters who consistently wanted to do debates in 2010. Channel 4 has indicated this time that they would like to be part of that process. We would welcome them into the discussion, and we are going to go into the processes for broadcasters. In a sense, all the broadcasters who were willing to make the commitment were involved last time and I hope that will be the case in future. There is nothing to stop another channel seeking to do something different. There is nothing to stop the broadcasters represented here acting individually if we thought that was the sensible course to take. We have taken the view that acting with a degree of collectivity, albeit making our own editorial judgments and being responsible for our own broadcasts, was the most likely way to achieve success in 2010. I think the evidence is that that was the right judgment then and I suspect will be the right judgment for 2015.

John Ryley: It is not unusual at all for broadcasters to work together on other big stories or on big set-piece coverage. It is not an unusual thing to do.

Bishop of Norwich: What about diversity in terms of programme format? You did say, I think, Mr Bailey, that it is quite a sacrifice to go for the same style of programme between three of you. That might have been the right thing to do last time. Would it be better to have rather more diversity in the programming next time? How would you decide all that? Would that be simply by agreement between you?

Ric Bailey: Yes. As I say, the simplification of having a single format and using that to negotiate as three broadcasters in the environment where we did not know whether we could make them happen or not was really important. They have happened once. There is no guarantee that they will happen again, but we at least have a framework there. I think all of us would think that the room for manoeuvre in terms of coming up with slightly different formats is something that would be good to see, but not at the expense of them not happening. It is less important than making them happen.

Bishop of Norwich: That was done for the sake of the politicians themselves, was it, to make them more comfortable?

Ric Bailey: No, it was done, I think, because after 50 years without them, we had to look at why they had not happened before. One of the reasons they had not happened before was that you had different broadcasters coming up with different ideas. Parties would use that sometimes, when they were perhaps less enthusiastic about them, as a way of not engaging. One of the things that we were trying to do was to come up with something very simple that we could agree on that took us beyond some of those initial hurdles that had been experienced by previous negotiators.

Michael Jermey: I think if we had not kept it simple in 2010, the debates would not have happened. The debates at root happened because all three party leaders thought it was a sensible thing to do, but by keeping it simple and by keeping to one format that we talked through with the parties, we got to a good conclusion in 2010. I agree with you that diversity in broadcasting, as in most things, is desirable. If we can move to a more diverse set of debates in the future, that would be a great result—but not at the cost of not having any debates. What we created in 2010 is not a bad fallback position. In any future election you can point to it. You can say it worked and that it would not be such an awful place to end up. Of course, we have ambitions to improve the format to include other ways of doing things and to develop what was built in 2010.

Q13 Bishop of Norwich: Can I go on to something rather different? That is the use of social media alongside the debates. Last time Twitter had probably only been in existence a couple of years and all of that has taken off since. What do you see as the potential for the use of social media alongside the debates in future?

John Ryley: Speaking from Sky’s point of view, I do not see social media—and by that I mean a Twitter feed or whatever—appearing during the course of the debate between the party leaders. The key thing is to enable the party leaders to answer the questions that are being posed by members of the audience without any sort of screen clutter whatever. That is what the programme is about. It is to hear and watch the leaders give their answers to specific questions. If you add in social media, that is going to distract from what they are saying. You are right that tools exist to curate media in very imaginative ways. Maybe there is a role for the use of that elsewhere during the election campaign, but on the election debate programmes on Sky they would not play a role.

Michael Jermey: I draw a distinction between the debate and everything else that goes on around it. On ITV, we would like to have the debate as a clean video feed in which the party leaders debate with each other. We and a hundred other media organisations may well on a second screen or elsewhere allow people to participate on Twitter or what have you, but you will have the choice as a viewer to have no distraction and an unmediated debate, or a choice as a consumer to see what the Daily Telegraph or the Sun or the BBC or Sky or anybody else is saying about the debate on our channel.

Baroness Deech: Can I just pick up one tiny point that I thought the Bishop was going to ask? The view has been expressed that the last debates were a women-free zone. It cannot be impossible to find a woman presenter. I was watching Christine Lagarde on “The Richard Dimbleby Lecture” last week and the comments on Twitter were, “For goodness’ sake, we have finally found an older woman who is allowed to appear on television.” Can you not come up with a woman presenter, not some cutie who is there for her looks, but a proper, serious presenter?

John Ryley: I agree with that.

Baroness Deech: Good. Let us hope we can get that.

Michael Jermey: As a general observation, I think you are right that broadcasting is not as diverse as I would like it to be or as diverse as I intend my part of it to become in the years ahead. I do not think one should concentrate just on the debates in regard to that. Sometimes in discussion around the debates you would think it was the only television that existed. There are other election programmes. There has not been, as far as I am aware, a female main anchor of an overnight election night programme. On our network, half our main newscasters are women and half are men. More diverse broadcasting generally rather than specifically in the debates is desirable.

Lord Razzall: Since Elinor Goodman retired there has not been a female political editor, although whether John just gave a hint as to who is going to replace Adam Boulton will remain to be seen.

Baroness Fookes: Could I ask a related question about the format that you adopted for asking the questions? If I remember correctly, the questions were taken from members of the public but were not put by the members of the public directly.

Michael Jermey: I think that is a mis-memory. The questions came in two forms. There was a studio audience of 100 or so people selected by ICM who were politically balanced from within 40 miles or so of the studio centre. Half the questions came from members of the public that they put; half the questions came through questions that had been e-mailed in from anywhere in the country and the people whose questions were selected were also put in the studio audience. They put their question direct and, certainly on the ITV programme, half the questioners were female.

Q14 Lord Dubs: In the last broadcast, according to your written evidence, I think you said Sky was the only commercial broadcaster to make the debate available to be carried live to all broadcasters and news organisation—any platform, anywhere in the world. What do you think the policy should be next time from each of your organisations in terms of making the content available to other broadcasters and online?

Ric Bailey: The BBC did the same; we made all of ours available live to whoever wanted it.

Michael Jermey: We took the view that we wanted our debate to be available to as many members of the public as possible. We made it available live on ITV, which is available to the entire population, available online and available on radio—principally through BBC Radio 4. We then released the entirety of the programme to other broadcasters without charge to use as many times as they wished. We were the only programme that did not brand our channel on the feed itself, and that strategy led to the largest number of consumers of our programme. So I think we met our remit in terms of making the programme universally accessible.

Lord Dubs: Yes, that is pretty clear, thank you.

The Chairman: For next time around, am I right in saying that each producer of a debate, assuming it happens and assuming you are going to be part and parcel of it, will make the material available live to any broadcaster that wants it?

Michael Jermey: That is not what I said.

The Chairman: That is what I am not quite sure of. I am just trying to get it clear as exactly what you are saying.

Michael Jermey: If there is a debate on ITV next time, where I stand now—and it is a matter for discussion—is that I would want every voter in the UK to be able to see it easily. I care more about the voters than about other broadcasters. Post the debate, if channels want to rerun the debate, as some did, it would become—

The Chairman: It will be available after the debate to everybody?

Michael Jermey: After the debate to everybody. There were some people who do not have access to television but have access to radio, which is why we were happy for it to run on BBC Radio 4.

Lord Dubs: So ITV’s policy is slightly different from the other two?

Michael Jermey: Yes, I suppose that in a sense the BBC, as a publicly funded broadcaster, takes a view of universal access. Sky, which I think runs an extremely fine news channel, certainly at that time was not universally accessible on normal television to viewers. It was in a slightly different position and got the smallest number of viewers despite that distribution. We are a mass-market channel that everybody through DTT in the UK can see. We made sure that nobody was at a disadvantage in seeing our programme, but having invested a large amount of money in setting the thing up, having decided not to run advertisements, having decided not to put our branding on it, we thought it was reasonable, given that everybody could see it in its first transmission on television, for people to see it on ITV.

John Ryley: We believe it is very strongly in the public interest to make it available to as many people as possible.

Q15 Lord Skelmersdale: Could I now turn to the worm that is used in political programmes rather differently than normal news? We have had academics concerned that the people who contribute to the worm are a very small sample. Would you like to comment on that?

Ric Bailey: Yes, I think we share the concerns about—

Lord Skelmersdale: They are not always a small sample but they sometimes apparently are, according to them.

Ric Bailey: That is why we did not use it. I think the view that it might influence the audience is a perfectly valid one and we were very keen in setting up the debates that we should not be doing it with gimmicks. Having said that, if audiences wanted to choose that, they could.

So for our third debate people had the option if they wanted to see it online rather than on television. We also used it as a way doing an instant reaction that we filmed within a focus group. So we were not showing the worm in a way that I know viewers across the country were seeing it; we simply showed it within a focus group and then did a report on that as a way of illustrating how the debates were seen and reacted to. We did not do it in the way the academic points out, which was a way that could influence the voters at large. I think we accept that would not have been appropriate.

Lord Skelmersdale: No worm of the bottom of the screen while the programme was going on, is that what you are saying?

Ric Bailey: Certainly not during the debate when it was on, no.

Lord Skelmersdale: That view is universal, is it?

Michael Jermey: We had a clean version of the programme. We talked about the worm in news programmes afterwards but it did not interrupt the main debate.

The Chairman: So no worms?

John Ryley: We did not use a worm, no.

Baroness Fookes: You would not want to do so, I gather, for the next one if there is one.

Ric Bailey: Not on the debates themselves, but as an option if people want to go and look at it and play around with it. You might want to do a lot of things that people have the opportunity to do, but as the central offering of the debate to the audience, no.

Q16 The Chairman: We are getting towards the end of our session, you will no doubt be pleased to hear. Is there anything that we have not touched on that you think is important and we ought to bear in mind, please?

Michael Jermey: I would just amplify a point Ric Bailey made earlier. The debates in 2010 were not an easy thing to achieve and we do not absolutely assume that they will happen in 2015, although we intend to work very hard for them to do so. It is possible that in some of the academic contributions to the discussion around the debates there is a starting position that they are an established fact and therefore all we need to do is refine the process of how you administer them and deal with public education around them and so forth. I believe there are still some very practical issues that need to be addressed and I think that broadcasters working together, in co-operation with the political parties, is the most likely way of achieving the practical result of debates happening again in 2015.

The Chairman: That raises an interesting point, because you said quite rightly that each of you operates according to your own regulatory environment, which in the case of the BBC is slightly different. Well, each of you in your own way has a slightly different one: two of you under the auspices of Ofcom and the BBC under the BBC Trust. At the same time you have also said that you work together collectively. When you start working together collectively, obviously at one level you are then answerable back to the particular regulator or regulatory system—let us call it that—under which you operate. Is there a problem about the fact that when you come together collectively there is no collective answerability for all of you together? I am not sure there is but I am just wondering about it.

Michael Jermey: No, we are accountable as separate organisations and therefore we would not commit to anything with each other that we were not prepared to stand up for.

The Chairman: So the safety net is that because you are firmly accountable down the lines of account that each of you are attached to, any collective decision is going to have to be bought into by each of you three separately within your own terms of reference.

Michael Jermey: Yes.

Q17 The Chairman: Finally from me. First of all, did you find that the political parties were sensible and constructive in their engagement prior to a debate last time?

Michael Jermey: Yes, my observation of the three parties involved in the negotiations was that they all wanted the debates to happen, they all worked to overcome some practical difficulties that happened along the way and they all made some compromises to achieve the end result. I have nothing but praise for the representatives the political parties put into the negotiations.

Ric Bailey: I agree 100% with that.

John Ryley: So do I.

Lord Dubs: May I ask one question that relates to something earlier that I am not sure you dealt with? Last time there were three of you. Channel 4 wants to come on board. What is it that says whether there will be three broadcasts next time or four?

Michael Jermey: I think we are at too early a stage of the discussions to be able to give you a useful and helpful reply. We believe that the debates should happen, and we believe that the broadcasters working together is the most likely way to achieve that. We welcome Channel 4’s desire to be involved in the process this time, and I think that falls into the great category of 100 practical issues that we need to resolve between now and next spring.

Lord Dubs: It is a pretty big one when the three of you had the broadcast to yourselves, as it were, and Channel 4 this time wants to come in.

John Ryley: We have a very good template to build on from last time and we are very keen that Channel 4 is part of the process now. Using the template from 2010 we can improve and perfect it.

Lord Dubs: Does that mean four broadcasts, because I do not see how you can include Channel 4 unless you have four broadcasts?

Ric Bailey: We are in a very different position now to where we were in 2009. In 2009 we had to make it up as we went along, there was nothing to build on. We are in a completely different position now and I think the level of trust that we have arrived at between the broadcasters is sufficient for us to be able to tackle what we know will be difficult problems. That may well be one of them.

Lord Dubs: You have been extremely helpful in this session, but these last are politicians’ answers, are they not?

Ric Bailey: But we are 15 months away from a general election. I do not think there is any point in us speculating about issues that will happen. We know that there will be lots of things we will have to sort out, but we have a greater confidence that we can do it. We are not hiding anything from you, we just think it is an issue and I am sure we will sort it out.

Q18 Baroness Fookes: Are you likely to encounter any problems with the leaders of lesser parties who have pretensions to the premiership knocking on the door and refusing to be content with the answers that you might wish to give?

Ric Bailey: Yes, in the same way as I think we said before. In all our programming at election time we were having to make these judgments about who was included, who was not included, and what different sorts of coverage we gave to different sorts of parties. All of the factors that we think about for all of our coverage will have to be part of how we think about the debates, and that is one of them.

The Chairman: Presumably if you were hypothetically to have more debates next time, then the way in which you feed the debate would have to change, would it not?

Ric Bailey: I think it is too early to be talking about that.

The Chairman: But that is the kind of detail that follows, is it not?

John Ryley: That would be for discussion in the next 15 months.

The Chairman: Exactly, but all these things are for negotiation within the historic framework of last time’s rules: is that the way you are looking at it?

Michael Jermey: Certainly within the historic context of the fact that a co-operative effort and proper engagement with the parties led to a good result. I think that the detail will be subject to all sorts of discussions between broadcasters, and between the broadcasters and the parties.

Q19 Lord Razzall: I wonder, in view of the comment that was made that we should not take the process for granted, whether we should re-emphasise—as I know we have done—that we do not think this Committee will have any say in whether the broadcasts take place. That is clearly way, way above the pay grade of this Committee. What we want to look at, assuming they are going to take place, is whether we can cast light on what the format should be. I would not want people to assume that we will say, “Clearly the broadcast should take place”—which we all believe—as a result of which the leaders of three political parties will immediately say, “Well, that is it then, we will have the broadcast”.

The Chairman: I regret to say that is absolutely right. The political establishment of the United Kingdom takes remarkably little notice.

Lord Razzall: This will be a decision that is taken right to the topmost level in all three political parties, will it not? We know Lynton Crosby is on record as saying that he did not think the Tories should have done it last time.

Bishop of Norwich: Does a coalition government make the repetition of the debate more likely or less likely?

Ric Bailey: I am not sure it would go one way or the other, to be honest. In the end, when you are approaching an election, all these parties are offering themselves to the electorate, and that is the basis on which we are putting up a platform for them to debate on. Each of them will have to defend their history as much as their manifestos.

The Chairman: That is probably as good a moment as any to draw it to conclusion. Thank you very much for coming. The collaborative evidence that you have given has been extremely helpful and it makes me feel that, whatever the outcome, there is a real wish within your organisations for the process to repeat itself. Thank you very much for giving up your time to come and talk to us about it. Thank you.