Unrevised

Members present

Lord Inglewood (Chairman)

Baroness Bakewell

Lord Clement-Jones

Baroness Deech

Lord Dubs

Baroness Fookes

Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill

Bishop of Norwich

Lord Razzall

Lord St John of Bletso

Baroness Scotland of Asthal

Earl of Selborne

Lord Skelmersdale

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Professor Stephen Coleman, The Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds, and Tim Gardam, Chair, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and Principal, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford.

Q86 The Chairman: I do not think that for either Stephen Coleman or for Tim Gardam I need to make any formal introductions, since we have brief descriptions, CVs, and we obviously know of your work. It is going to be very helpful to hear what you have to tell us. Just before we get into the hearing proper, if you could, please each identify yourself and who you are. That is for the purposes of the recording, and it is being broadcast as we go. If you would like to make each an introductory comment, please feel free to do so.

As far as the questioning is concerned, please range widely when you respond. Sometimes you both may want to reply, and on some occasions you may feel the other person has said everything before you get a chance to chip in. Do not hesitate to say, “I have nothing more to add”. Just play as it comes, please. First of all, would either of you like to make an opening statement?

Professor Coleman: Yes. I am Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds. What I hope to draw upon in the answers that I give you today is research that I have been doing over a number of years into televised leaders’ debates in different countries. In particular, I want to refer to the 2010 UK debates, in which I led the team conducting the main audience research and research on the media coverage. I would also like to draw on some recent research that I have been conducting with audiences in focus groups looking back to the 2010 debates and looking forward to the 2015 debates and thinking about what they would like from them.

Tim Gardam: I am Tim Gardam. I am the Chair of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford. The Reuters Institute’s research frequently focuses on what constitutes the public value of news journalism in an age of digital convergence. It increasingly comes back to the question of how an individual citizen in the digital age can engage with the information and get hold of the information they need to make the sorts of informed choices on which a representative democracy depends.

Three publications as a result of the 2010 election related to the debates: Stephen Coleman’s analysis; Ric Bailey on how they changed election broadcasting; and Nic Newman who talked about the catalytic effect of social media. I think all of them point to the paradox of the debates, which was this was an election that we expected to be defined by social media and online media, which ended up being defined by a very much 20th century technology and, the most traditional of all, public service television, and a programme format that is 50 years old. Yet all the Reuters Institute research emphasises that it is the interaction of old media and new media that gave the public service purposes to the debates, because social media became a viral transmitter, essentially, of this conversation rooted in a mass audience.

It is just worth refining that point further for a moment. It seems to me that one of the lessons of the debates—and I think this emerges out of all the Reuters research—is that they exemplify a public value to public service broadcasting that is rooted in political broadcasting but goes beyond that.

Social networks today characterise the way people express themselves and relate to each other in a society that is both increasingly connected but, of course, increasingly diverse.

The public service culture of British broadcasting is not so much a social network as a civic network. Although the evidence shows that the social networks were very important in amplifying the message of the debates, they are essentially rooted in a civic network, a common place, where, if you are viewing, you have to take account of views that you may not agree with or may not know about. I think all our research comes back to this space, which I hope we will be able to explore this afternoon, because even though social media has developed a lot in the past five years and the debates may not have the same power of novelty in the future, the need to understand what a civic media is remains central to what we are talking about.

The Chairman: In short, you are saying that the public service broadcaster, the civic medium, is where the business took place, and the social media were the means of transmitting it and amplifying it and reconfiguring it throughout the rest of society?

Tim Gardam: In the end I think they become interdependent, but the locus is the arena that public service broadcasting provides, which is an arena where everyone can come together in one place and understand the point of view of the other and encounter the point of view of the other, whereas social media, by its nature, are many separate communications, a web of them taking place, but you do not have this common ground that public service broadcasting provides.

What this interaction shows—I think this is fundamental both to the future of public service broadcasting and indeed democracy—is that citizens, when they think it is important to take something seriously, do just that: they take something seriously, and they need a public arena in which they can focus on what they need to know in order to make those serious choices.

Q87 The Chairman: One of the things that has struck me about the work that the Reuters Institute has done, and your work too, is that behind it all there is a feeling that these debates were in the public interest and that they should happen again. Indeed, to go further than that, there is an inference that somehow they assisted in increasing voter turnout, particularly among younger voters. Do you think there was a killer phenomenon, if I can put it that way, in the debates that appear both to have improved turnout and to have contributed to the general election of that year?

Professor Coleman: Let us first look at what we found from the audience research, which is that over half of 18 to 30 year-olds said that watching the debates led them to in some ways rethink how they were going to vote. That is a very, very striking finding. Three-quarters of them said that they understood more about the party leaders as a result of watching the debate, and two-thirds of them said that they understood about the policy differences between the parties, although of course that is self-reporting. That is not to say they understood them in a very sophisticated way, but they understood them.

What I think is significant here is that the debates provided a simple and limited framework for public attention, particularly for young people. They were media events; you knew they were coming. You could talk about them to other people, very often doing so, in the last election, through the blogosphere, in the next election much more likely through Twitter. You could do things while you were watching them, and we know there were a lot of people who were not just watching them but were typing messages to one another while they watching them. Straight afterwards you could arrive at some verdicts both about policy and about who you wanted to talk to about them.

The evidence about increasing turnout is, at best, suggestive. Members of my research team conducted regression analyses in which they looked at the predictive factors that might have made people likely to vote. They pulled those out and they controlled for them, and they said, “If only watching the debate was a predictive factor, what would happen?”. Certainly, in terms of what people reported, the number who said they were going to vote increased after each debate. That is particularly striking in the 18 to 29 year-olds. I think there was something suggestive here; I think it would be very unwise to say these debates were the sole cause of increasing turnout.

Can I say one other thing about increasing turnout? In social media, Facebook ran a very interesting campaign around the debates, which was called the “I voted” campaign. What happens there is you press a button, you say you voted and you tell all your friends that you voted.

The Chairman: Was that during the debate or on election day?

Professor Coleman: During the debate you would say that you were going to vote. On election day you said you had voted.

The Chairman: Do we know whether there was a correlation between what people said in the first response and whether they went out and did it?

Professor Coleman: There was an increase, but there would be bound to be as the election got nearer. We can say that there was a correlation, but we cannot say that it was a cause.

Tim Gardam: You asked about the public value. Reading Stephen’s research again, it seems to me the most powerful evidence for the argument that they had a public value was the impact on what the research identifies as the marginally attentive voter, or marginally attentive citizen: the sort of person who otherwise would not have encountered the arguments that were central to the campaign, but did so because of the debates. There were clearly differential responses from the marginally attentive citizen, who often were younger voters.

The conclusion that is drawn out from the research, which I think is the most important, is that the debates bolstered the confidence of viewers. That is, I think, the conclusion that comes from the numbers that Stephen was quoting: the fact that 90% who watched discussed them, and 70% thought they knew more about politics at the end than they did before. It is quite easy for those of us in the thick of political journalism, political discourse, to forget that confidence is an issue and that the closed nature of political language and political debate can make people shy away. They feel they are not somehow emancipated to take part in it. Picking up Stephen’s point, the simplicity of format, the space given to the three party leaders to do something very clear and specific gave people the confidence, who might not otherwise have had it, to engage in the arguments.

The Chairman: Do you think that confidence goes a step further and propels them into the polling booth?

Tim Gardam: We cannot point to definitive evidence, no, but I think the correlations are quite interesting. The other response we get from the research is that the debates were seen in terms of utility, particularly by younger voters, in the sense of, “They helped me make up my mind”. In a world where people are short of time for attention, this was a very time-efficient way to give your attention to something that you wanted to get your head around. You did not want to spend a lot of time on the election per se, but the sense of event and the sense that here was a way of being able to calibrate your sense of responsibility was laid out before you.

The other interesting thing, I think, is that precisely because the debates were an event that allowed people to comment simultaneously and afterwards, the deliberative nature of the conversation continues long after they are over. If you look at the analysis of the blogs, as Stephen’s research did, there was a very low level of abuse. There were not a lot of people throwing insults at each other and there was quite a low level of partisanship. People were commenting on what was being said and on the leaders. None of this is evidence for the debates driving turnout, but I think it implies that the debates upped the level of political engagement, political articulacy and political confidence, and turnout did increase.

Q88 The Chairman: The sense of the responses that each of you has given indicates to me that you feel that what took place was a civic good. The nature of the arrangement is that the broadcasters are part of the civic component of society. The academic perspective buys into that—or should do, I think—but for these things to occur you also need the political parties to engage. The political parties and the attack dogs that they engage have, in a general election, only one thing in mind, and that is winning. Do you think that represents a kind of fault-line through the process?

Tim Gardam: I do not think the desire to win an election would be a fault-line in democracy.

The Chairman: No, but if you are an attack dog, a behind-the-scenes man, or even for that matter the leader of a political party, when you get to this point in the game, your approach to the election broadcasts will be, “Will it help me or hinder me?”. That, in reality, is the only factor that is going to play.

Tim Gardam: I think the right answer to that is this: clearly a series of circumstances came together at the last election that made the debates possible, and it does not necessarily mean that those circumstances will be there again. Not only was it the first election almost in living memory where none of the three leaders had fought an election as a leader before, but there was the low public esteem in which politics was held following the expenses scandal. A point was made in Ric Bailey’s report that the lack of money that the Labour party had to fight the election made the debate a very cost-efficient way of finding a major point where everyone would come and engage in the argument, all of which became a virtuous circle that led to the debates happening. Of course there will be a huge level of self-interest in the parties taking part. Having happened, it is obviously quite possible that, if they should fail to happen again, there will be a cost to be considered in pulling out of them.

I think the paradox of the debates is that they could have been construed as rather old fashioned. The 76-point agreement, even by the standards of the negotiations that broadcasters and politicians always have, was somewhat involved. There was no independent interrogative voice. There was a moderator not an interviewer. The audience could be heard but were not invited to engage otherwise, so it could have been seen as rather a patriarchal format. I think the fact that it was not was because of two things. First, we have been talking about the effect of the social media conversation that went on around it. Also, and this is where I would like to refer to the wider idiom of television and how that affects politics, since 2000 there have been a series of programmes, far away from the political arena, that are largely entertainment programmes, where the audience has been invited to interact. That audience has tended to be young adults in their early 30s, from “Big Brother” in 2000 through to the “X Factor”, and other programmes. Voting by text or engaging by text has become a core part of the exercise. I think the debates ended up offering this appetite for information and transparency—and transparency was very necessary to political culture in 2010—but then allowed the viewer to interact, to talk about it and then later on to go to the polling station and vote for real. What could have been a very old fashioned format becomes a very modern one. You get this interesting and I think very virtuous relationship between traditional, regulated public service broadcasting with lots of rules, and a completely unregulated conversation that goes on around about it. The debates allowed people to speak for themselves and to each other.

I think they also had an effect—and this may be something to explore later—that allowed the party leaders much more of a chance than you would normally get in a one-to-one interview or in a hustings programme to expand straight to camera their thinking on a policy. Given that the trajectory of most political coverage in the last 20 or 30 years has been much more towards a hustings/direct encounter with the voter, it was an advantage to the party leaders that they were given some space. What was interesting is that that was not seen by the audience as in any way paternalistic or putting them up on a podium and not a soapbox. It was welcomed as a chance for people to be able to judge for themselves. I think there are a lot of incentives for politicians wanting to win to think hard before abandoning the format.

Professor Coleman: I want to emphasise the point that there is a systemic zero-sum game for the negotiators to think very hard about in the coming months. The big loser in the debates not happening next year would be turnout, because I think people would feel let down; they would feel that the political leaders had not bothered to appear before them and provide them with the opportunity to do what they could do in 2010.

One of the things that they could also do in 2010, to add to Tim’s very good analysis of what the debates made possible, is determine the result of the debates. The public could determine the results of the debates without spin doctors telling them what they thought. One of the most interesting things that happened after the first debate last time was that there was spin room based very much on a replica of the US model, with lots of spin doctors running around with their mouths opening and no sound coming out, because the flash polls had already arrived, the social media analytics had already been conducted, and everybody knew exactly what the public thought of the debates because the public were making up their own mind. So the spin doctors found themselves out of work.

The Chairman: That is interesting, but it is a contest for the politicians where there is no silver medal for being second.

Q89 Lord Razzall: I suppose you two are marginally less convinced, or less absolutely convinced, than the broadcasters who have given evidence to us as to whether it was the debates that drove the increased turnout. I think you are being slightly cautious on that, for understandable reasons to do with academic research, but I assume you would accept that the corollary of the success of the debates was a reduction in the audience for all other political programmes during the election campaign. Could I follow up that half-statement/half-question with asking whether you have given any thought to what would happen, if there are no debates this time, as to how, through other forms of programming, the audience could be engaged in the process if the debates do not take place?

Professor Coleman: We are looking at a very long-term decline in viewers for election programmes, so I am not sure that the debates had that effect last time. I think the debates focused people.

Lord Razzall: It was going to happen anyway.

Professor Coleman: I think if there are no debates this time, the broadcasters will no doubt try to put together some informal discussions—audience discussions—of one kind or another, but I think Tim’s analysis is correct. The place where particularly the generation of first and second-time voters want to have the conversation is not with a virtual deliberating audience in a television studio speaking for them as the public; they want to do it themselves. I am not at all convinced that, in the absence of the debates, having the “Granada 500”-type programmes would do the trick.

Tim Gardam: Stephen and I take a slightly different view on this, I think. We are absolutely agreed on one thing, which is that without the debates last time the likelihood of a collapse in viewing for normal-type election programming would have been very great indeed, because we were going into an election at a time when trust and respect for politicians was at a very low ebb. There was an incipient crisis of legitimacy across the parties, so I think the debates offered a new clarity with which to see the party leaders, which was very important in changing that mood and in that sense was, I think, a huge democratic good.

The other point I would make—and this is as a former director of a television channel—is that in today’s multi-channel world the solution cannot be the same as at election time in the 1980s, when I was running “Newsnight”, where you just flooded the airways and you extended every programme by 15 minutes. The “Nine O’clock News”, as it was then, became an hour and you just poured this stuff at people and they had nowhere else to go. Today they have lots of other places to go. They go off into a multi-channel world, and you would see those programmes collapsing or, even worse, you would see a desperate attempt to try to do ingratiating programmes to hold the audience there. I think political television has to follow the rules of all public service broadcasting, which is that a few big-event programmes, if well conceived, can capture the imagination, and if you get the format right, less is more.

There is, to my mind, a quite serious secondary question here. The debates posed a difficult question for the traditional one-to-one political interview with the Prime Minister, the leader of the Opposition and the leader of the Liberal Democrats. They suggested to me that the era of the Brian Walden and Robin Day interview, which was a “make your mind up” moment as you watched as a voter, is probably over. The closed political discourse that is inevitable in an interview like that does seem to turn off a large number of people watching.

Lord Razzall: Although they still did them in the last week.

Tim Gardam: They did but they were not things that captured the imagination. I think it would be a great pity if they were not there. Similarly, and I think this is where Stephen and I slightly disagree, the hustings programmes, the “Question Time”s and the Granada 500s, have a really important history in democratic broadcasting. If you look right back to the 1970s, those programmes bring leaders from the podium to the soapbox at a key moment in an election when the Cabinet Minister or the Prime Minister is head to head with the voter. From Jim Callaghan getting it wrong with the nurse in 1979, through to Tony Blair having a tough time in 2005, and others, that sense of the voter, the audience, taking on the party leader is very important. But Stephen’s point is an interesting one: how far that is seen to be sufficient now for a generation that is used to having direct, unintermediated access might mean that those question-type programmes are not themselves enough.

Q90 Lord Skelmersdale: It has been put to us from time to time that the debates can dominate the campaign—in other words, to the extent in people’s minds of what you might describe as normal election broadcasts—and that they might presidentialise a general election and hence a future Prime Minister. It has been put to me privately that they might well have caused the coalition in the first place. Do you have any comment on any of those three ideas?

Tim Gardam: I have thought about the presidential question. I do not think it is an issue. As Ric Bailey’s research reminds one, the elections in the 1970s, and 1974 in particular, can be seen as the height of presidential politics in Britain because you have a Prime Minister and a leader of the Opposition, both of whom had been our Prime Minister. In the Wilson-Heath years you have two people, both of whom were in No. 10. The research shows that 60% of each party’s coverage was with Wilson or with Heath; 90% of the bulletins had Heath or Wilson on them. Remembering those elections, they were absolutely dominated by that sense of the two of them. I think they were as presidential as anything today. Indeed, if you look at the history of this Parliament from the debates, this has not been one where Parliament has been inactive.

The Chairman: Might I just put a point to you there, which is that at that time there were very, very few other parties in the frame, so it was easier for it to be presidential?

Tim Gardam: That is true. If there had been such an encounter in 1970 the Liberal party would not have had anything like the same—I think I am right that Jeremy Thorpe gets a lot of coverage in February 1974 because of surge and 69% of the Liberal party’s coverage in 1974 was with Thorpe.

On the issue of the coalition and was it formed as a result of the debates, one can speculate and opine. It would be interesting to know whether the concept of Nick Clegg as Deputy Prime Minister emerges from out of the three of them on the podium. That is something I have seen written.

Lord Skelmersdale: What I was trying to get at was, if you like, an unclear election result, rather than specifically the coalition. In other words, no party ended up with an overall majority of the seats.

Professor Coleman: That would suggest that the third party had the benefit of votes gained as a result of the debates. In fact, it did not. I think it is correct to say that the debates made coalition thinkable in the public imagination in a way that was quite helpful, because there was no clear majority and it had to become thinkable. I am quite certain that in 2015 people will be watching the debates with an eye to the possibilities of coalition, because coalition I think is now regarded by people as a part of mature politics.

Q91 Lord Dubs: Can I avoid appearing to make a party political point? I say that with respect to colleagues. My memory of it is that Nick Clegg did extremely well in those broadcasts. Everybody said he had done well, and when the election results started coming through, the Liberal Democrats did not do as well. Can you explain that in terms of the answers you have been giving?

Professor Coleman: The fall in polling for the Liberal Democrats happened between the first and second debate and particularly between the second and third debate. Anybody a week before the election, predicting the election result, would have assumed that the Liberal Democrats were going to do not as well as one might have thought after the first debate.

Lord Dubs: Obviously you have thought about it. My memory of it is that it was quite a surprise, when the results came out, that the Liberal Democrats had not done better, given the expectation that had been built up through the broadcasts.

Professor Coleman: It was quite as surprise to the Liberal Democrats, and I think that after the first debate the Liberal Democrats certainly saw the debate format as the magic route to coalition. But the arithmetic did not add up that way, for all kinds of reasons. Clearly the parties, and indeed the partisan newspapers, decided that they had to be much more aggressive in looking at Liberal Democrat policies after the first debate, and they were, and it registered with voters.

Lord Razzall: The reason there was a coalition was because Labour did better in the last week than everybody anticipated, so that is why we had a coalition.

Lord Skelmersdale: Could I ask you both to answer my third thought: that these election broadcasts came to dominate the campaign?

Professor Coleman: I do not think they did at the local level. Tim might have views on this, but certainly what is interesting is that when we conduct focus groups people make a very clear distinction in their minds between the local campaign, which was pretty similar in 2010 to previous elections, and the big centralised campaign, the rhythm of which did change in 2010 because the leaders had to prepare for the debates. But I do not know that that can be seen to have an overall effect on the campaign, because most people experienced the campaign locally.

Tim Gardam: I would say that one should distinguish between news coverage and the debates and other election coverage. It is undoubtedly true that the leadership debates dominated the overall coverage of the campaign. I do not think that the news itself and the news bulletins—and the debates were a major component part of the news—were dominated solely by the election debates. Indeed, as in every election campaign, incidents are blown out of all proportion that can take over two or three days of the campaign and which you could argue are of far less substantive import than the policy explanation and debate. There will always be a “bigoted woman” moment in the campaign of one sort or another. The interesting thing about the debates was that they focused on substance.

It is also true to say that if there was a loser out of the coverage of the campaign, it may well have been the press corps. If you look back to the 1970s, 1980s and even 1990s, the morning press conference was absolutely fundamental to the discourse of the campaign. That was the journalists from Fleet Street, as was, and the political correspondents interrogating and pushing the agenda. The salience of that had worn off in the elections in the early 2000s, but just as the one-to-one interview, to my mind, does not have the bite that it did, the press conferences were also not having the same effect.

The other programme that used to be there, which I think had come to an end before the last election but in the 1980s and 1990s was very influential and very good, was “Election Call”. So there have always been formats in the course of election coverage that have come to be the format of that era, and formats change. I am sure it will be the case in so many years to come when the format of the election party leaders’ debates will also seem to have become tired.

Q92 Baroness Deech: Are you sure the post-television debate amongst the public was actually about substance? I have this theory that we are a very visual society, especially younger people, and I recollect these American presidential debates where, sure as anything, the younger, better looking candidate would always come out top, almost regardless of what they say. Clegg looked so nice.

Professor Coleman: You may well think so, and so did I, but there is a very counterintuitive finding from our research. We did very serious research on the media content after the debates. First of all, the debates themselves had very rich argument, so the substance of the debates was good, I think. Secondly, the media covered the arguments. Thirdly, the media organisations that were best at covering and simplifying the arguments were the tabloids. The tabloid press did a remarkably good job after these first debates by setting out tables and diagrams and comparing arguments and claims in ways that I suspect might have had an effect upon the turnout.

Certainly it is true that some editors wanted it to be a very superficial visual and rhetorical analysis that they were going to be providing for people, and they borrowed a lot of not very good American ideas, such as having body-language experts watching the debates. But it turned out that the body-language experts ran out of things to say very quickly. It was the substantial political journalism that followed the debates that dominated both broadcasting and newspapers, although I accept that is a very counterintuitive finding.

Baroness Deech: The tabloids, of course, are good for things like, “I agree with Nick”, which is a perfect tabloid headline and was repeated over and over. Does your research indicate whether the political classes, as it were in collusion with the broadcasting bubble, shifted the vocabulary in which the discourse was sustained in order to meet that broader constituency of which you speak, Tim?

Tim Gardam: I think I would put it the other way around. What is quite interesting about the relationship between the broadcasts and the social media is that the “I agree with Nick” phrase was picked up in social media first; it was picked up by viewers. I think one of the things we can underestimate is the very healthy role of social media as popular satire—the jokes, the potential to mock or to make a satirical point, goes around virally—so I think it takes the discourse away from the elite. It may well be, and I think it is the case, that the political class picks up very fast on what is being said online and in social media and adapts to it. For instance, in the first debate, following on American examples, some party leaders armed themselves with rather cheesy anecdotes. These are mocked in the social media reaction to them and they do not try to use the anecdote again; they move much more towards substance.

Stephen has an interesting framework in his research which describes the relationship between game and substance. The research concludes that you should not see these as two things apart; they interrelate. In the reporting of the debates—in gaming terms, the horse races and so on—versus the substance, one feeds into the other.

I would take us back to what I think was the greatest achievement of the 76-point agreement, which is that it sets out in really clear terms what the debates are there to do. This was written some months before. It says, “To ensure maximum debate between the party leaders—the distinctive characteristic of these programmes—whilst allowing the audience’s voices to be heard directly posing questions”. I think that is a very, very successful summation of the purpose of a programme. That sense of seriousness of purpose and simplicity and the desire to illuminate substance is what made these programmes honest. Although clearly there was a lot of froth and talk about who was the good looking one, I do not, in the end, think that was the important thing.

Picking up Stephen’s point, the trajectory of the campaign and the debates was that after the success of Nick Clegg in the first debate, the other two parties decided to focus on Liberal Democrat policy. I think the research shows that the move towards discussing issues of substance increases as the debates go on. Is that right, Stephen?

Professor Coleman: Yes.

Q93 Baroness Deech: Do you know of any research that shows that the UK public understood that these three were chosen as party leaders, and all the complications attaching to that? Did the public know that there were other parties and leaders whose voices could be heard elsewhere in the media in other coverage?

Professor Coleman: No, I do not think there is any significant research there. Anecdotally in the focus groups that we have just been running looking back to the 2010 debates and asking people about participation in the next ones, a lot of people have been suggesting that if there are other parties that ought to be forming the agenda in these debates, the public who support those parties should be making that clear through the kinds of questions that they are sending in. What people seem to be saying is participation of more parties in the debates is rather less important than participation of more of the public in the debates. If the public can form the questions and can be seen to broaden the agenda so that it reflects what real people are interested in, that is possibly more important than who is standing on the platform.

Tim Gardam: I do not know of any research either. Looking back again at the debate programmes themselves, I think they were quite clearly signposted. This is where the moderators did a good job. They signposted a context to each debate, particularly in relationship to the difference between England, Scotland and Wales in education policy and policies that do not apply to Scotland, which were being debated, and they pointed forward to the contextual programming around the debates, where those who had not been included in the debates were included. I think as a piece of television they are very carefully framed. I do not think we know, though, what the public consensus is, if there is public consensus, about who should or should not appear, and where. I remember in those main programmes there were certainly very deliberate pointers to the separate debates that were going to take place in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I think the grammar of the programmes were pretty clear.

Professor Coleman: And calling them the prime ministerial debates rather than election debates was a very good move, because this showed that there was a focus in some sense upon a single Government of the United Kingdom and their leader, which are reasonable preoccupations of people leading up to the vote.

The Chairman: I do not think it was ever supposed at any point that Nick Clegg was going to be the Prime Minister.

Lord Razzall: It depends who you asked.

The Chairman: Have you found any evidence that at any point it was thought that you had these three candidates debating it and that the eventual Prime Minister, as opposed to a possible Deputy Prime Minister, would be the leader of the liberal party?

Professor Coleman: I think it is a plausibility issue. Whoever takes part in a prime ministerial debate has to be regarded as plausible in accordance with fairly clear criteria, such as the number of candidates standing and the possibility of being a major coalition partner, in becoming if not Prime Minister then Deputy Prime Minister in a coalition. In 2010 that probably entitled Nick Clegg to be there in a way that it might not have entitled others to be there. There might have been other entitlements that could have put others on the platform, but I think not that one.

The Chairman: That might be the case in the future.

Professor Coleman: I cannot see how it would be the case in 2015, from where we are sitting now.

Q94 Lord Razzall: Taking your point about involving the public in those sorts of decisions, the obvious issue that has not been mentioned but underlies this question is what to do about UKIP. When we asked the BBC, when it gave evidence to us, what its view was and how it would go about making the selection for who would appear in the debates, one of the factors that it said it took into account last time, and would propose to do again, was public consultation. It went out to consultation to get the views of the public as to whether it wanted Mr Farage there.

Professor Coleman: Public consultation can mean many things, but I would have thought that what the BBC means by public consultation is what the federal debates commission in the United States means, which is a very peculiar and in my view rather dangerous formula of aggregating opinion poll results over a six-month period prior to the debates to see whether—

Lord Razzall: They were going to do that as well but this was going to be separate.

Professor Coleman: Just on the principled objection to doing that, it seems to me that a general election is a legitimate election, but opinion poll aggregates are not. The decision about who takes part in the debates is complicated—politics is complicated—but it seems to me that putting that in the hands of the pollsters would be a complication too far.

Baroness Deech: You two are very familiar with these arguments and the 76-point agreement, which I have to say I had never heard of until I sat on this Committee. If I had not heard of it, I just wonder whether the public know enough about how you get to that point of the three people, why those three, what the 76-point agreement is and so on. I had no idea until we started this inquiry.

Tim Gardam: It is quite important to stand back a bit from the debate programmes. They were a very important part of the election coverage and, to my mind, undoubtedly a democratic good. But they were a political programme format. They are not an essential part of the constitutional architecture of the United Kingdom. Here I am not talking with my Ofcom hat on but just from my experience as a regulator. The advantage of the regulated system of British broadcasting is that frameworks are established within which broadcasters have the editorial independence to propose programmes and then wrestle with the political parties to see who is going to come on. That is the case both at a daily programme-making level and when you are making a programme of this significance.

As a broadcaster, in guarding that independence, which I think is fundamental, you have reference to a framework that has been laid out that is deliberately flexible and not too prescriptive. Although the BBC and the commercial PSBs have separate codes, they are broadly the same. The regulatory code gives the broadcasters discretion but also gives guidelines on what constitutes a major party. The code makes clear that major parties can vary depending on the election. For instance, the designation of UKIP recently as a major party for the European elections in England and Wales is due to the fact that UKIP, after all, has a substantial number of seats in the European Parliament. It was second last time and in the election before that it polled well. Those are criteria surrounding the European elections.

Surrounding the general election, different criteria may apply. UKIP has no seats in the British Parliament at the moment, so it is for the broadcasters, I think, guided by the regulatory architecture, to make editorial decisions for themselves about who they think should appear on their programmes and then try to get the parties to agree with it. I would be slightly worried if we tried to put more than this architecture around that. My perhaps conservative view is that this is an area where, in the end, public service broadcasters and Sky should have the freedom to work this out with the parties for themselves. Of course, the great advantage of the last election campaign was that Sky, the BBC and ITV worked so closely together and produced an extraordinarily long document but one that, when you read it through, allowed these rather clear, simple and worth-while programmes to emerge.

Baroness Deech: It is just that the public did not know about it. I do not think they knew.

Q95 Baroness Fookes: This brings us very neatly to something I would like to ask your opinions about, and that is whether the format, the 76 rules and so on, could usefully be changed on the assumption that these debates take place and that you get some concordat with the broadcasters and political parties.

Professor Coleman: I think it is for the broadcasters to think imaginatively about what is going to make good television and what is going to contribute to a fair election. I suspect that in doing so they are going to want to replicate a lot of what worked well last time. I think there is one key change that would inspire public confidence, and that is in relation to the last question about transparency. I think there needs to be much greater clarity about how questions are asked in the debate and the source of questions, and there should be opportunities for those questions to deviate if the public are of a mind to deviate from the standard political agenda.

Baroness Fookes: How would that work in practice? Would you have some arrangement before the broadcast began, explaining how the questions have been selected and so forth?

Professor Coleman: Yes, and there would be a process of selection that would itself need to be more transparent. At the moment, my understanding of the question selection in 2010 was that people could e-mail questions, which were selected by a group of people from the broadcasters. Alternatively, some of them came from the questioners in the audience. I think that could be expanded to opportunities for people to go online, raise questions, perhaps do more than raise questions, tell stories, make films about their lives reflecting the complexity of policy, not just one single policy-issue question but perhaps a question about what it is like to be in a particular sort of position. It would then be for the broadcasters to work with the debaters to integrate that greater depth of questioning into the debates.

Baroness Fookes: I see. Mr Gardam, do you have views on this?

Tim Gardam: Yes. As a former programme maker, mine may be somewhat conservative. My worry is that a single programme format can do only a limited number of things. Although I spoke earlier of my concern that the hustings-type programmes do not disappear, because I think there is a real value in the Question Time and the “Granada 500” type of format, to overelaborate a format that I think worked well, because it gave space for politicians to explain things and at the same time be challenged by each other, might vitiate the effect of the programme overall and its impact.

However, I agree with Stephen that it would be possible to make the process more transparent whereby the questions emerge and perhaps the questioner is given a chance to follow up. However, the programmes are already an hour and a half long. To make them more interrogative, for instance to give the moderator a chance to jump in too, there is a danger that you would overload the programme and its grammar would become damaged.

However, the one point I think the broadcasters should take away from the research of the Reuters Institute is the criticism that you hear time and time again that the political leaders evade questions. I wonder whether that is because there was no chance to follow up a question once it had been asked. That is the area that I think could perhaps be explored.

Baroness Fookes: Is that something you could leave to the moderator, assuming we have a moderator?

Tim Gardam: You could. I think the constraint on the moderator last time was one of the things that made them rather old fashioned programmes. On the other hand, I come back to my point that the more you give others the chance to jump in, the less time there is for what the programme is there to do, which is to ensure maximum debate between the party leaders. The importance of the debates is that you get all three party leaders in one place debating with each other, and you want to ensure there is enough time to make that happen properly.

The danger of the moderator taking too great a role is you are back into that old, closed political discourse of someone you have seen on television a lot talking to politicians as they always do, as opposed to giving a greater breadth of discussion that you would not get otherwise.

Professor Coleman: Also, it is risky. It only has to go wrong once or be seen to be an unfair challenge by the moderator and the greater good of the debate can be lost. I am very much in favour of supplementary questions from the audience, but I am also in favour of different types of questions from the audience.

Q96 The Chairman: The Chancellor’s debates only had 26, or 28, rules. I do not know whether you did any work on them, but I never heard the wider public differentiate between those debates in a way that indicates that one was lesser or higher quality than the other. Maybe once you got into the swing of it, the conventions surrounding it means that you can be slightly less prescriptive with rules.

Professor Coleman: Many of the rules, after all, are not that prescriptive if you read them. It seemed necessary for the participants before they began to make sure they had dotted every “i” and crossed every “t”.

The Chairman: It was a sort of insurance policy, was it not?

Tim Gardam: The Chancellor’s debates, in my personal view, were some of the best television that took place in the entire election.

Baroness Fookes: But you would still attach importance to each leader being given a chance to put his viewpoint? One of the things that, as a politician, irritates me with some interviewers is that they do not give you a chance to say what you think before they jump in and question.

Tim Gardam: I think that was the great strength of these debates. They gave party leaders a chance to explain and set things out, and all the party leaders rose to the challenge. They did it within some quite tough timing constraints that had been laid down in the rules about how long they were allowed to speak for, and it worked well.

Baroness Fookes: That is good, because they cannot meander about then, can they?

Tim Gardam: It worked.

Q97 Lord St John of Bletso: If I could touch on the non-broadcast media, Mr Gardam, you spoke about the catalytic effect of social media and you also drew a distinction between public sector broadcasters, which you referred to as civic networks, and non-broadcast being social networks. From your research, to what extent did the public use non-broadcast social media during and after the debates?

Tim Gardam: Stephen will give most detail on that. It is important to recognise from the research that it is wrong to think of social media as somehow downstream from the debates themselves. There is essentially a circular relationship between the two. The debates seemed to go from a regulated space to an unregulated space and then back, for the subsequent debate, to a regulated space again, because the nature of the discussion that was emerging from the debates influenced the second debate and third debate as they took place. It was in this bridging of the two worlds that public service broadcasting suddenly got a new bite to it. That is why I think the interaction is so important.

I think it is impossible today for a broadcaster to conceive of a programme without thinking of the noise and conversation that would go around it. Indeed, I think this will be more the case in the next campaign than in the last one where you will have correspondents whose job will be to sift the chatter in the world beyond regulated broadcasting. There is the point that Stephen has already made where he said that if the last election was focused on the blogosphere, the next election will focus on Twitter. That is because back in 2010 Twitter was essentially still a celebrity medium. It is now a demotic medium, so I think you would get an increasingly varied conversation coming from the debates. The point I would make is that without the debates that conversation would not have the focus and would not have the energy that it has.

Professor Coleman: Social media are moving more and more towards instantaneity. In the 2010 election, social media was perhaps half a minute, one minute, behind what was happening on television. In a Twitter campaign, which is what will clearly happen next year, it will be a matter of split seconds behind what is going on. Indeed, people will be using split screens.

In some respects what is taking place is a continuation of what communication theorists have recognised has always gone on with television. We often refer to a theory that we call the two-step flow. You watch television and then you talk to other people about what you have seen on it. That is what always went on in the 1960s and the 1970s, and people who had a lot of friends would be the people who, if you were a politician, you would most want to convince when you were speaking to them on television. Now two things have changed. People have much wider networks of people that they can immediately contact, and they know them less well, so trust is a problem. We have weaker links with people, but the essential circularity of networks is exactly the same now as it was in the 1960s. People tell their friends about what they are interested in and they do not talk to their friends about what they are not interested in.

Lord St John of Bletso: You speak about split screens, but how much greater use can be made of social media with the advances in technology for forthcoming debates?

Professor Coleman: I speak about split screens, but very few people are literally using split screens. Perhaps we’ve passed through that Bloomberg period where you had the very busy screen with everything going on at the same time. One of the things we have discovered is that unless you were dealing with millions of dollars on the financial market, it gave you a headache and so people do not do it. What actually happens is that people sit with their tablet, their iPad or whatever on their lap, and they are writing things as they watch television. People watch television in fundamentally different ways now from the way that they used to watch television. Very often they are watching it on their own or they are watching it ‘with’ other people who are not physically there. It is a very strange phenomenon, but what is happening is that a community of people will say, “We watched this programme together”, but in fact they were not in the same room or even necessarily in the same town.

Your question is: where could this go next? The answer I would be confident to give is that it will move on to mobile telephony. Probably next year there will be a number of apps for mobile phones that people will start to use during the debates and at other points in the campaign, and by the 2020 election perhaps people will be using their mobile phones politically rather more than they are using their computers.

Q98 The Chairman: Arising out of that, do you think there is a possibility, by using the techniques, data, that political parties can then introduce their specific messages through social media on to the general traffic that is going around?

Professor Coleman: I think they will try. The history of the internet is a history of every political party assuming that they can dominate it in a way that they could dominate the press at one point or broadcasting at another point, and failing. It always backfires. Social media’s main currency is authenticity. People like to know that things are coming from real people and from real motives, and at the moment there is an attempt to manipulate what is going on. I am absolutely certain that some political strategists will rather unwisely try to control Twitter during the next election campaign, and I am absolutely certain that they will fail.

Tim Gardam: I think it is worth recognising that the personal technology of the next election will be fundamentally different from the last. The tablet and 4G will change things a great deal. I believe that both will make it less likely that any attempt to manipulate social media will be successful.

Baroness Fookes: Is it likely to increase people’s powers of concentration?

Professor Coleman: It depends on how you define people’s powers of concentration. If their powers of concentration are defined in terms of their ability to do one thing for a long time—in other words, if it is measured in traditional terms of attention—I would say that there has probably been a long-term trend away from focused attention. If one thinks about the capacity to concentrate on things while multi-tasking and multiple ways of approaching a single problem, perhaps people are getting rather more sophisticated as thinkers. It is a very complex question and how one answers it depends on which of those two definitions one employs.

Q99 Bishop of Norwich: We heard quite a bit about the way the US debates commission promotes awareness about the American debates and spreads knowledge of them, yet in Stewart Purvis’s evidence last week he said he thought that the broadcasters here had not promoted the debates very assiduously, that there was not much viewer education, and that there was no debates portal. Are there other ways other than social media in which the broadcasters themselves could extend the influence of the debates in relation to the campaign?

Professor Coleman: This is a very important question and was one of the most conspicuous gaps after the last election. I suspect that many people among the broadcasters were very nervous about these debates, perhaps wondering whether, after the expenses scandal, they were going to be taken seriously and whether they were going to be primarily for political insiders. They were a popular success. There is a tremendous opportunity for the public service broadcasters to get together now and use these debates to think very imaginatively and expansively about what the public needs around an election and the deliberation involved in the debate but also the information involved in voting itself.

I think there are a number of things that they could do. Websites are probably still the main source of good voter information. There is an opportunity to create opportunities for people to build Wiki-like aggregations of information and local knowledge. I think there are opportunities, and my university has been funded with the Open University to do this: to build platforms in which the claims made in the debates and the records of the debaters are open to public scrutiny. I think this is a very, very big one for the public service broadcaster, for all the broadcasters, to get together on and they probably need to start now.

Tim Gardam: I agree. I think that the potential for demonstrating democratic empowerment is probably the biggest potential gain that has come out of the debates if they happen next time. There is a huge opportunity for joined-up thinking between the public service broadcasters and Sky, and to learn from the fact that it was only by being joined up last time that they got the debates to happen at all. Given that both the BBC and Channel 4, the two publicly owned broadcasters, have education as part of their statutes, my point is that, if they have sufficiently worked through an education strategy generally, this must be core to what they should do.

It was terribly important that the debates were on ITV, because ITV and its reach are critical to the overall remarkably resilient public service portfolio in this country. The fact that Sky was involved was very important too, because Sky, after all, is not formally a public service broadcaster and yet represents all the best values and character of one. I think it is very important that the plurality of those broadcasters can be seen across the piece in one place, which both demonstrates plurality of the analysis and makes it easy to find.

If you think about it, only the broadcasters can do this, because the concept of political education is such a sinister one. You need the rock-solid sense of independence and impartiality that governs those broadcasters to bring this off.

I think it also could have quite a significant impact on the longer-term thinking about partnerships in public service broadcasting, because one of the broader issues of PSB in the converged age is going to be whether you can find it, discover it and access it, and the costs of distribution grow all the time. To be able to create a common platform whereby material of real value in educative terms exists, and where you know where to find it, and maybe opening that platform to academic institutions too, will be an extraordinary educational gain.

Bishop of Norwich: Can all that be left to the broadcasters themselves to organise, or ought there to be some sort of body? I am not thinking particularly of a US debates commission but some sort of body set up by the broadcasters themselves to enable this to happen, because if we have fixed-term Parliaments things can be planned in an entirely different way than would have been the case in the past.

Tim Gardam: My personal view is you already have quite a complicated regulatory architecture around PSB of which provision of impartial news is absolutely core. To set up another body to make this happen would probably complicate things. The one thing one has to say the BBC has done extraordinarily well is to move online and become the central place for online information. For this to be a shared portal, though, would be very advantageous.

Q100 Earl of Selborne: You have shared some of your thoughts about the lessons learnt from the debates. If we were to recommend that the broadcasters should take a more concerted exercise to review the lessons learnt from each series of debates, what do you think this should involve?

Professor Coleman: I think the starting point should be surveys of the audience who watched the debates and heard about them in the news. This research should not simply be looking at people’s behaviour but at what people wanted from the debates. They should be taking a uses and gratification approach.

There is scope for running focus groups in real time so that we can observe people watching the debates and see what they are actually saying and doing during the debates. We would then have some ethnographic knowledge next time. We need to continue to monitor the media commentary on the debates very carefully and check whether the quality is kept up and the civic mix between game and substance is balanced.

We need, I think, to look at the debates themselves and the deliberativeness of the debates. There is, for example, an invention called the deliberative quality index, which incidentally has been applied to this House by some academics, to explore just how much people listen to each other and change their minds during the course of discussions. Probably we should be doing face-to-face interviews with the people who are involved in the debates to find out more about what they felt they were achieving and how they felt they had to prepare for them. That is the broad set of things that we should be trying to do next time around.

Tim Gardam: There are four things that I would like to know as a result of the debates if they happen and, if I were still a broadcaster, I would like to understand better. The first is to dig deeper into the ability of the debates to reach different parts of what is an increasingly diverse Britain. There is a danger that we do not think across the diversity of the country and the different means whereby political engagement takes place. We still tend to see this very much in mass terms, and I would very much like to know how the debates play in different ethnic communities and backgrounds in the United Kingdom.

Earl of Selborne: Could I just interrupt you there? Would you use focus groups for this? How would you set about it?

Tim Gardam: I think it probably has to be surveys, both quantitative and qualitative, and I will leave that to Stephen, who is the expert in how to make sure those things are academically robust. After all, we are not only an increasingly multicultural society, we are also an increasingly multilingual society, so I would be interested to know, if the debates are going to be the core means by which voters engage and make up their minds, who they reach and how they reach them. I think we need to know more about that.

One would also be interested to know, as would broadcasters for their own self-interest, how viewers’ behaviour has changed since 2010. I mentioned just now the personal technology people use and how far that will change the needs of people’s engagement with political substance.

The third area that I would be interested in is the public policy issue of the plurality of news provision. Here are some central events that are broadcast to everybody, and yet the means whereby people pick up the debate and the stories that flow from the debates will be from all sorts of different news outlets. One of the areas that I think is of particular importance as media converge is how plural citizens’ sources are for news. The debate has been a very interesting model from which to explore that. Many people, after all, do not see the debates but they hear about them. How do they hear about them? From whence does the mediation come?

The final area is that now we know from last time that debates can be very impactful and popular forms of broadcasting, research should be done at the time of the next debates to get contemporaneous feedback of people’s views on how the format is working. Although my personal feeling is that the format should stay more or less the same the second time around and should not be fiddled with because that could disrupt something that worked well, my guess is that the format will have to evolve if it is going to continue to be a key part of the broadcasting electoral firmament. We should be hearing early and contemporaneously from viewers what they find frustrating or satisfying about the format as it is presented. That would give good guidance for all to work out, going forward, how one can agree on making changes to it.

Earl of Selborne: I posed the question of what the broadcasters should ensure was reviewed, but I suppose there is a case for others undertaking the work as well as the broadcasters. Do you think, for example, that there would be a case for the Economic and Social Research Council funding on behalf of the wider public as well?

Tim Gardam: One has a conflict of interest here, of course, working in an academic institution, because one is always pitching for grants. But, yes, the United Kingdom higher education institutes and universities have a lot of expertise in this type of research, and independent research into this area, such as the work that Stephen has done and the Reuters Institute does, gives one a critical distance from broadcasters. The broadcaster can learn from the research rather than debate among themselves what lessons they wish to learn from it. It is far better to commission research so that they can then hear the lessons that others think they should learn from it.

Q101 Baroness Bakewell: You mentioned diversity and you mentioned ethnicity. You do not mention whether there is a gender issue here. They were very male programmes and the public agenda has changed very much. There has been an extension of women appearing on television. Indeed, there has been a big issue about that. Could you comment on that?

Tim Gardam: I think absolutely that it would be important to establish from the research whether there are clear differences in reaction according to gender. I am not sure, Stephen, what you found last time.

Professor Coleman: In the focus group study that we have conducted, for each demographic group we had a male and a female group and the responses were often starkly different. What was running through the female groups was exhaustion and frustration at what they saw as a form of aggressive bickering. It seems to me that politicians have an enormous amount to learn from this very basic qualitative research.

Baroness Bakewell: You do not need research, you just need a female moderator at least.

The Chairman: If the moderator was allowed to do anything, because, after all, the moderator at the moment is a very constrained role.

Baroness Bakewell: So that it does not look like a whole stream of white males.

Professor Coleman: I also think it comes back to the point about supplementary questions. Women very often have a style of questioning that is different from men, and it is often the case that a woman not getting the response to a question will be able to press the point in a way that I think the public would find attractive and appealing.

Baroness Bakewell: Is that a consequence of the way things are or is it going to change them?

Professor Coleman: I think it is a hopeless generalisation on my part, but I still think it is based on some degree of truth.

The Chairman: Talking about women making good questioners, Lady Healy.

Q102 Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: With the millions who watched these debates, which was a very good thing, could greater public value be achieved from the broadcasters being encouraged to co-ordinate their activity? I know you have spoken about them possibly coming together around the broadcast general election debates, for example in a one-stop shop online for information and education about the debates and potentially live streams and archival content so that everybody can go back and find them. I am interested in what you think their role would be with 3 million, at least, not on the electoral register. These people, young people particularly, are watching and then they find they cannot vote in the end. Would it be a civic duty perhaps for the broadcasters to encourage them to make sure they are on the electoral register in their trailers for the debates perhaps?

Tim Gardam: It is important to amplify the points we were discussing a little while ago, which is that the broadcasters were taken by surprise by the resonance of the debates last time. That was my impression. I think, talking to them, that they would say the same. There was a nervousness about how popular they would be, although no one doubted their significance. What one then makes of that material as a broadcaster needs careful thought. It is normally the way of broadcasters that they go off on their own to work out what they can do with it.

Coming back to the points that we were making just now, in pure terms of ease of access, discoverability and the clear incentive to build a common point of access and, as I said, to open it up for material beyond that of the broadcasters, this would be a very, very powerful educational tool. I do not know how much thinking has gone on there. I know that the BBC is talking about the need to make its educational strategy much more self-evident. It seems, going back to the point I made before, that in the area of politics few institutions have their independence and impartiality so enshrined as to make such a tool seen to be something for the public good as opposed to something that may have implications of control.

Professor Coleman: There is something rather unusual happening here, which is that for once the universities might have a bit more money than the broadcasters to do this sort of thing. We have been given quite a large pot of funding to produce a platform for public education after the debates, if they happen next year. What we cannot do as universities—the University of Leeds is working in collaboration with the Open University on this—is what the broadcasters can do well, and that is publicise it and bring to it some of the creative design energy that we academics do not always bring to things. I think there is a tremendous opportunity here and it is because one of the research councils was imaginative enough to support this idea that we are in a position to be able to do this.

Q103 The Chairman: Thank you. We are now getting towards the end. I was thinking as you were speaking that if I were the moderator of this particular debate I would have been a failure, as we have gone long over time and we have wandered away a bit from the points that we thought we were asking the questions about. Speaking personally, I do not think we are any the worse off for that, so thank you very much indeed.

Despite having been a bit discursive, which I think has been good, is there anything else either of you would like to say to us, either words of advice or warning, before we formally wrap up?

Professor Coleman: I would like to just underline something that Tim said at the beginning about confidence, because I think it was so important. One of the great opportunities of these debates is to help citizens to do what is actually very hard work. That is the work of informing themselves, talking to other people about their views, being open to changing their minds, and listening to other people. These are all things that, in the inner world of politics, are matters of habit. For most people they are not. I think insofar as these debates can focus upon working towards those sorts of opportunities to build public confidence, they will surely constitute a public good.

Tim Gardam: The only point I would add is that it is worth thinking about the debates in terms of the character of the way in which democracy operates in the United Kingdom, which clearly relates to the public value framework of our broadcasting. I think in the future it is likely that there will be a lot more political advertising online. We still have a framework that stops political advertising on linear licenced television. We have party election broadcasts instead. If one looks at the American model of attack advertising—it is a very different, more visceral model; in America they have the debates too; the ability of the debates to offer a point of concentration, a point of intention, whereby at the moment when political leaders are putting themselves up and asking for the voters’ choice as to who is going to form the next Government, to clear the space for that to be able to happen in a simply constructed, direct communication that still includes challenge and interrogation is incredibly important. It might act as at least a break on a move towards a different sort of politics that I think would be coarser and not part of our democratic society.

The Chairman: This would be a lodestar of even-handedness in the message, which you would not get through a number of other forms of communication.

Tim Gardam: Yes, that is just what I am trying to say.

The Chairman: Thank you both very, very much indeed. We are extremely grateful to you.