Dame Patricia Hodgson.

Q59 The Chair: Good morning and welcome to the Industry and Regulators Committee inquiry into UK regulators. I am delighted to welcome Dame Patricia Hodgson, deputy chair of Policy Exchange and a non-executive board member of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Relevantly to our committee, she was chair of Ofcom between 2014 and 2017.

I will start by talking about remits. Something that has come out clearly from our work over the last three years is that many of the regulators have extensive remits and are being asked effectively, possibly often without guidance, to prioritise three or four different objectives. Ofcom covers a very broad waterfront, from getting the Fast2Fibre to every home in the UK to bad language on television and other things going on on the internet. So you had a very broad remit, and exciting news arrived this week that the Government are now having a consultation on the merits of a growth duty that would also be added to the remit. When you were there, how did you see that remit, and how did you balance it? In particular, how did you prioritise things with or without the guidance of the Government?

Dame Patricia Hodgson: Ofcom has an enormous benefit because its original statute gave it a clear range of statutory duties, together with clear priorities. That is, its top priority is consumer and citizen interest, delivered where possible through competition. Then it has a lot of secondary objectives, such as efficiency of spectrum and a wide range of radio and television programmes—it is a long list—and then many matters that it must have regard to, such as transparency and accountability. That prioritisation and that degree of clarity gave it helpful underpinnings for exactly the wide range of difficult balancing decisions that you have described. That has been particularly important in a sector where, as in many sectors, extremely well-resourced businesses may sometimes rather chance their arm and think they will challenge a decision in court. If the statutory objectives and how they are to be balanced are clear, that is helpful in the face of any such challenge.

As you say, there is a fashion for political objectives, which may change. As they grow, that gives Ofcom a base for informing government of what powers it has and how it might integrate directions into its decision-making. There are some other factors in that authority and that ability to inform government and have grown-up conversations. Obviously, Governments are elected and have the right to give directions or strategic guidance, but it is always helpful if there is a grown-up conversation about the practicalities of what the Government are seeking to achieve and what the duties of the regulator are. Not only is there the clarity in statute of the regulator’s objectives and priorities but there is the question of whether the regulator has authority across the whole sector. When Ofcom was formed its remit was very bold, covering the whole of telecoms and the whole electronic media sector. It was intended to be far-seeing, and it has turned out to have been absolutely right as the electronic media sector has grown.

What is the status of the regulator? Ofcom is a statutory corporation. That is enormously important because it means it appoints its own staff; it can decide, within sensible reason, on pay; and it accounts directly to Parliament, which creates a virtuous circle of authority, independence and accountability. It is also able to raise resources from the sectors it regulates. That must be responsibly done and monitored and so on, but it means Ofcom can have the resources that enable it to do a wide-ranging and difficult job, as well as possibly to pay enough to get talent—whereas, although I have an extremely high regard for the CMA, it is a non-ministerial government department, as are Ofwat and Ofgem. That does not mean that government is seeking to interfere—it understands that these bodies are supposed to be independent—but they have a different, Civil Service status. It means their resources can be limited by the annual spending round and they are limited within Civil Service pay rates. Ofcom has enjoyed a number of important benefits that help it to do its job. It has a difficult job and of course it is not always perfect, but that helps.

The Chair: So that status gives you a degree of protection from interference. In trying to work with the various priorities, particularly the interesting growth duty that is now appearing on the horizon—although, to be fair, the Government have been talking about greater competition over the last few years—to what extent do you rely on speaking truth to power by telling the Government, “This is how the market is”, and how do you then get the Government’s signal as to which one of those priorities should be uppermost?

Dame Patricia Hodgson: I cannot answer for Ofcom now, because I am not in the boardroom any more and it would be unreasonable to try to answer on its behalf. In those discussions, there are a number of parameters. When Ofcom was originally set up, it was in the wake of the privatisations when the priorities were very much, “How do we have independent bodies that manage monopolies where they exist, manage dominant players, look after the interests of consumers and, in particular, maintain as much stability as possible in sectors that allows the companies in those sectors to invest?”.

There would be a five-year strategic plan that would inform return on capital, return on investment and agreements that are made with dominant players. This allows them and other players in the sector to have some degree of certainty, which is helpful in business and probably helpful for growth. I cannot tell you in detail how that balances with a new direction for balanced growth.

Ofcom has another advantage: the market itself is already very competitive, and the wisdom of our predecessors has built on that. For example, when we felt some years ago that broadband fibre was maybe not rolling out as fast as it might, we were able to do a couple of things. One was to focus on and clarify the kind of metrics we used—I will come back to that in a minute because all regulators have this problem—and the other was to encourage competition. There are now altnets, and it is undoubtedly the case that that competition encouraged BT to roll out its fibre a bit faster.

An interesting factor is that one of the problems that regulators face is the sheer scale of the companies they are trying to regulate and the way they are snowed under by data and reports. They need to have their own resources and analytical arrangements to understand them and, where necessary, take another view. For example, there was a period when Ofcom publicised the average broadband speed that people in this country got. That was not much good because, at the time, Virgin Media had cables into everybody’s homes, the speed of which was very high—it was not fibre—and that was covering up the fact that quite a large number of BT’s broadband customers were getting very low speeds. Shifting the measure to take, by decile, the speeds that the top 10% got, the next 10%, the middle 10% and the bottom 10% immediately revealed that a great deal needed to be done to roll out broadband and increase its speeds.

Ditto for mobile phone coverage. Ofcom had the resources to equip its own measurement vans and go around the country. That revealed that, to describe it politely, Ofcom was using rather more demanding criteria for coverage than was being reported by some of the companies. Those sorts of things are enormously important and are the kind of things that help to give authority to a regulator when it talks to a Government about a growth strategy, or whatever the strategy might be at the time, and about the realities and what is needed.

As I have seen from your previous hearings, one of the biggest problems for regulators is the sheer economic power of the big companies and the way they go into the departments and see Ministers much faster than the regulators. The temptation, unless the regulator has managed to develop its own resource and authority, is for it to be easier just to publish those shared statistics that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Q60 Viscount Chandos: You pointed out that different regulators have different status but, in general, how independent are the UK’s regulators? How independent should they be? Going back to what Lord Hollick said, I note the importance within that of being not just able but incentivised to speak truth to power.

Dame Patricia Hodgson: You would expect me to believe that a strong degree of authority and independence is important, partly because my career experience goes back to the build-up of having regulators that could take on overmighty groups in the economy, in the interests of consumers, and create a degree of accountability that had been missing earlier. I noted the great importance of stability within sectors to enable them to grow and, especially for new entrants, to know where they are and make investments.

It must be the case that the ability to speak truth to power varies from regulator to regulator according to the range of things I talked about: their basic status, the resources available to them and so on. The regulators I have worked with are able and serious people I respect very much. I have particular respect for the CMA, which we worked well with. Ofcom has concomitant powers in some areas—takeovers, abuse of dominant positions and so on—and it had to develop good working relationships, which it did. They worked very well.

My observation is that the CMA—you will hear directly from it, although it may not wish to speak so frankly—is much more dependent on government funding and does not at present have the range of resource it probably needs. It has a huge remit—bigger than any regulator, in a way. I do not know how it works and its pay scales, but they will be within some sort of Civil Service and Treasury framework, which will limit it, especially because everybody is now competing in the economic and technical fields in particular.

Viscount Chandos: Do you think the advantage that you described Ofcom having, as a statutory corporation, could be more widely applied to strengthen the independence of other regulators?

Dame Patricia Hodgson: I am afraid I do, yes.

Q61 Viscount Chandos: What has your experience been, both directly and as an observer, of appointments, whether of staff or of board members, and the evolution or change in direct government involvement in that?

Dame Patricia Hodgson: Again, Ofcom is quite privileged. We had a good relationship with our sponsoring ministry, and that worked. The sponsoring ministry was obviously responsible for the non-executive board appointments, but a senior non-exec from Ofcom was always involved in that process. Communications with DCMS were good and it could proceed at speed. Obviously, chair appointments went up to No. 10, but the whole thing was quite fast. This is in contrast to what one reads and hears happens in a lot of places.

Because we were a statutory corporation, there was no possibility of the Government being involved in the appointment of the executives. When I appointed Sharon White as the chief executive, I obviously informed the department and the Cabinet Secretary out of courtesy after the selection committee had agreed the appointment we wished to make. There was no question that it might be changed in any way. Sharon then appointed her executive, with the agreement of the non-execs, and there was the clarity of a direct sense of accountability from the executive through to the board, which is probably rather important. As I said, the advantage was that that accountability then went straight to Parliament and a Select Committee.

All I hear now is that board appointments can take six to nine months. It is my belief that this loses an enormous amount of talent, because will able people really sit around, putting their lives on hold, for that length of time? In my observation it is never less than six months, and I believe that is because more processes have been inserted into appointments.

I am afraid another factor is that, if you want the best, you need the best headhunters and you need to be able to pay reasonably. There is enormous pressure from the Treasury—understandably; that is its job—to either prevent the use of headhunters or limit who is used. That is a false economy.

On pay, I will give some idea of the dimensions of it. Clearly, regulators cannot and should not pay what the private sector pays. I have found that the private sector might be paying four times-plus anything that I could conceive of, and what I could conceive of was perhaps one-third more than the comparable Civil Service rate. But that one-third more made a great deal of difference because it showed, first, that Ofcom was serious and, secondly, that it was possible for somebody to plan to do a reasonable stint, because you want at least five years from somebody senior in your organisation. On top of that, working for a regulator is pretty good for other opportunities later, although one has to be aware of the potential conflicts of interest.

Viscount Chandos: To go back to the process that has slowed up, it seems that it has not only slowed up but become much more arbitrary. Is that at the departmental level, or is it at No. 10?

Dame Patricia Hodgson: It varies between departments. I believe the Cabinet Office is now involved, so there are three levels. Where the delays happen will vary, as will the reasons. But it also gives the impression to people who might consider public service that it is not respected.

Q62 Lord Clement-Jones: Is there an overlap or duplication in the responsibilities of different regulators? How successfully do regulators co-operate on matters of mutual interest? We have obviously heard about the digital co-operation forum and so on, and there is a network as well.

Dame Patricia Hodgson: With Ofcom, it developed pretty well. As I said, there were the basic concurrent powers with the CMA, so that was the basis. It then became clear that there were not overlaps—I mentioned Ofcom’s privilege of being responsible for pretty well its entire sector—but obvious areas that naturally ran across the economic and utility regulators. Indeed, there are some that run across all regulators, such as data privacy. So the digital regulators forum began with the CMA, Ofcom, the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Financial Conduct Authority. That has been pretty successful.

There are also bilateral collaborations on particular issues, which is extremely important—certainly on growing privacy issues, with the Information Commissioner’s Office. As the Chairman began by saying, Ofcom has broader responsibility for social and electronic media, not just programmes. That will involve a large number of regulators, not just the ICO, where collaboration is well established. Regulators have not had to deal with things such as the potential for deep fraud and electoral fakes, and they have not been resourced or geared up for it.

I will make a general point and then come back to that. Clearly, digital data, generative AI and the expansion of technology are one of the biggest regulatory challenges—as well as social and economic opportunities—that any country could have. The Government are right to allow the sectoral regulators that know their business to take the initiative within the framework that they have been setting for transparency, accountability, redress and so on. But it will be a huge challenge; I suspect it will be an inquiry in itself for bodies like you.

I will come back to how to deal with this in the short term. Ofcom has the benefit of the online harms Act, which, for all its challenges and difficulties—the problem that, even if companies have offices in this country, they are headquartered in different jurisdictions, and so on—has the benefit that it has the main core responsibility. An extra power in the Act, which the CMA already has to a certain extent, is being explored at the moment and is very important in general for regulators: the power to hear super-complaints. That is in the Act, but the Government are currently consulting on how Ofcom might hear super-complaints on matters of online harm—mainly child harm. How do you limit it? On the one hand, billions of messages are out there, so how the hell do you know where to start? On the other, how does Ofcom start to understand them within reasonable resources? So super-complaints could be brought by children’s charities and bodies with their own analytical or research capabilities.

That makes me wonder—although I have not thought this through—whether we will have to think carefully about the importance of independent resourced consumer bodies. The regulators very often have a consumer body within them—Ofcom does—but it is one of many. There are ombudsmen, but they are quite limited and take only individual complaints. The regulator cannot take individual complaints because there would be a conflict of interest with the sectoral decisions it has made about something. It can, and does, do surveys, set up ad hoc committees and so on.

We have very important consumer groups such as Which? and Citizens Advice, but they have to cover a range. So I wonder whether we should start thinking about independent resourced consumer bodies in certain sectors. As I said, I am not being very helpful because I have not thought this through, but it links to conversations that I am sure there have been about whether there should be consumer Select Committees in Parliament, and so on.

Lord Clement-Jones: Those are really interesting examples and, in a sense, a discussion about the limitations. You and I have met in the context of the ombudsman service for communications.

Let me just take you back to the more general point about whether, in your view, the regulators are currently co-operating on matters of mutual interest, and whether these forums are effective and have the resources that allow them to learn from each other.

Dame Patricia Hodgson: Yes, I am sorry. I got diverted.

Lord Clement-Jones: No, that was useful. I would love to have followed up on every one of those strands, particularly AI regulation, but I will not.

Dame Patricia Hodgson: My experience of Ofcom was that it collaborated pretty well in the digital regulators forum. Obviously, it starts and gets better as it goes on. There are a good deal of bilateral collaborations on particular issues. Staff may be informally deployed on a particular issue. As it will have grown since I ceased to be at Ofcom, I have no doubt that there will be times when, between them, they will bring together a group of staff formally to work on particular issues.

My experience is that this kind of focus on what you are trying to solve works best. We of course had the UK regulators forum, which started at about the same time as, or possibly even before, the digital regulators forum. It was much more general and, because it was not dealing with problems that regulators had to solve this week or this month, its activities tended to get delegated—middle management started to run it. That does not mean that it cannot be very useful. The Government are consulting at the moment on, for example, using it to bring together how Ofcom, Ofwat and Ofgem treat vulnerable customers. But it is not as likely to attract the attention of as much senior talent, and your resourcing may not be as well focused as if you managed to focus it on delineated issues that particular regulators are trying to solve at this moment.

Lord Clement-Jones: Such as digital.

Dame Patricia Hodgson: Yes.

Q63 Lord Cromwell: Can we draw on your thoughts about the impact of parliamentary scrutiny on regulators’ performance? In your experience, are Select Committees able to scrutinise them regularly, in the round and systematically, or is it just when something blows up that they get pulled in?

Dame Patricia Hodgson: It is enormously important. The annual meeting with the DCMS Select Committee on the annual report and accounts was taken extremely seriously, and throughout the year will have affected how Ofcom thought about its business plan and what it would be able to report at the end of the year.

Select Committees also call in regulators on particular issues, very often when they have already appeared in the media and, sometimes, when it is a bit late. They are absolutely vital—I emphasised earlier the importance of direct accountability to Parliament—but, however good they are, there are up to 90 regulators and the time of Select Committees and Parliament is limited.

In the last three to four years, the NAO and the PAC have been much more formalised in looking at the effectiveness of regulators, although obviously with a financial organisational bias. That is a good development. I have not developed these thoughts, but that made me wonder whether there needed to be the equivalent of a sort of NAO/PAC on consumer issues. There is probably a need for something else to make scrutiny more consistent. Given the complexity of regulatory work, it really needs some sort of underpinning, paralleling the way- the NAO has to inform the PAC.

Lord Cromwell: Do you support the idea of—the dread phrase—a regulator of regulators?

Dame Patricia Hodgson: I am not sure about that. I have not thought it through, so it would be unwise to give an answer. As you have gathered, my prejudice is in the direction of consumers, and I hope we will talk more about that if there is time.

Q64 Lord Reay: You touched on this, but how do the regulators that you are familiar with measure their performance? Is the information published transparently and displayed in a way that is accessible to the public?

Dame Patricia Hodgson: It varies, but it has improved enormously over the years, particularly as websites have become the go-to place. Nearly all the regulators I am familiar with have upgraded their websites, and they are very useful. Having said that, transparency is one of the biggest challenges. Going back to what I said about the tendency to be bombarded with data and directions from the big hitters in the sector, I note the need for the regulator to have its own analysis and be critical of what should be measured and how.

Many people here will know a great deal more than I do about risk and audit but, sitting on the occasional risk and audit committee over the last 20 years, I have seen that develop into an enormously detailed, process-driven industry, with deck upon deck of data prepared by middle management. Unless senior people in the company, on the board, are really on the ball, this can sometimes distract from the real accountability questions and what is really happening. That is an issue that has to be worried about with regulators because, if you do not have the resourcing, authority or confidence to do your job, it is easy to substitute process. Of course, process is necessary, but the balance between it and judgment about outcomes is difficult.

There is some supremely good paperwork from GCHQ about how it uses process in AI, given the range of stuff it has to do and all the data it is constantly scrutinising. In discussing this, it has the confidence to say, “Of course we must use AI and these processes, and mechanise them when we have to”—this is relevant for the financial regulators—“but we will never make decisions without strong human assessment, which will come first”. Ofcom’s report on outcomes at the top of its annual report is in English and quite accessible, although of course backed up with metrics. That is important.

Q65 Lord Cromwell: To what extent can metrics be used to judge regulators’ performance in addition to qualitative evidence?

Dame Patricia Hodgson: They are important, of course—you want to know what they are spending, how that has moved over the last five years and how many staff they have. Those are metrics. Let us take a difficult issue at the moment: the balance in BT rolling out fibre to premises and the cost of that, which is leading it to say, “We’re going to switch off the copper landline”.

I am not there, and I cannot answer for what it is doing, but I am sure that Ofcom is looking very carefully at the metrics: how the rollout of fibre is doing, what sort of speeds people have in houses that will find their house telephone line dependent on broadband, how often that goes down, what plans there are for maintaining access to emergency services when there is a power cut—because broadband goes off in a power cut—what proportion of homes have mobile phones and how reliable they are. It will use metrics, and will want to publish those, in making its assessments, but it will also make human judgments about the vulnerable and the elderly, whether it believes the mobile phone metrics and so on. The mix is always complex, but it is very important.

The Chair: You are now sitting on the other side of the table, in some sense, in being on the board of the DCMS, which presumably does an annual review of Ofcom’s performance. Can you explain, from the DCMS point of view, how you measure and assess Ofcom’s performance over a 12-month period?

Dame Patricia Hodgson: I was appointed in the summer and have been to only a couple of meetings, so I am sure you will understand that I do not wish to get drawn into any conflicts of interest.

The Chair: It is an interesting conflict that you have, because you have experienced both sides.

Dame Patricia Hodgson: I hope it will be useful.

The Chair: A question that has come up is that quite a lot of non-executive directors are appointed to both departments and regulators, and it is a bit of a puzzle for the committee quite what role they play. At some stage, it would be great if you could come back and tell us—when you have had a full year.

Q66 Baroness McGregor-Smith: How well do you think regulators engage with business and other regulated entities, bearing in mind their statutory duties and responsibilities and how they assess markets? Is their regular dialogue with business good enough?

Dame Patricia Hodgson: I cannot speak for all regulators, but what Ofcom did is what I imagine the other utility and economic regulators do. You naturally ask for particular reports and receive regular reports on certain things—annual reports and so on. You do your own surveys and have a regular framework of meetings: chair to chair, chief executive to chief executive, chief technical officer to chief technical officer and so on. As I have said in a number of ways, your challenge is not to be overwhelmed by the resource and power of the biggest company in the sector. So it is useful to have engagement within a mutually respected and understood framework. There must be mutual respect: it is no good falling out, because regulation will not work if there is no mutual respect. On the other hand, both parts in the pattern must understand the role of the other.

That brings me back to how you manage to balance that with as much understanding and knowledge of the consumer dimension as possible. If you are lucky, like Ofcom in its fairly competitive sector, you can certainly have the same pattern of engagement with other people in the sector. Those who are less powerful than BT beat a path to your door, but you have it in the same framework, so there is no favouritism and it is clearly done properly. But how you manage this scattering of the consumer interests is a constant challenge.

Baroness McGregor-Smith: Do you think the regulators, specifically Ofcom, are still well resourced enough to do that in such a changing world? I am thinking of technology, AI and so on.

Dame Patricia Hodgson: I cannot answer that. Ofcom has been generously and well resourced, although your colleague has more recent experience of that than I do. It has a significant increase in budget to deal with onlinery. But none of us knows how we will cope with onlinery. The first good steps have been taken, but none of us yet knows.

Baroness McGregor-Smith: Ofcom also has a real bias against intervention—it explicitly states that it does—but do you think the balance of that is right and protects consumer interests enough, particularly in this radically changing world?

Dame Patricia Hodgson: As I said, it has been lucky that the market has grown in competitiveness exponentially over the years, which is generally to the benefit of consumers. The consumer dimension worried both Sharon and me, and we did a big tilt towards consumer interests when she came in, from big things such as considering the status of Openreach within BT to day-to-day things such as putting pressure on BT to identify the technology it needed to stop international scam telephone calls. My observation is that that tilt has continued and there is a lot of pressure for information for customers about price rises and so on.

But you are right: it is part of the general problem of how on earth you manage to represent the consumer. You are not representing them but acting, with all your other responsibilities, in their interest. You have your consumer body inside the organisation and all the things you do—surveys and so on. I set up particular groups; I was keen on subtitling for the hard of hearing. You can do that, but I wonder whether something is needed to reinforce the consumer interest that is separate from, and creates pressure on, the regulators.

Q67 Baroness O'Grady of Upper Holloway: I want to continue with that theme. Thinking about regulators more generally, from your experience and observations, do you think that not just the consumer interest but the workforce interest is sufficiently integrated into the processes, rather than just being stakeholders that we deal with?

Dame Patricia Hodgson: Can you develop that a bit more? Are you thinking of health and safety matters? What sort of thing are you thinking of that the economic regulators might intervene to do on behalf of workers?

Baroness O'Grady of Upper Holloway: I am conscious that regulators will be guided by their remits, and in some cases—on competition, for example—this does not address workforce interests. But, clearly, decisions around the merger between Sainsbury’s and ASDA could have a huge impact on the workforce. There may not be a remit requirement to look at that, but there might be a moral one.

More generally, you described the challenge of addressing consumer interests—the sheer scale and the scattered nature of organisations—so, from your understanding, what happens now? How is that interest integrated into the process of decision-making?

Dame Patricia Hodgson: Obviously, I cannot answer for current or very recent decisions. The only thing I have observed in that area was that, as you might imagine, when Sharon became chief executive of Ofcom, she was particularly interested in diversity and opportunity issues, and she began to ask for reports from the companies that we regulated. That will have developed substantially since then, but of course I cannot answer for what actually happens now.

Q68 Baroness Taylor of Bolton: Can we go back to the issue of the governance of regulators? We have touched on this to a certain extent—we talked about departments and Select Committees. You mentioned in one of the exchanges the difficulty and time lags that sometimes occur now in the appointment of non-executive directors. Can you expand further on what you think the role of the board is, what those non-executives can and should do, and how effectively they play a part in holding the executives to account?

Dame Patricia Hodgson: As I said, if you have the benefit that you have appointed your chief executive, who has appointed his or her executive, and there is a clear line of accountability—and, concomitant with that, if you have a decent set of non-execs, which I certainly had the benefit of at Ofcom—challenging your executive can work very well.

This comes back to your question about data and issues. One of the things I did when I came in was to say, “Right, we’re not having these huge reports to the board. No papers will be longer than six sides, and that’s with a two-page summary at the front. If you want a deck behind it, that’s okay, but that will be in ‘any other business’”. The organisation went into paralysis for about three weeks, but the quality of the stuff that then came through was transformed, because they were very able people and they had to cut through all the data they had been processing from the companies, the consumers and government, and they had to develop an argument. So we started to get, “If this, then that”. I am sorry; I have now got distracted from the question.

Baroness Taylor of Bolton: I think quite a few people around this table were non-execs and would have appreciated the idea of a limit on the sides of paper that are presented.

Lord Burns: That includes this committee.

Baroness Taylor of Bolton: Yes, that includes this committee on occasions, we have to admit. The dynamics between the non-execs and everybody else vary from organisation to organisation. If that goes right it is very positive, but it often depends on the individuals involved.

Dame Patricia Hodgson: Yes, it does. This is not of particular interest to you, but it speaks to this: I would like to have done another year at Ofcom but did not because my board was all up for renewal and I knew that Sharon would probably go after that. I felt that there should be a new chair—who appointed his own board, who appointed the chief executive—if the benefits that I had had, which I thought had helped to make Ofcom reasonably effective, were to continue. That is not always possible, especially if non-executives are taking six or nine months to be appointed. I know of very recent examples where the non-execs are all appointed but there is still no chair—that just does not work.

Q69 The Chair: Coming back to the question of the appointment of people, as you referenced, we had the saga of the appointment of the chair of Ofcom recently in breathless novel terms from Nadine Dorries. As you pointed out, the thought of being embroiled in that sort of farrago probably deters a lot of people from throwing their hat into the ring.

Is there a case for the final decision on the appointment of the chair of a regulator being made by a Joint Committee of Parliament, where the board would go through the process that it normally does in public companies, selecting somebody and putting them forward for approval? That would take it out of the hands of politicians, who inevitably look to appoint or favour somebody who is perceived as an ally, a friend or whatever.

Dame Patricia Hodgson: I certainly agree with the principle of trying, as far as possible, to reduce people putting their mate in. Scrutiny of somebody who is put forward for an important appointment, which happens after the appointment now, is very important. In extremis, it can be used to say, “We have reservations about this appointment”.

I hesitate to answer in this forum of parliamentarians, except to say, going back to an earlier answer, that speed and good headhunters are of the essence. I hope it is not discourteous to point out that, however good Joint Committees are, they are composed of politicians with interests. So it is a difficult question.

The Chair: You made an interesting point about whether consumer bodies have the resources to address these complex issues on behalf of the consumers, as they direct questions to regulators and sponsoring departments. You explained that you had not thought it through, but if you had any further thoughts on that, we would welcome them. One of the challenges in our inquiry is how to better represent the consumer interest. You clearly made the point today that you saw that as one of the most important things. Quite a lot of evidence that we have received over the last three years is that consumers feel rather lost and homeless, and it is difficult for them to access a regulator or the Government to raise a particular concern. So it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on that, if you can develop them over the next few weeks.

The other point you raised, which is interesting, was the super-complaints regime. You praised it and regarded it as a good thing.

Dame Patricia Hodgson: I hope it will be.

The Chair: We all travel in hope. Let us assume that it comes about. Do you think that the advantage of having it done within the competition authority itself—making it speedy—at the same time deprives it of a proper independent judicial review process? How do you balance the speed of the process and the democratic need to ensure that there is a proper judicial review process?

Dame Patricia Hodgson: There is clearly a problem with speed of process, with the CMA’s need to be very careful. I do not know how super-complaints work with the CMA. The super-complaint proposal is that it could be made to Ofcom. Again, I do not know how it would receive it or what the nature of its processes would be in so doing. It may well be an important contribution. There is clearly a huge problem with social media, especially for children: assessing what is going on out there, balancing that against what the service suppliers are telling you their systems can achieve, and hearing from people who are affected.

I do not think it can be the whole answer. The thing that worries me is: do you want an independent consumer body in every sector? That is what I have not thought through. I can see that one in Ofcom’s sector would be jolly good. Ofcom would sigh deeply, but I suspect that, actually, it would help it. But I do not have enough knowledge of how it would apply elsewhere.

The Chair: If you have further thoughts, please write to us. Thank you for that very interesting session.