24
Examination of witnesses
Jasmine Dotiwala, Mercy Muroki, Dr Rob Watson and Deborah Williams.
Q32 The Chair: Welcome to the Communications and Digital Select Committee. This is the fourth session of our inquiry into BBC future funding. We have four witnesses today who can help us explore in greater depth how well the BBC serves different sectors of society. What we are trying to understand today is what different audience groups want and need from the BBC—if people are not getting what they want from the BBC, are they getting it elsewhere? If so, what does this mean about the role of the BBC as perhaps a national glue?—and how the BBC is funded in the future. Before I get to questions, I invite our witnesses to introduce themselves briefly. Dr Watson.
Dr Rob Watson: Thank you very much for the opportunity to present evidence and speak to you here today. My background is in community media: I have taught media production at university for over 20 years, which evolved into facilitating and supporting community media. I based my PhD on why people participate in community media as a distinct movement or sector of the media landscape, if you like. I am very much focused on the idea, and the work I do now is to support and help community media groups to enhance their organisation, their profile, that kind of thing.
Deborah Williams: Thank you for inviting me. I am currently the executive director at the Creative Diversity Network, which is a London-based membership organisation that looks at diversity across UK media and broadcasting. The BBC is a member alongside the other four major broadcasters, the production community, the supply chain and skills and training organisations. My background is as an artist, so I am a performer, writer and director. I came up through Disability Arts and crossed over into policy-making when I joined the Arts Council England about 10 years ago. I then moved into the British Film Institute, where I designed the Diversity Standards for the BFI. I have now been in this role here at the Creative Diversity Network, monitoring on-screen and off-screen diversity and demographics in UK broadcasting, for five and a half years. I am also a data and ethics professional and facilitator.
The Chair: Thank you very much. Moving on to our guests on screen: Miss Dotiwala.
Jasmine Dotiwala: Good afternoon, everyone. I have over 25 years of experience as a head of department, manager, broadcaster, producer, reporter, director and columnist at brands such as Netflix UK, the Media Trust, Channel 4 News, MTV, the BBC, the Voice newspaper and more. I have been in TV production my whole career: I came up as a runner, then a presenter, producer, director. I have headed up a couple of TV channels, and in recent years I have been more focused on including and training talent across the nations and regions into TV production and multimedia roles.
Mercy Muroki: My background is in social policy. I studied a Masters in comparative social policy—I actually graduated about a week and a half ago. I worked at the Centre for Social Justice for some time, a think tank; I dealt with a number of issues there. The title probably most associated with me would be journalist—I write in the Sun, present on “GB News” and have also been a commentator. I try to engage in things relating to ethnic minorities on other channels; for example, I was recently on the BBC’s “We Are Black and British” series and also on the Channel 4 “Unapologetic” series, which was very much marketed towards the young ethnic minority audience. That is my background, in a nutshell.
Q33 The Chair: Thank you very much. You are all very welcome and we are all very grateful to you for giving up your time to be with us this afternoon. I should have said at the beginning, we are live now on the internet and we will take a full transcript of this session, which will be published.
I will start off with the first question and come to each of you in turn. I am interested in your views as to the extent to which the BBC should act as a national glue, as it were, across all sectors of society. The reason why I ask this question is because we have had evidence from previous witnesses as part of this inquiry where they have focused on fragmentation within society, whether that is with greater diversity within society, or a realignment of our political views and a more distinctive set of world views that people may have from one another. Because of that fragmentation, and because of the fragmentation that we now see as well through the choice of media, should the BBC seek to be a national broadcaster which provides that social glue that binds us all together?
Dr Rob Watson: I would say the answer is yes, but the way that it goes about it has to change. I often use anecdotes to express this, and I can recall a conversation with a senior BBC executive who looked after local radio in England. Part of the conversation was about how BBC local radio has been reconfigured to own the local conversation. I was aghast—you do not own any conversations of the public, you facilitate them. For me, that is a mindset shift that needs to take place in the way that the BBC is organised in order to have a different mission, which is about civic engagement and civic empowerment. It is about citizenship, not about audience consumer development, which were too weighted towards the role that the BBC plays as a mass media organisation in the old 20th-century model, and not responsive to new technologies, new social arrangements, new organisations of people within society. We need to flip that around and make the BBC more responsive to some of those bottom-up, ground-up changes.
Deborah Williams: I would absolutely agree. Over the last two years with the pandemic, the BBC has shown that it still is the glue, whether it was radio, iPlayer or linear television. It was clear that people needed and wanted the content, the availability and the fact that it existed, and it showed itself to be critical. Where I would agree with Dr Watson is about how it goes about that. I do not know whether it is a mindset, but some of the culture within the organisation and the institution is this idea of quantity not quality—the notion that the stories that you tell are one-dimensional, homogeneous groupings—which may be what the conversation around the fracturing is about.
I am not the demographic for the BBC at all, but I am really thankful that it exists, so that other members of my family and close friends have access to it and are able to use it. Whether that is in terms of social mobility, socioeconomic status, location and geography, race and ethnic grouping, or disability, does not matter, what matters are the stories that you tell and how you tell them. The BBC is stuck in a track of this notion that the communities that we are talking about are homogeneous groups, and that they solely represent this group in this way. That is what needs to change: the quality of the storytelling, the content that is created and how and where that is presented. That is what is critical.
The Chair: Did you say that you are not the demographic for the BBC?
Deborah Williams: I do not believe I am the demographic for the BBC.
The Chair: Forgive me, but what do you mean?
Deborah Williams: I am young, black and disabled, I do not think that is a part of how the BBC sees its core demographic—I am not a part of the broad main consumer base for the BBC.
The Chair: But you pay for it?
Deborah Williams: Yes.
Jasmine Dotiwala: Similarly, I agree with a lot that Deborah said. When we set up the context to this conversation, it is not about thinking about the diverse population as being a reason for the fact that we are fragmented. Of course, UK society is changing, because societies everywhere change all the time: people move, we marry, we mix, and our trends and mindsets change. We have an increasingly diverse population and a healthy mix of worldviews, which I do not think I had when I was growing up. When I was watching the BBC as a child, I was fed a diet of one narrative which was very myopic. It was not until society in the UK did start to become more diverse that we were able to hear more worldly perspectives, which is a good thing.
The reason we are less cohesive is not because of the BBC or television as such, it is often because of our politicians and our leadership. Over these last two decades we have seen that the values at the very top of our society have been shown to be corrupt. This behaviour drips down through society’s DNA; the rest of society watch, we observe, we do as we are shown pays at the top for people in the elite position. I do think therefore that it is less about blaming media and culture, and more about looking at what we are feeding society.
We are doing culture wars everywhere we look. We have looked at Brexit where people have had to make big decisions on things around that, at the royal family and at politicians. Not so much the BBC, but across TV land the mainstream broadcasters have traded in the misery of others with shows such as “Benefits Street”, “Rich House, Poor House” and “Big Fat Gypsy Weddings”. We have seen with the “Jeremy Kyle Show” documentary this week that it has been a real trend amongst mainstream television to punch down. The BBC does less of that, but it does look through a lens of colonial romanticism. For people like me, that can bring in historical trauma for our ancestors.
On the positive side, the BBC should and does act like a national glue and it showed its strength during the pandemic. We saw it regroup and set up educational hubs for home learning and students across the nation. BBC children’s TV is regularly consumed, but during the pandemic that necessity went up. We saw BBC local radio stations that helped galvanise communities and shared vital information to support communities. It really came into its own during Covid, but outside of the pandemic we also see the BBC as our national platform. We all know that it brings people together during sports events, new year’s fireworks, historical moments, political speeches, royal speeches. Statistically, millions of audiences do choose the BBC at times of coming together and uniting the nations.
Having said all that, it would be remiss of me not to add that it does also feel like any time we watch any of these events we are watching every bit of content come from the lens of a straight, white, middle-class, Oxbridge man, which is not going to reflect honestly the wider society that we live in. We have to look at the positives and the negatives.
The BBC is positively in a unique lane of its own when it comes to its drama. There is something for everyone, from “EastEnders” to “Call the Midwife” to “Line of Duty”—its drama has kudos, it is applauded and engaged with across the world. The BBC should not try to compete with other services, because it cannot be everything to everyone. It does serve a national audience here, and we have a big range of TV in this country that we probably would not have if it were not for the BBC and other public service broadcasters.
There is one thing that we often fail to mention when it comes to the BBC acting as a glue. The BBC trains a lot of people across the TV industry and it has so many various programmes; it has around 1,000 apprentices across the year. Other broadcasters and streamers do not get near those numbers, and those trainees are from underserved communities. Within those mainstream public broadcasters, we are training up the talent and the decision-makers of the future, so the BBC plays an important role in TV talent and developing the landscape of television but of course it needs more work. I work with people in various groups across the country, and I have found that the older UK generation think the BBC is a public service and does act as a national glue but many of the younger people I work with hardly ever engage with it, and some have never engaged with it. To many of them it is the channel for their grandparents.
Mercy Muroki: I agree with a lot of what has been said already. When it relates to ethnic minority, the BBC has not yet properly grasped the intricacies of it. I do feel there is a homogenisation that goes on when it comes to ethnic minority—a general narrow lens is looked at. I actually looked at the report called Reflecting the Ethnic Diversity of the UK Within the BBC Workforce. In that there were 52 mentions of “BAME”—“This is what we are doing for BAME representation” but just three mentions of “black” and two mentions of “Asian”. I feel like there is almost still a residual attitude that there is a BAME audience and it is a homogeneous thing, and there are clichéd, surface-level things that you can do to please that audience. I would not blame somebody for saying, “I don't feel like I'm the BBC's audience if I'm black, if I'm working class, if I'm young” and so on.
Having said that, the BBC does have an important role to play. I grew up watching CBBC and my daughter watches it now. CBBC and CBeebies play an incredible role. I remember watching “Newsround” growing up and now, when I am looking over CBeebies and CBBC when my daughter is watching them, I see they have actually made a real effort with the children's programming to be reflective and diverse. I am constantly seeing working-class, ethnic minority or disabled characters, and not just in the dramas the BBC is showing in the children's programming, but actually in the presenting team as well, so that side of things has been really good.
When it comes to politics it still has a long way to go to be representative, as I certainly know among the working-class communities that I spend time with. The reason I could not make it in today is because I am in Northamptonshire, where my mum lives on a council estate. I grew up on a council estate, so I would consider myself a working-class girl. From all the working-class people I speak to, I do get a sense that there is a perception that the BBC looks down on some of the opinions that we know working-class people are increasingly holding in greater numbers. Whether that is in relation to politics, Brexit, concerns around immigration or whether that is in relation to voting Conservative, I do get a sense from so many working people that they almost want to like the BBC, but there is a condescending atmosphere around it, when a lot of people are watching.
The Chair: You have all covered quite a wide range of different issues there and we have quite a few questions to come so, rather than me hog things now with supplementary questions, I am going to move on. I reserve the right as Chairman’s privilege to come back in again later on. Lord Young.
Q34 Lord Young of Norwood Green: This is really a continuation of the previous question. Some sectors of UK society typically have lower engagement with the BBC—for example, young people, ethnic minority and those from less advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds—and you have made yourself clear on that. We have heard that people across the UK feel that the BBC does not reflect a wide range of perspectives. In broad terms, what do these underserved groups need and want from media, and how does that compare with what the BBC can provide?
If you are saying, “Well it doesn’t”, what then can the BBC do better? I am thinking especially about that last point made by Mercy that it can come across as patronising and condescending to views that are not, shall we say, the normal middle-class views or whatever—I presume that was what you were referring to. There are areas where it has changed, and there was some recognition of that from Jasmine. Do you think, for example, a service such as BBC Sounds impacts on any of these groups at all?
Jasmine Dotiwala: When we talk about underserved communities, the reason some sectors of UK society typically have lower engagement with the BBC is because there is more choice and competition than ever for our attention. Decades ago, the BBC would have had a monopoly on our time and our attention, but today the screen industries are a busy, thriving landscape, and the BBC just cannot compete with them all.
There has been less engagement for a long time, because the BBC was stopping its creators from underrepresented backgrounds telling authentic stories. I have a list as long as my arm from when underrepresented groups have been brought into the BBC, and their stories and talent were chipped away at by that BBC Oxbridge lens, where the stories were diluted so much they became unpalatable to their core audiences from those underserved communities. The BBC needs to trust its creators to speak to their audiences more, without chipping away at the stories that they have. They have become better at it in recent years. Taking Michaela Coel as an example, they have been really good with that with that show and that series, but the younger, more diverse BBC audience probably moved on a long time before this.
When you ask, “What do those communities want?” I am obviously not in a position to answer what all the groups not accessing the BBC need. Hopefully, you would expect that the BBC is going out there and spending time with those communities and building relationships to garner more views. What I am told by people from underrepresented groups is that they want content that informs them about the world around them and makes them feel like they belong and gives them pride in their own cultures. That has been the problem in BBC content in the past: we have not felt proud. We want more refreshing programming that represents broader voices and stories. The BBC should feature talent and ideas from creators from across generations, races, religions and genders, because we know that the more diverse and inclusive they are in their staff workforce, the better their content will be.
When I have seen content about underrepresented groups in the past, it has been really negative stereotypes about our communities. As we have already mentioned, in TV in recent years there has been a trend of trading in the misery of underrepresented groups, and we have always had a light shone on challenges and negative narratives. This makes underrepresented groups feel bad, it makes us look at ourselves negatively, it makes others outside of our groups look at us suspiciously, and that is the reason so many viewers have migrated across to streamers. The streamers are much more positive and they have joyous content. It is difficult to compare them both.
I will give you a personal example from communities across the UK. The most recent UK Census in 2011 highlighted that in England and Wales, 80% of the population were white British, then Asian, Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi and other groups made up about 6.8% of the population, then black groups were 3.4% and Chinese groups were 0.7%. If we are saying that the largest ethnic group in this country are Asians, I would ask whether you think that the BBC genuinely reflects that statistic of viewers that are paying for the licence. When it comes to Asian British communities being reflected on the BBC, where is the content and the talent? Over my lifetime I have seen Asians on the BBC making great curry on food shows, running corner shops in soap operas, or an English celebrity is sent out to India to ride on a train or, even worse, an elephant. When it comes to South Asian communities such as Sri Lankan or Tamil communities, they are never represented by the BBC.
I would ask you to look at the difference between what the BBC puts out, compared to what Gen Z sees on streaming SVODs. On streaming SVODs we see South Asians and Indians running many of the big tech companies globally around the world. If you look, most of the bosses of big American tech companies are Asian. Where is that proud documentary content that makes us feel seen? So I would say that the BBC often does continue in stereotypes. It is definitely changing, but not quickly enough, and therefore audiences are going, they are leaving, it is like a house on fire when it comes to underrepresented and young audiences.
Dr Rob Watson: The problem with that analysis is that it kind of ignores the fact that there are alternatives out there, and that people have access to media production technologies that they never used to have in the past. My argument would be, if you are not happy with the BBC, set up your own independent alternative media organisation. We can do this with our mobile phones these days; we have platforms such as YouTube where people are producing content. Community media and community radio are all about people coming together to exactly address those issues of identity, sense of belonging, community involvement and representation, but it does not need to be organised by a corporate organisation funded by taxpayers. It does not need to be organised by the state in any way; it is not a commercial proposition so it fits with the mutual and the civic society part of the social economy. There is a freedom out there to set up your own alternatives. It is important to have the BBC because it offers institutional engagement, professionalism and standards of representation and accountability, but outside of that it is a wide-open field.
What we do not want to do is allow people to just exist in the social media environment, with misinformation, polarisation, clickbait—all those kinds of things. Community media has an essential element to it, which is about accountability and trust, and it is about representing people living in those communities in those places. For Leicester, where I have been most embedded for the last two years because that is where I live, the BBC did not serve the needs of citizens in Leicester during the pandemic. We were in the longest lockdown in Europe, and when the public health teams started knocking on doors to find out what people’s problems were with isolation and then later on with vaccinations, it was because of the low level of educational skills, language skills, health capacity and so on, and for some reason this was a shock.
There is a general idea that media and the media economy work. They work for about 80% of the population, and that is fine if you are selling messages which are focused on convenience and entertainment, but 20% of the population do not engage with, watch or listen to the BBC, which is where community media comes in. We are seeking to fill those gaps, but it is like we have our hands tied behind our backs, because we do not get investment, support, or recognition. You end up in this situation where you try to do positive things, helping people to represent themselves, but it takes a monumental effort. We now have 300 community radio stations in the UK and that is not championed. Community media was not mentioned in the levelling-up White Paper; pride of place in society, social economies, but no mention at which level our media would do that, where people can be directly involved in that process.
That is one of the things that have changed—we do not need to look to the BBC exclusively for the answers any more. It is part of a pluralistic set of options we have, but we can put in and invest in other things that build up that capacity in society for people to represent themselves and provide their own entertainment, information and education, through their media.
Deborah Williams: I am inclined to agree with what has been said, but I believe representation enables better and deeper connection. One of the core things that we are talking about here is the representation, not just on screen but inside the broadcaster, inside the BBC. Who makes the decisions? How are the decisions made? What level of representation are we seeing from communities that are being looked at and explored anthropologically? That is what media does; it reflects a lot of what is going on. As has been said before, a lot of the public narrative—whether it is working-class people voting Tory and people not understanding what that means or whether it is about disabled people and why disabled people are not included in the conversation around mask mandates and things like that—happens in society and that is reflected within our broadcasters and within the BBC, like anyone else. The problem is there is no one inside the organisation challenging those narratives, asking questions about those narratives and saying, “Actually, these are some of the reasons and some of the other perspectives that we could think about exploring”.
Secondly, it is non-binary. It is not binary: it is not either/or. As long as we continue to think of it as that it will always be at odds. The example I would use is “Strictly Come Dancing” and Rose Ayling-Ellis; a deaf woman—who is an actress in “EastEnders”—was on a reality television show and reasonable adjustment was put in place to enable her to fully participate in that show. The impact on the entire country and beyond—not just for deaf people—was really important. You have seen an increase in people wishing to learn British Sign Language and an understanding of British Sign Language as a language in terms of what then happened politically. The impact is there and if we continue to think of it in a binary sense and say, “Oh, we have to have one or the other”, then we are defeating the purpose.
On the educational remit, community radio and community public service media are brilliant, they are fantastic, but they are still about wealth. You still have to have the means of production to do those things, and not everybody does. We need to remember that. Everyone needs something to fall back on and something to be able to work with. Look at digital poverty in this country. People who do not have access to the internet or data on their phones often have to use pay as you go services on older phones. You cannot be creative in those spaces; you cannot present a radio show or things like that. Those communities that do not have access to those things need the BBC.
It is also about trust. If you do not trust the people who are telling your story, why would you trust and listen to anything else that they have to say? Stories that are told about so many communities in this country, not just within the BBC but within other media—whether that is television or radio or online—the stories that are told are myopic. For me the most important thing is the polarity of the experiences of communities. You change that and you have a better level of engagement and a better understanding of what the options are. I would also say that a lot of people watch BBC content but they do not know it is BBC content.
Lord Young of Norwood Green: I am sorry, say that again. I missed that.
Deborah Williams: A lot of people watch BBC content, they just do not know it is BBC content because they are not watching it through the BBC. They are not watching it via iPlayer or via BBC1, BBC2, BBC Three or BBC Four; they are consuming it online or someone sent them something and they are watching it and they do not really look at the branding in the corner of the screen. They are just interested in what they are being shown and what their friend has been excited about or disgusted with. The BBC content is always there and it is always with us.
To answer your question about Sounds, I think the rebranding of Sounds is a phenomenon. Over the last two and half to three years, Sounds has become the sort of place where people who I work with and who I know who are younger than me access a lot. During the pandemic, when people were not commuting to work or travelling around the country, they were using Sounds as a way of relaxation, as a way of finding out, listening for themselves and breaking out of the spaces that they were locked into during lockdowns.
The complexity of it should not be dismissed, it is the most exciting thing about it and that people have choice. Content allows you to curate your own viewing pattern in your own way and it is not linear. It is not, “I am going to turn on the television at 8 am and turn it off at 10 pm”. You drop in and out of things, and to be able to curate your own media experience and your own content in that way is critical and the BBC feeds that in many ways.
Lord Young of Norwood Green: That is really interesting. Of course, we had the first same-sex couple as well on “Strictly Come Dancing”.
Deborah Williams: Indeed, we did.
Lord Young of Norwood Green: That was another game changer, was it not?
Deborah Williams: He should have won, in my opinion, but that is just my opinion.
Lord Young of Norwood Green: Last but by no means least, Mercy.
Mercy Muroki: First, it should not be up to smaller organisations, smaller platforms, to try to plug any perceived gaps in the BBC. The fundamental structure of the BBC is that it is paid for by everyone. We legally have to pay for our TV licence and therefore it should have an offer for everybody. There should not be anybody in the country who feels, “Actually, because I am this, this and this, the BBC is not for me”, or that, “The BBC is not targeting me as a potential viewer”. It should have some kind of offer for everybody, regardless of their race, ethnicity, class and things like that. I do think it should exist, obviously—well, it is not obvious, there are people who do not want it to exist at all.
Critically for me, the BBC puts a lot of work into ensuring that it captures those audiences and represents those stories. Jasmine was saying that she did not feel that Asians have been represented, especially in the diversity of the Asian community. I tend to agree with that point because I do feel that often when minority groups, whether that be social class or ethnicity, are being represented on the BBC it sometimes feels like a caricature representation of a community which does not appreciate the depth and the intricacies of a particular community. It is very in-your-face textbook ticking. I remember at school when we were learning about culture, a Jamaican man would come to school for the day and play steel pans because apparently that was all the school could think of when it was trying to represent the Jamaican community.
It is that sort of crude representation which does sometimes fall into caricature, and whether this is something to do with the production team behind these programmes or the commissioning aspects of these programmes I do not know, but I certainly feel that that is the case. There is no depth to what the BBC is trying to do when it comes to representing communities and, indeed, that is reflected in the fact that, to this day, its strategy is still a BAME strategy rather than something more substantial when it comes to acknowledging the different communities that make up the UK.
Lord Young of Norwood Green: We have touched on diversity. We have not done much about younger viewers.
The Chair: I think Baroness Bull wanted to pick up on that.
Lord Young of Norwood Green: Okay, I will leave that, but thank you.
Q35 Baroness Bull: Thank you, and you have definitely led me nicely on to continue this theme about how the BBC serves certain sectors of the population. Having taken on board your very good points about the risks of treating any group as a homogenous entity, I am going to go into the younger people bracket. Deloitte's last report on digital media trends found that the generation that grew up with social media—instant messaging, gaming and streaming—prefer to do all of those things rather than just watching TV or movies and often they do those things simultaneously. There is almost an expectation of interactivity as part of a media experience.
While I would sit and watch video-based entertainment, that is really alien for Generation Z. If these preferences were consolidated over time, the dominant position that video-based entertainment—which much of BBC entertainment is—has had is really going to be challenged, and any media company with that as a mindset is going to be detached from future audiences. I am really interested in what this would mean for the BBC if that is true—indeed, you may disagree—and how might it need to adapt to meet these needs and how might it be challenged in making these evolutions. I do not have time to come to all four witnesses but if I could ask, Rob, because of your CV and your areas of study, and then perhaps Jasmine, but if others have a view, with the Chair's permission, we will have some brief comments.
Dr Rob Watson: The solution to that is not to be found in the BBC providing top-down answers and putting in place policy wonks, developers, to come up with solutions that imitate what is happening elsewhere; it is to get young people involved in the production process, the governance process and the editorial decision-making process, and to push down to decentralise. I am a distributionist and believe that that which should be done at the lowest level, should be done at the lowest level. We need to radically devolve the BBC down to the lowest level of society that is functional so that people can get involved. You cannot walk into a commercial organisation, knock on the door and say, “I want to be involved. This is the kind of programme you should be making”, and they turn around and say, “Yes, come and try it out. Come and have a go. We’ll facilitate that”. You cannot do that with the BBC or with the commercial sector.
You can do that in the social media sector and the community sector. We need to flip it around and think more creatively about where the innovation is going to come from. What ties it together are the values of integrity, truthful reporting, objectivity and social accountability. Those should inform what the BBC does, and I am agnostic about how and in what way it does that. What we have is a rigid corporate structure that is wedded to some outdated attitudes about what media could or should be. To take Deborah’s point, during the lockdown analogue radio was absolutely essential for isolated people in communities, but it was not sexy for policymakers who want to push everything to be digitally engaged. That FM or AM radio in the corner of the kitchen was a lifeline for a lot of people, so we have to be pluralistic about it. We have to be open to innovation from different areas, empower young people to make the content and give them the responsibility and the mission to create the BBC of the future. Do not wait for the BBC, in some kind of enclosed bubble, to come up with the answer.
Baroness Bull: That is really interesting, and you can see immediately the challenges of how you create that level of governance which still fulfils the functions that allow the permeability. Jasmine, can I bring you in?
Jasmine Dotiwala: My thoughts are that Gen Z, who are more engaged with streamers and games and all the different things that they can get on YouTube and Google, do that because it is interactive and it is a global interactive user experience. Everything about the way the BBC model is set up means that it cannot be a global experience. When you watch a new series on Netflix, Amazon Prime or Disney, global conversations happen with young people all across Twitter, Instagram and TikTok because they are watching simultaneously. A whole series is dropped in one go and because it is global, it is exciting for young people because they are having conversations with their peers in different countries around the world.
I do not think the BBC can always compete with that. At certain times it can. Every TV vehicle has a 360 digital content aspect that is built around it: TikTok and Instagram content for the youngest audiences; Twitter for driving interactive hashtag conversations; YouTube for bespoke youth viewing to complement on-air content; podcasts being created at local radio like Rob’s, and they are uniting cultural tribes around specific topics. There is so much going on with digital platforms. I do not know whether the BBC is set up so that it has the resource or the manpower to necessarily do that. If it does, then it needs to employ staff who are very different. The more underserved you are as a community in the UK, the less likely you are to be employed by the BBC. It is like oil and water mixing; you are not going to get those cultural tribes and audiences.
I would suggest that it creates hubs outside the major cities, in smaller towns and regions that can use the skills that young people have in the digital skills gap. If you think that young people are on social media all day, they are managing their SEO, they are collating their likes, they know how to put together email branding content for digital content, that can easily be transformed into the BBC sector.
Another issue at the BBC is jobs for life. That is a real concern with the BBC staffing structure. The BBC has heads of platforms who have been in their jobs for life, and it creates a really stagnant lack of creativity as well as a bit of an arrogance. It is that long-term employment at the BBC that makes parts of it quite stagnant and heavy. If you are competing commercially with streamers or other commercial brands, you can get that diverse talent set. Having been at the BBC—and out of it—I know that staff at the BBC are often demoralised and unmotivated. If you think that their salaries are way out of kilter with the rest of the industry, the BBC pays nowhere near market value, there are no bonuses, there are no packages, so the BBC loses out on the best talent; why would young people want to work there? BBC staff are very frustrated. It is quite a toxic place to work for many people from underserved communities. The potential is there and the talent exists out in the regions across the UK, but the BBC needs to make sure that it is bringing those people in and letting them tell authentic stories with their own voices.
Baroness Bull: This is so fascinating, I am going to continue with it. Two things to note: one is the BBC did manage to invent the iPlayer—I think it was some blokes in a shed who did it alongside the BBC—but more importantly, you talked about a global conversation and being a global glue. Our Chair introduced the idea of a national glue and I wonder whether there is a differentiation—there clearly is in that you set your sights higher with a global conversation—between creating a national conversation and a global conversation? I am going to come back to Jasmine on that because you said it, but then I will hand back to the Chair and anybody else can write to us if they have thoughts.
Jasmine Dotiwala: In this world you have to be able to compete. Remember, we pay for the programmes the BBC makes, so we are investors in those shows. They are sold via BBC Studios and BBC Productions to the rest of the world. There is a profit somewhere coming back in. There is no transparency for us as to where that money is going. There is a potential to keep the BBC content in a global conversation, but for some reason it is not happening. It has to be so that everyone can consume at the same time. Does that make sense?
Baroness Bull: Yes, it does. That is really fascinating.
Deborah Williams: I just wanted to pick up on the global conversation because I think it is disingenuous to say that the BBC does not feed and lead the global conversation. The direct response to young people, treating them as consumers, which is what they are because they are consuming content, is dangerous. Assuming that as a consumer you can just trip over into being a creator is a massive jump and a massive step. That is something that I would avoid.
The notion that because you come from a group, you can represent that group and that you are going to be better than anyone else representing that group, the data does not suggest that that is true. We have Attenborough, we have “Line of Duty”, we have “Strictly Come Dancing”; there are many other formats that have come out of the BBC that are global, that travel globally, and that original investment by us as citizens of the UK who pay our licence fee, that is really important to know that we do feed that global conversation and the BBC does feed that global conversation and it is happening.
As I said before, people are interested in content. They are not interested in where that content comes from or who makes that content. My nine year-old nephew watches a lot of stuff on YouTube that he does not know comes from the BBC. CBeebies is the ultimate. The BBC makes some of the best content in the world for children and young people who are Gen Z now and whatever the next generation will be. It is really dangerous to suggest that is not happening alongside some of the issues and some of the concerns that are rightly being raised.
The Chair: Mercy, as somebody who is probably Gen Z, it would seem inappropriate not to give you the chance to respond to this question if you can remember what it was that Baroness Bull put to you.
Mercy Muroki: I am actually a millennial.
The Chair: Forgive me. You look so young.
Mercy Muroki: I am two years away from being Gen Z. Was the question about the younger audience?
Baroness Bull: It was about the expectation of interactivity, that they do not want to sit and watch a show, they want to contribute to it or comment on it.
Mercy Muroki: That is certainly the case. What I have noticed with a lot of the shows that have been popular among younger people—they are often reality shows, to be fair, so that is probably another reason why they are popular—they always involve a kind of hysteria around them, and people are engaged with those shows. They have online communities and there is a big fuss about these shows. ITV is very good at creating a sense of mass hysteria around certain programmes and making them a cultural phenomenon. When people are watching something, they also want to be on their phone, texting their friends about it, tweeting about it, all that kind of thing.
I have also noticed streaming platforms are becoming more multimedia and there has to be some reason behind that; presumably it is very profitable. I went on Netflix a couple of days ago and I realised that there is a games platform within Netflix itself. You have Spotify, which is branching out into video as well, so some podcasts have video. There is certainly a move towards a more interactive multimedia experience and that is particularly the case when it comes to young people.
Q36 Lord Foster of Bath: Thank you, all of you, for coming. It has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. I will just give advance notice to Mercy; I am going to ask my question to you first of all because of something you said a little earlier on. What we have discovered from your contributions is that, on the one hand, there is a changing broadcasting ecology, with a growing number of alternatives, from Netflix to Rob’s community radio, and I think it was Deborah who said we have the ability to curate our own listening and viewing. On the other hand, we have heard that the BBC is perhaps not meeting the needs of quite a number of different parts of the community from some young people who want to engage in the way we have just been discussing; we heard of British Asians who are missing out, and even from Rob that some of the people of Leicester seemed to lose out during the pandemic, and many others.
In the light of all of that, and turning to a point that Mercy made earlier—“We all have to pay our licence fee so the BBC should be offering something for all of us and currently it’s not”—my question is a simple one. Should the BBC simply work harder to ensure that it does meet those varying needs of different parts of our community and we carry on with the license fee, or should we be looking at a wholly different way of funding the BBC, recognising that it cannot necessarily meet everybody’s needs? Mercy, kick us off. How should we pay for the BBC?
Mercy Muroki: The first port of call is for the BBC to do a better job because if it was to immediately adopt some of the more private sector models, it would quickly fail given its current offering. If it improves and proves itself worthy of surviving and competing with other channels, platforms and programming, I certainly think that in the future there would be a great opportunity for the BBC to adopt a completely different funding model. At the moment, I am very averse to that purely because there is so much good the BBC is doing. It just needs to improve in certain key areas.
I also want to reference something Jasmine said earlier about underserved people at the BBC. These underserved communities, whether that be the working-class communities or certain ethnic minority groups who are disproportionately more likely to come from those working-class communities, they are the people who are really feeling the pinch when it comes to seeing that licence fee on their bank statements every month and £12 a month means something to them. That is some people’s disposable income for a week. Those are the people who very much worry about being able to pay their BBC licence fee. That is at the forefront of their minds because they get the letters through the door saying, “You haven’t paid the licence fee”, and they would rather feed their children. If anything, those people are the people who should feel like, “I am paying this chunk of money, which is not insignificant, out of my wage every month. It’s money being taken away from my family, and I want to feel that the BBC is worth paying for”. I think it can exist in the national consciousness, so to speak, in the same way the NHS has done for a very long time. Yes, we pay a lot of money for it, but people go into the NHS because they are proud to work for the NHS because it is such an important national service. The BBC has a lot of potential in that respect.
Lord Foster of Bath: To clarify, you are saying, notwithstanding what may happen a long way in the future, in the medium-term you think the licence fee should stay but the BBC has to work harder?
Mercy Muroki: Yes.
Jasmine Dotiwala: I have been thinking about this for years. It is important to provide access to a national public service broadcaster for everyone. If we are saying that the BBC is an essential life need in this country and it does connect societies together, then we should be providing that service free of charge via a tax, like for the NHS, not a licence fee. If that is the scenario then only people who can afford to pay that tax over a certain annual salary should be paying it because, as Mercy said, people who are struggling with food banks, homelessness, high living costs, some people are carers, they have no disposable income, they should not be paying for this. I am sure that even the most ardent BBC loyalists would say that the licence fee funding model has to change.
There is a lot that does not make sense. For example, without a BBC licence you are not able to watch other channels. How can that be fair? If you use the TV just for gaming, you cannot use it without a BBC licence. How can that be fair? If it is a public service that everyone in society has to have access to, then not everyone should have to pay the same. If it were a tax, there should not be a universal flat fee. It should probably be a tax cost linked to your salary or a progressive tax like income tax, so a tax that is indicative of your means of payment. That would mean that when the earnings of the nation went up, the earnings of the BBC would go up too and vice versa. It just seems fairer.
For my whole life the BBC has been pitched as something that has been a national service like the NHS or education. While all of us will use education and the NHS—and I expect in the 1970s that everyone did use and engage with the BBC—we are now in 2022 and it is not the case any more. To expect people to be forced into payment cannot be right. It just feels like there is something ethically and morally wrong with the licence fee being mandatory. My feelings are similar to Mercy’s. When people get those letters through the door, forcing them to pay and go to court, I have often heard my BBC colleagues say, “Well, no one really goes to prison for not paying the fee”. Actually, they do.
In 2012 I think 49 people were imprisoned—for less than three months, but that is not the point. The point is that people are going to prison for not being able to pay a fine. In most of these cases it is women who are hardest hit. Women are 10 times more likely than men to be convicted for not paying the fee. Growing numbers of women are being slapped with criminal records because of the licence fee. It penalises women, and that is an underserved community that you are telling us we are trying to cater for.
Lord Foster of Bath: Sorry to interrupt you, and I will come to Rob in a second, but to clarify, you are saying not the licence fee, but a tax that is based on your ability to pay, but you then seem to be indicating that you should not be required to pay it.
Jasmine Dotiwala: It would not work if it was a subscription because we know with a subscription there are too many negatives. You would not have as much budget to create the content and the quality that the BBC is currently providing. I am not suggesting a subscription. If we are saying it is a national public service and people are required to pay, it should absolutely be tied to their income tax and ability to pay.
Dr Rob Watson: I agree with the points that have just been made, but I suspect we can ask the question: what is our stake in the BBC? We feel that affinity to the NHS, that ownership over, not directly, and that might need to change as well in terms of public policy development. How can we have a feeling of ownership? It is done for us. It is provided on our behalf. It is the consumer-based approach. As I say, we need to flip that around to focus more on citizen engagement.
Before we talk about funding models, why is the BBC not a mutual or co-operative federated organisation around the country where people have a stake in that organisation and it is funded through a range of things such as public taxation, subscription, licence fees, digital taxes, those kinds of things? To be honest with you—to the point that was made earlier about the global BBC—I am fed up with the global BBC expectations, that it should compete as a global organisation. We need to serve our citizens here first. Many of the decisions that are taken about how the BBC plans and operates its services are on the basis that it has to compete in the global marketplace. We need to get the horse before the cart. We need to change that expectation and return to the public service commitment. There is a revolving door of executives and professionals who leave the BBC to go and work in commercial organisations.
It is a national service. That is how you get people to support it, to invest in it, to keep it going over long periods into the future, not by operating it as a quasi-commercial British version of Netflix, because the market will produce these things anyway and they will come and they will go. We want the BBC to endure because it says something about our national sensibility. The phrase I think of, though, is from Michael Oakeshott—is it civitas or universitas? Should this be determined by top-down national strategic planning in a Soviet kind of approach or is it something which comes from the people themselves?
I am pluralistic about this. If the BBC can exist in a form which sits alongside commercial media and community or mutual or civic media, there is a role for it. We should not romanticise this monolithic notion of what the BBC should be doing on our behalf, because we are the citizens that the BBC is responsible to and when did it last come and knock on our doors to find out what it is we want other than through marketing exercises and market research exercises? It does not not hold citizens’ panels. It does not organise events where members of the public can go and talk about what the editorial priorities should be. That is how you get buy-in.
Deborah Williams: When the role of director-general came up at the BBC, jokingly, I thought, “Let me apply for that role”, and not because I cannot do the job—I know I could do the job, but I would never get the job. One of my dreams was to sort of burn it to the ground in some ways and go right back to the royal charter and think about the purpose of the BBC, what it is for, and rebuild it from there for the world we are now in. In some way that is what needs to happen.
The licence fee is critical in the short, medium and even long term to a certain extent, if we are looking at the next 10 years. How it is managed and navigated and how it is used in the political space I have real questions about because that creates an underclass and subclasses and reinforces stereotypes about people. I do not see a problem with it competing in global markets and international markets, but I do not think that is what the core purpose of the BBC should be. The idea that if you dismantle everything and segment it up and everyone is going to buy all the bits of it, it is not going to be the BBC, it would be something else. If people want it to be something else, that is fine. Fundamentally, the idea of a universal public service media and a public service broadcaster for this country paid for by everyone is critical.
I would disagree in terms of the NHS because we all pay for the NHS—those of us of a certain age pay—but some people also pay for private healthcare; some people because they can afford it, some people because they have to, and some people because they want to. That is exactly what is happening with our media consumption at the moment. You pay your licence fee. Like I said, I pay it. I do not really watch the BBC—I am not a hardened 9 to 5, seven-day-a-week watcher—but there are elements of it. I know it is there. I can go to BBC Radio 4 or BBC Radio 6 and listen to anything that I want to listen to. I can access it at the point of service, and that is really important.
Yes, the funding model needs to change, there is no denying it. There is no doubt about that whatever. I do not think there is anything that exists that would be suitable for what the BBC currently is. That is why I would go right back to the beginning. What is the purpose of the BBC? Who owns it? Should everybody be able to make an editorial decision? That creates a whole other conversation about people having a job and expertise and experience. Where does that sit alongside anybody and everybody being able to turn up and say, “I want to see this today”? We know that individuals will focus on what individuals want and that does not get us a public service media, that gets us individual service media. Yes, it has gone too far, but I do not think going the other way is going to help it either.
I have not heard any conversations or any suggestions from anyone, anywhere that convince me, as yet, that any other funding model, apart from the licence fee, will work. It needs to pull its sock up and sort itself out and make much better and much more diverse content that focuses on the multiplicity of who we are as human beings. That needs sorting out and it needs to figure out what works and what does not work within what is currently being made. I am not denying that, but I think that the idea of getting rid of the licence fee and all sorts of other things is a nonsense.
Lord Foster of Bath: Thank you very much indeed. I am sure the head of Radio 6 will be delighted with the namecheck that his station has had, and good luck when Tim Davie stands down and the post becomes vacant again.
The Chair: Deborah, you were very emphatic about the purpose of the BBC. How would you define it? If you applied for the DG job presumably you knew what it was. Also, on your view that the licence fee is fundamental and has to stay, I was not sure whether you were saying that that is your starting point before the purpose or whether you were saying you need to define the purpose, but regardless of what it is the licence fee has to stay. Could you just explain?
Deborah Williams: I think licence fee and purpose are linked, and it is linked to the idea that in democracy you need neutrality. You need to be able to go to a place where you can get information that is as neutral as it can be, that is not one-sided, that is not from any individual perspective. That is what I think the BBC should be. For me, that is its purpose and a part of that is that everybody contributes to paying for it. Everybody, whether that is from 16 to 64, or whatever it is in terms of work age, contributes to it and everybody gets something from it.
I would insist on the licence fee staying as long as the purpose is that of everybody and is neutral. If the purpose changes, then I would very deeply question the idea of the licence fee being the way to subsidise, support and build the BBC. At the moment, the licence fee is the most democratic way of supporting and subsidising the institution as it stands. There are lots of things I would do differently but, like I said, I am not director-general.
Q37 Lord Bishop of Worcester: First of all, thank you very much indeed to all four of you. It has been a really interesting and helpful session, with lots of nuanced views which are greatly appreciated.
Part of the question I was going to ask has been covered by Lord Foster, but I want to take you back to the question of legitimacy and a national broadcaster clearly has to have legitimacy. You have spoken about ways in which the BBC lacks legitimacy in some circles and ways in which it might improve. I want to ask you to sum up what your feelings are. You mentioned, Deborah, about the BBC having to “pull its socks up”. Exactly how does it need to pull its socks up” I want to just pick up a particular thing with each of you, if I may.
Mercy, you spoke about the BBC very often providing a caricatured representation of minority communities, presenting them as homogeneous entities. I think I understand how you feel about that because the same is true of faith. It is not just “The Vicar of Dibley”, but faith, and the Christian faith in particular, is very often presented as something simply to be ridiculed and not to be taken seriously. I wonder what is to be done about that.
Deborah, you spoke about trust and the importance of trust. One of the experiences I have had with the media in general is I tend to be quite trusting. I am paid to be trusting, but I read things about which I know very little and I think, “Gosh, yes”, and I take it all in. Then I read something in the media about something about which I have some knowledge and I think, “My goodness me, this is way off the mark”. I suspect that is an experience that most of us have had. How do we generate that trust, particularly in communities which are perhaps underserved at the moment?
Jasmine, you spoke about the staff at the BBC being demoralised. I am surprised to hear that. It is not the experience I have had of BBC staff who I come into contact with. Is that linked with the lack of legitimacy that they feel? How is that to be expressed?
Finally, Rob, I am wholeheartedly with you about the importance of local radio for communities, particularly those who probably would not feel they themselves could get involved in producing community radio. You were rather disparaging about the blockbusters, but those blockbusters are things that a lot of people here say the BBC is about, serving the community. If you talk about “Line of Duty” or “Strictly Come Dancing”, those are things that people here enjoy greatly, but they also make a bit of money abroad. I am a bit puzzled by that.
Apologies for the long introduction, but I am going to start with you, Mercy, if I may, about caricatured representations and so forth. The basic question is: how can the BBC improve? How can it “pull its socks up” in order to have the legitimacy that is needed by a national broadcaster?
Mercy Muroki: What I mean about the caricatures I mentioned could be summed up by saying that I am sick every time I hear about black communities in the UK. I can speak from my perspective as an immigrant; I am from Kenya originally. I am fed up each time I hear about black Britain being in the context of slavery or racism. There is a lot of that that happens. In fact, while you were speaking, I googled “BBC Black and British”. It is a strand of programmes that have been curated to appeal to a black and British audience. Scrolling through, it is all about slavery, it is all about Windrush, it is all about racism. That is one aspect of what it means to be black and British, but that is not the entirety of what it is to be black and British. There is so much more than that. I do not know how this ends up happening, but I am assuming that conversations take place where they assume that a black viewer is somebody who just wants to see something about the slave trade or that learning about black British history is learning about slavery.
I do not know what the solution is to overcome that but that is what I mean when I say caricatures. There is nothing I have ever seen from the BBC that I felt was a really rich and unique exploration of being black and British that takes into account top-level nuances. I am not sure how it can be resolved because it is hard for me to identify how that comes to be and therefore it is hard to know what needs changing in that process for that not to be the case.
Lord Bishop of Worcester: Thank you. Deborah, you do not need to talk about trust, although I would be interested to hear what you think on that, but legitimacy generally.
Deborah Williams: One of the key things is about transparency. In my current role, I collect personal, sensitive data from people. I ask them to share information about themselves. One of the things is to be transparent about what you do with that. I can appreciate what Rob and Jasmine have talked about; you pay a licence fee, the money goes into this pot, and you never really have any idea about what happens to it then, suddenly, things appear and you are expected to love them and cherish them and just believe everything about them. Then, on the other side, as you said, the communities that you come from and that you spend your life in, are represented and misrepresented in a way that throws you completely. How can I trust that you are making the best decisions for the organisation if you are not making the best decisions for me and the communities that I come from? Therefore, it is about transparency; telling us what you are doing with the money and telling us what the 360-degree feedback loop is.
It is also about communication and talking to people, asking questions, finding out what people are actually liking and enjoying—not just in a very tight narrow frame, but how you can use your complaint systems and communication channels in different ways to allow people to comment as they need to comment. Programmes where you can feed back get 15 minutes, but an hour a day is needed so that people can run through everything until you arrive at the point where people are quite tired of this and they say, “actually, it is all right because I am getting answers to questions about things that I was not sure about”.
The important thing is to stop making assumptions. As Mercy said, stop making assumptions about what you think people, in particular black communities, want to talk and hear about; stop making assumptions on the stories about black communities, minority ethnic communities, disabled people or people from multiple sexual orientation groups. Engage properly and think laterally about the sorts of stories that can be told. Why is it that a love story or a romcom is always based around a particular demographic, who tend to be straight white men of a particular age? Where are the mediocre white men, please, because I know I have experienced quite a few of them in my lifetime. I was not asking literally, obviously, as no one in this room would even come anywhere near that, but where are they? Where are they presented? Where are other communities, the mediocre ones and those more established and experienced groups that bring everything to the table? Ultimately, you do not know everything, and trust is about saying, “I don't know” and hoping that someone will say “That’s all right, I do”.
Lord Bishop of Worcester: Thank you. That is really helpful, particularly your point about transparency. Jasmine, you do not have to talk about demoralised BBC staff, although, again, I would be interested to hear more about that, but about legitimacy.
Jasmine Dotiwala: I would like to co-sign everything that Deborah said when she mentioned feedback and listening. I have worked across the mainstream broadcasters and all the digital tech companies such as Google, Twitter and YouTube, and one thing that the tech streamers do much better than the BBC is listening to what their audiences are saying, listening to what people are saying on feedback. From my friends who still work at the BBC, I know that comments on social media often go directly to the PR or the comms and marketing departments and are not shared around the whole business. When I have worked at tech companies, all the comments from the audience about a certain title or show are often shared across the business so the business brain as a whole understands what people are saying about content.
In relation to demoralised staff, people who work at the BBC, including myself in the past, do so for the name—“the BBC”. It is a brand. It is a big brand. It is a globally recognised brand, and it is respected. You do not work there because of the salary. When I say demoralised—the salaries are way out. They cannot compete in the rest of the market. Another reason the staff are frustrated is that your employers are often muzzling your voice. We are talking about impartiality all the time and, of course, impartiality is crucial, but it is crucifying the BBC and it is making it lose key names across its news department. It is not human to not have opinions in this day and age. We are living in the age of mass global opinion shaping people’s minds and society, and other media organisations and platforms employ staff who have openly public opinions but still manage to create impartial, factually correct content. That should also be possible at the BBC. When I talk about people being demoralised, I mean people who work in media have opinions and voices and they want to share them and they are often muzzled, so it can be quite demoralising.
Talking about solutions, the BBC can employ people from underserved communities in good numbers. As I said earlier, the more underserved you are as a community in the UK, the less likely you are to be employed across the BBC. It should create more hubs in the towns and cities, regionally and nationally, and distribute more power to the regions to justify and reflect the whole country equally. The BBC should work more with local TV and radio that is already set up and doing good work in those small towns and cities. Why would you go in there and try to reinvent the wheel? It is arrogant as there are people there, like Rob, who are doing the work already. There should be open applications for new ideas, content, shows, writers. You should have little creative hubs all around the country to develop talent because that eventually pipes through to the mainstream platforms.
There should be more funded BBC training programmes but not at entry level because there are hundreds of those and, while they are important, they can create a stifling environment. For example, the entry-level people that I have trained are suddenly at junior level and cannot get anywhere so they just drop out and so you get more entry-level programmes. You need more programmes to take people from junior to mid and mid to senior C-suite levels. That is where the industry is failing underserved communities.
Once underrepresented staff arrive at the BBC, they have to be trusted to create content with autonomy. As I said before, ideas are often creatively chipped away at. People are not supported or mentored into that next level of progression. There is a multitude of things that it is doing to create good value with those communities but there are also things that are stopping it and could be quite easily changed with that structural model.
Crucially, when it comes to future BBC funding, the salaries of the BBC leadership team should be directly tied to those targets, as they are across many American businesses. We all know that change happens and is signed off at the top, so the change within the BBC business will happen much more swiftly if the bosses are matched with the strategy to reflect those of us who are paying the licence.
Lord Bishop of Worcester: Thank you very much indeed, that is very helpful. Rob.
Dr Rob Watson: One of the principles that is enshrined in the legislation, the Communications Act 2003, which brought about Ofcom, is two principal duties of Ofcom: “to further the interests of citizens” and “to further the interests of consumers”. Citizens come first and we should not consider the BBC by itself. We have to consider it in the regulation of media more broadly and now with the online harms Bill, that context is important, but I feel that citizenship has been left out of the agenda for a number of years now.
Commercial providers have subsidies through, for example, the Audio Content Fund, and the television fund and the children’s media funds and have the freedom to operate in the marketplace and are very happy with that but they do not get public subsidy; they do not get public money. Public money should be directed towards issues and media that are not going to find their place in the marketplace. That principle of the BBC is sound and maintains the reason we need the BBC. To justify the BBC having that public money, it has to have a stronger public purpose and a public set of values.
I go back to the levelling-up White Paper and why is it not integrated in the BBC model of dealing with disparities—social disparities, educational disparities, health disparities, economic disparities? What is the role that media can play for public purpose? We have established this in public procurement in local government and the health service through the Public Services (Social Value) Act. We asked those questions. We are not just putting it out to the free market, we are saying there is a public interest. There is a public need that has to be served but we never include our media in that because we tend to prioritise consumer-based ideas over citizenship-based ideas. So, who is being served? What is being said?
There is a good way to think about this. It is the difference between media that gives you what you can care about and media that helps you to care for things. For example, I care about the environment. How do I care about the environment? I watch David Attenborough, and I love the penguins on it. Do I have a penguin? No. What do I care for? I have a cat. So that is the starting point for social change. That is the starting point for citizenship. That is the starting point for taking responsibility.
Somehow our media has become this detached, professionalised culture which moves away from real people. I help out a group in Leicester, the Evington Echo. I went for a walk with the editor of the Evington Echo. Her name is Helen, she is in her mid-70s, and she has run the Echo since the 1980s. It is a community newspaper. While we were walking, Helen was stopped in the street so many times by people who know her. You cannot get that with the editor of BBC Leicester. People do not know who these people are, but that sense of engagement and ownership of our media and participation in our media is part of our civic responsibilities, it is part of our civic duties.
The consolidation that has been allowed to go through in the last few years in British radio is based around format, centralisation of programming and the conglomeration of these things, and nobody has batted an eyelid and said, “Hang on a minute”. When we look at the really effective points that are made in the levelling-up White Paper about people’s pride in their local place, it talks about neighbourhoods and high streets; how do you know that people have pride in their neighbourhood and in their high street? You visit. You can see it, but what media tells you about that? Unless they have a vibrant, local mixture of commercial, public service and community media that speaks of the people by the people for the people—to use a clichéd phrase—you have no idea. You can drive through the UK, and you can listen to stations that do not tell you a distinctive difference between any place; it is homogenised. We have to pull it back to the groundwork, the boots on the ground, the people who deliver stuff and build it up.
I liked Deborah’s point; it was to almost start again. We cannot just start again but what we can do is train the next generation of media professionals to not be so obsessed with the marketplace, to include in our media literacies and training and our university courses and our media skills courses topics such as social engagement and social action. What is the call to action that comes with our media? What is the thing that you are going to do? What is the thing that you are going to change? What is the thing that you are going to value about your local community? That is the mindset I would like to see all the way down to the bottom at the BBC. That is the purpose: you join the BBC because you have that in mind.
Maybe that is naive and idealistic, but it is what we try to do when community media works well: put the responsibility and the power into the hands of the people to speak for themselves. If they get it wrong, and if they do it badly, it is an opportunity for people to learn. I like the William Morris—was it?—quote: don’t ask what you get for something, ask what you become. If we switch our media around, our thinking about media that is supported by the state and gets public subsidy, that asks everybody to buy into that, that is the kind of question we should be asking about people’s motives for producing the kind of media that they do. After that, leave it for people to get on with and I am sure they will come up with really great stuff.
The Chair: That is probably a good place to finish this session. I am grateful to all four of you for your contributions, which have been wide and varied. You have given us quite a lot of food for thought and things to reflect on after this session and as we proceed with the inquiry. Thank you.
