House of Commons Hansard Debates for 1 May 1991

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company logos on the front of Hansard ? Why not have the Strangers Gallery sponsored, with company logos displayed on it? We might even have company hospitality suites, where people could watch Prime Minister's Question Time with drinks and smoked salmon. That seems to be the logic of the commercial approach. I see hon. Members nodding, but no one wants to say anything. I will gladly give way to any hon. Member who thinks that we should have company hospitality suites.

Mr. Austin Mitchell : Since my hon. Friend is talking about commercial matters, may I tell him that my speeches are now available on an 0896 number for 35p a minute at the off-peak rate. It is the only service on that number where the heavy breathing is at my end.

Mr. Grocott : I hope that the possibility of the Commons signal being sponsored is as ludicrous to everyone as is the suggestion of sponsorship of the other two means of communication, Hansard and the Strangers Gallery. The Select Committee could at least have ruled that out by voting for my amendment.

We come back to the two fundamental differences which make it impossible for me to support the Select Committee report. As a Select Committee we had the job of recommending a permanent system for televising the proceedings of the House--a tremendous advance in our democracy which has been enormously successful. The report, unlike most Select Committee reports, was never going to gather dust. It was to provide the guidelines for operators, for the basis of the financial arrangements and for the way in which we should deliver the signal to our constituents. I fear that we have produced a rambling shambles of a document which does not address the two key issues but comes up with a botched compromise which is inconsistent. I hope that my hon. Friends and many other hon. Members will support the amendment.

5.3 pm

Mr. Anthony Nelson (Chichester) : I should like to start by paying tribute to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, as chairman of the House of Commons Broadcasting Unit Ltd. The role of the Chairman of Ways and Means has not been fully recognised. It may yet continue to be important in any survivor to the HOCBUL arrangement. I should like to say on behalf of the Select Committee, if I may, that the House is grateful to you for what you have done in that regard.

Tributes are due from lowly members of the Select Committee, first, to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, who picked up the baton at a difficult time and who managed the proceedings of the Committee with great skill, sensitivity and leadership. It was also appropriate that one member of the Select Committee was elevated to be Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister. Through your chairmanship of the Committee, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and through that elevation, the Committee had a new influence.

Hon. Members who have followed the matter since February 1988 feel that it is of great consequence, and that what the House has achieved in implementing the televising of its proceedings is nothing less than a major constitutional step in democratic progress. Those who would cast such things aside and make light of them fail to

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recognise the great benefits that televising has already brought to parliamentary communication and public understanding of our proceedings.

It has rightly been pointed out that many of the alarmist fears expressed in 1988 have given way to a recognition that it is in our interests and in the public interest for the House to be televised. Far from the procedures or the cherished traditions of the House being abandoned, by and large they have carried on much as before. The only change for the better is that people can see more clearly and understand not just by listening or reading what we are about. I give two major examples in the last year, the first more uncomfortable than the second. During the leadership change in the Government, I believe that it was important for the public to see what was happening in the House. They were entitled to judge by the contributions and emotion of the House the decisions that we were taking. Uncomfortable as the aftermath may have been for some of us, I believe that what happened has been vindicated by events and judged by television to be right. The new leader of the Government and of the Conservative party is an outstanding leader who comes over extremely well to the public.

The second example was the Gulf war. I remember vividly being in the Chamber during the emergency debate on the Falklands, as will other right hon. and hon. Members. On that great, sensitive and important occasion, there was no television. The public were unaware of the emotion of the House. It was up to us vicariously to report it to our constituents. During the Gulf war, there was great public interest day by day in the statements in the House and in the representations of hon. Members on behalf of constituents. All the people have been able to use the new medium to see the democratic process at work through a visual report which did not exist previously. I profoundly believe that Parliament has taken an historic step forward in introducing the televising of the House and that future generations will be indebted to its courage in making that decision.

Mr. Gale : My hon. Friend has said that the public can now see great, important and sensitive decisions. He is right, provided news editors consider that those decisions are great, important and sensitive, but great, important and sensitive decisions which affect tiny communities such as the Scottish fishermen are being, and will be, denied the very coverage to which my hon. Friend thinks they are entitled.

Mr. Nelson : I agree with my hon. Friend. I should like to see more regional coverage and more television coverage of Back-Bench contributions on issues of importance to our constituents. However, I disagree with him to the extent that I feel that much of the coverage would never have taken place before. There is more net television coverage of regional and individual issues than ever before. It is a net benefit, and a great step forward. More could be done to draw attention to regional and individual issues, and that is part of the debate about a dedicated channel.

I want to turn to future arrangements and the setting up of a parliamentary broadcasting unit. As I said in an earlier intervention, although I respect the point of view of the hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mr. Grocott), I believe

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that we will have the best of both worlds under the proposed arrangements. As we will have a majority of the board members of the new broadcasting unit, we will have control over a body which will be spending a sizeable sum of money--some £2 million this year--broadly half of which is the cost of the broadcasters. The other half covers the cost of the House of Commons and the Government. So it will be half private sector and half public sector, but wholly in the control of the House. There would have to be pretty compelling reasons for us to insist that the private sector made no financial contribution, although that would not result in any substantial benefit in terms of the control or direction of the broadcasting unit.

It is important to remember that nothing is immutable. We can change things. If it does not work out and a broadcasting company defaults, the matter can come back to the House and we can make other arrangements. However, after the tried and tested experience of the experimental period, why should we reject a contribution from the broadcasting companies, which in my view have been generous and responsible in the way in which they have conducted those affairs, and insist, perhaps for some ideological reason, that the entire cost should be carried by the House? I do not think that it is necessary, and if we can mitigate the cost, so much the better.

We will also have to consider carefully the arrangements for a permanent channel. I have said in previous debates that I would like as many people as possible to be able to tune in to a debate of their interest--not just to see the highlights on the news at 6 o'clock or9 o'clock but to see an entire debate. Only by listening and watching an entire debate can those interested in a particular matter get the full flavour and meaning of the issues being debated in the House. We will find that there is an enormous latent audience interested in particular issues.

Experience in Canada suggests that, when there is a debate on agriculture, a vast community of people who are directly affected by the issues and decisions of their legislature will listen in. Many of them will watch the debates more avidly than Members of Parliament and become extremely well tutored and informed. Admittedly, they will then put pressure on us as their elected representatives, but if we are aiming for a more informed public debate about major issues, we have everything to gain and nothing to fear from a dedicated channel.

Mr. Tony Banks : The hon. Gentleman is making a very good point. He is right to say that global viewing figures give a completely misleading impression. We should be looking at the different interest groups that will watch different debates at different times according to the subject that is being discussed. All those interest groups add up to some pretty impressive viewing figures.

Mr. Nelson : The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Research carried out in Britain and abroad shows that a surprising number of special interest groups would benefit from such access. It should be our business to communicate to them by making that signal available. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House said that it was not technical problems that were holding us back. I believe that technical problems are holding us back. If it were now possible at a reasonable cost to have a terrestrial channel available so that our constituents could switch to Channel 12, for example, and watch the proceedings of the

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House in the same way as people can watch the proceedings in Canada, I would be in favour of that, and I would be prepared to vote for rendering public moneys for it.

Half our job is to do our job and the other half is to communicate what we are doing. It is an important part of our votes and our proceedings to spend money on telling our public and our representatives what we are doing. If it could be done at a reasonable cost, and the technology allowed a terrestrial channel, we would vote in favour of it. However, it is not possible. I understand that only one terrestrial channel is available in addition to the four existing channels, and that is the proposed Channel 5. It would be difficult to argue on an opportunity cost basis that we should take that channel. Apart from the fact that the costs would be enormous, we would be denying many other franchises and companies that wished to use it. For the time being at least, and largely for technological reasons, we are limited to providing a dedicated channel by means of either a cable message from the House or via a satellite communication to those who receive it directly from a satellite or those who receive their television on a cable, which in turn receives a message via a satellite.

It matters not to me whether the satellite that communicates our signal is of a new or old variety, providing that it does the job. The key question is how many people will be able to tune in and obtain the dedicated channel from the cable system. Under any of the options currently available, a relatively small proportion of the viewing populace will be able to see our dedicated gavel-to-gavel proceedings, whether we adopt the proposals of my hon. Friend the Member for Thanet, North (Mr. Gale) or the line taken by the hon. Member for The Wrekin. We can only move with what is available. The proposals made present the opportunity of immediacy rather than further delay before our public are allowed to see a channel dedicated to the proceedings of the House. We have the opportunity to reach many more people than we do currently and much more gavel-to-gavel continuous coverage of entire debates. As that is a practical proposition that will be available from the autumn this year, the House ought to buy it.

For all those reasons, I believe that the proposed organisation and medium of communication are reasonable, practical and viable. It would be a further great step forward if the House were to approve the Committee's recommendations tonight.

5.17 pm

Mr. Merlyn Rees (Morley and Leeds, South) : I shall be voting for the recommendations that have been made ; I shall also support the amendment for which I voted in Committee.

In my view, we should have a broadcasting unit as a Department of the House. I accept what the Leader of the House said, that there is parliamentary control over the method that the Committee proposed. I also accept his view that the reason that we have got no further is purely financial and not ideological.

Some years ago, when I was chairman of the all-party group on televising the House, when televising the House was not as popular as it became after the experiment, I visited a number of different parts of the world where the legislatures had broadcasting units.

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A broadcasting unit is not some left-wing ideological idea. The first time I saw it was in the United States of America. The Senate had a broadcasting unit that we visited. Those who worked for it were employees of the Senate. Just as Mr. Speaker plays an important part, although not directly, in the way in which the experiment is conducted in the House and the cameras are used, in the Senate that comes under the general guidance of the Leader of the House. As the years develop, we must bear in mind that broadcasting unit--an electronic Hansard. As the hon. Member for Chichester (Mr. Nelson) said, who knows what may happen next year? The hon. Member for Chichester and I may disagree when we vote, but in the past two or three years that we have been on the Committee we have followed lines of thought as far as we thought possible and then, six months later, on the advice of the staff who work to us, we find that a chink of light appears and we move in a direction that we had not thought was possible. Over 200 years, Hansard has developed in a particular way and has a world reputation for what it does, but there must be an electronic Hansard as well.

I want to deal with the location of the broadcasting unit, whatever its name. In our report we disagreed with the conclusion reached by the Accommodation and Administration Sub-Committee that the new control room should not be sited within Central Lobby. We went up the Central Lobby tower--I did not even know it existed--to see what it was like. It was like a 1930s version I am old enough to have seen it--of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". It is extraordinary. One felt that if one put a foot wrong, one could float or perhaps fall down. In the report, we reiterate our preference for the Central Lobby tower as the location for the proposed integrated control room, and we recommend that that solution should be adopted by the House, provided that the remaining practical difficulties can be overcome. As I have said, I am in favour of a broadcasting unit. It should be located in the House and not across the road. We would not put Hansard across the road in the Queen Elizabeth II buildings. Hansard belongs to the House of Commons. It is important that it is here for security reasons, let alone all the other reasons for its presence here over the past 200 years. I sometimes think that those with whom we argue do not have the right idea even about the Committee's proposal for something that is not a full broadcasting unit. They think that it is something to do with the BBC, the Independent Television Commission or those television people, and that the best place for it is away from the House of Commons, because it is a slight nuisance and not a real adjunct to the work of the House.

Our experiment has shown that the televising of Parliament is as important as Hansard and is having a profound effect on the way in which the British people look at the House of Commons and the way it works. The attitude of some in the House is similar to a story that I heard when I was in the Royal Air Force at the beginning of the war. The RAF had used carriers for planes before the war. The Royal Navy guided the small carriers and the RAF did the flying. A naval captain would not turn his vessel into the wind because he believed that the advice from the young RAF personnel was nonsense. Until the

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planes went into the sea, he was not prepared to listen to a new idea. He believed that it was nothing to do with the Royal Navy. Some people seem to think that the televising of the House is not part of the House of Commons and that it should be located with the broadcasters. They seem to believe that it can be brought in with wires or something of that sort.

I have sat through all our deliberations in Committee mainly to speak in support of the idea that the integrated control room should, if possible, be located in the House, and the central unit should be above Central Lobby.

Regional coverage is one of the good things to come out of the televising of Parliament. Northern Ireland, where I was earlier this week, picks up the contributions of the 16 Members who attend the House from the Province. When I return home to my native Wales, I see that it picks up matters concerning that area. I am sure that the same happens in Scotland. I wish that it happened in the English regions. I imagine that London Members miss out, because everything tends to be national. However, at least something is happening on regional coverage.

I am glad that more is to happen on Committee coverage. Over the past two or three years, all the members of the Select Committee have spoken in favour of Committee coverage. I hope that it will go further. In the autumn, there will be another step forward. The work in Committee, particularly when we have a dedicated channel, will be of great interest, if not to people in general, to interest groups concerned with certain aspects of legislation.

As I have said, some years ago I was the chairman of the all-party group on the televising of Parliament. I was moved by the feeling that the spread of democracy demanded that people should see what goes on. Even now, some things are not understood. If this debate were being televised, people would ask why so few Members were in the Chamber. In fact, I am cutting a Committee upstairs now. Many other things take place here than just a perpetual meeting of the "city council". However, many of the great occasions or events, such as the virtual disappearance from political life of the previous Prime Minister, will enliven a discussion for centuries to come. I wish that we could have seen the debates on the American colonies that took place in the Chamber round the corner, between Pitt and Fox. It would have been wonderful to comprehend the real arguments. Nowadays, they are over-simplified. In the new book about Lord Halifax, "The Holy Fox", I read another interpretation of the events of 1940 when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister and Lord Halifax nearly became Prime Minister. There are bits of that that would not have been shown on television. As late as 1941--I am sure that the hon. Member for Halesowen and Stourbridge (Sir J. Stokes) was not aware of it ; I was not--members of the Government were having discussions with the Germans in Switzerland. Had I known, I would have been less keen on what I was doing. That would not have appeared on television, but one would have been able to see the mood of the House.

We are not doing this for historical reasons, although that issue arises. The televising of Parliament is an important social and political development. It has not ruined newspapers. It has made some of the superficial reporting of the House almost redundant. Newspaper

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commentators who look at this place in depth have not had their work made easier, but one reads them in a different context when one can watch events on television.

I commend the report. For the reasons given by my hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin (Mr. Grocott) I shall be voting for the amendment, because that is the way that we have to go. I voted for it in Committee. In general, it is an excellent report and we should commend the Leader of the House since he has taken over the chairmanship. We should also commend the Supervisor of Broadcasting and his staff, without whom we would not have got nearly as far. We should also commend the Clerks of the Committee. Hon. Members attend every couple of weeks and express our views, but the work is done by others.

We are moving in the right direction. The televising of Parliament is of great importance. This is not the end of the story. It will develop in other ways. It is important that we have a dedicated channel. We have moved towards that, and it is important that we go further.

5.39 pm

Mr. Roger Gale (Thanet, North) : I voted against the report of the Select Committee on Broadcasting and I regret that I cannot support it tonight. Like the hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mr. Grocott), I have been a member of the Committee since it first sat and, like him, I enjoyed its deliberations enormously. I appreciated the chairmanship of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Surrey, East (Sir G. Howe), my right hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, South and Maldon (Mr. Wakeham) and the present Leader of the House. The work of the Committee has added greatly to the appreciation of our work by those outside the House.

Until now, the Committee has sought to deliver the best to the House and to the public. It saddens me enormously to have to say that I believe that we are asking the House to accept second best. When we began our deliberations, we were criticised for taking a long time to get the technology right and were accused of shilly-shallying. We were told, "We know that you are opposed to it ; get the cameras in." We resisted that temptation and as a result of the work of the Committee, of visits to Canada and of our examination of the work of C-Span--which has been referred to often and to which I shall refer again--we were able to deliver state-of-the-art technology and an improved lighting system.

I should like to pay tribute to all the technicians involved and to the Supervisor of Broadcasting for their hard work, and to the Director of Television, Mr. Patrick Harpur, and the people working with him since televising began. The technical quality of sound in the Chamber may leave something to be desired, but the technical quality of the pictures has been first rate. That has been recognised in the United Kingdom and worldwide. It is a pity therefore that we are falling down badly in this report. Since televising the House began, it has been claimed that we are seeking to enhance democracy. Over and again, hon. Members have reiterated the importance of public access to the work of the Chamber. My hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr. Nelson) made much play of that.

The proposals in the report will not enhance democracy and public access to the Chamber but, sadly, will restrict them. If we adopt the report, we will put into the hands of

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broadcasters--the BBC and ITN--the editorial control of the television coverage of the House. We will be paying lip service to the concept of a dedicated channel, which, as the hon. Member for The Wrekin said, was determined in our first report. We will hand control to an American cable company. I have no quarrel with the professional ability and technical expertise of United Artists--I am sure that it will do a good job--but I question whether the Canadian Parliament would hand control of its dedicated channel to the Americans, or whether the Americans would give the control of C-Span to the Japanese. It is curious that the mother of Parliaments is preparing to hand to an overseas company control--without offering it to anybody else, which is the crucial point--of something that does not approach a dedicated channel.

As my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House said, the Select Committee on Broadcasting considered offers from three companies. For what? For the provision of a dedicated channel. No one is interested in the scraps left by the BBC and ITN. It is inconceivable that any company considering a dedicated channel would consider those leftovers to be commercially viable.

Much has been made of the prospects for funding a unit at the House and a dedicated channel. I believe that they cannot be separated ; they must be considered together. The Committee failed to grasp the fact that the production of a signal from the House and its transmission to the public by a dedicated channel should be inseparable. That is why the proposal is half-baked. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House said that the production of a signal from the Chamber and a dedicated channel would cost millions of pounds, but he did not quantify the figure.

I am sorry that I cannot agree totally with the hon. Member for The Wrekin, and I shall explain why later. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the public subsidy of public information services. My best estimate suggests that the House spends more than £450 million a year on public information services, such as the BBC World Service, S4C, the Central Office of Information and Hansard. That is a colossal sum. To pretend that the House has never set a precedent for subsidising information from the House is wrong. During the passage of the Broadcasting Bill, the House committed itself to spending £10 million a year to provide a Gaelic service to a maximum audience of 80,000 people, yet we are not prepared to spend less than that sum to carry the proceedings of the mother of Parliaments to the electorate of the United Kingdom. That is quite incredible.

I disagree with the amendment, because I do not believe that it is necessary for the House to provide that massive subsidy. A unit of the House, either by franchise or by direct control, should be able to sell its signals not only to the BBC and the independent television companies, which quite properly will want to use excerpts, but to overseas organisations such as CNN, C-Span, the Canadian Broadcasting Services, and to the Commonwealth countries and private industry. In the long term, such an operation, considered as a whole and not in part, as the report has, should be commercially viable. If the House has to underwrite that in the short term, that is entirely proper, because having voted the end, we should vote the means. We have said time and again that the British public should have the right to see the proceedings of the House. The Select Committee on Broadcasting will consider a practice undertaken by the hon. Member for Banff and

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Buchan (Mr. Salmond), who showed Scottish fishermen in his constituency an excerpt from a debate in the House that was relevant to them. No one would suggest that that debate was of riveting interest to the vast majority of people in the rest of the United Kingdom, but it affected the livelihoods of fishermen in Scotland. They had a passionate and burning interest and naturally wanted to see it. Why did he have to take a cassette to his constituents so that they could watch our deliberations? Why were they unable to watch it on a dedicated channel? Answer : because, having willed the ends, the House refuses to will the means.

My hon. Friend the Member for Chichester asked whether the problem was technical. The technical solution that we are being offered--again, I disagree with the hon. Member for The Wrekin--is a cable service that will reach a maximum audience of 250,000 people, and, by the end of the century, will perhaps reach 4.5 million people.

In my maiden speech, I advocated the development of cable. I am passionately committed to that development, because I believe that cable delivery will be the system for homes of the future, not only for television pictures and entertainment, but for home services, for data and for telephone. I have never made a secret of my belief, but it would be wrong to suggest that such a development will be rapid. It would be even more wrong to suggest that it would not be many years--if ever--before large areas of the United Kingdom, and especially rural areas, received cable. Are we saying that people in rural areas--for example, the farming constituencies that I and many other hon. Members represent--shall not have access to the proceedings of the House? It is already available to them.

It is suggested that United Artists, having seized its opportunity to steal a march on the rest of the industry to provide the cable service to a quarter of a million people out of the whole electorate of the United Kingdom, should take the Marco Polo satellite dish, which was discarded by BSB, and deliver the signal to the home by that means.

There is no question but that, on the cheap, that satellite would be a good mode of delivery to cable head ends for United Artists. Nobody would deny that, but are we seriously suggesting that the people who have an interest in watching the unedited proceedings of the House will buy from a warehouse full of unused squarial technology that is already out of date? The hon. Member for The Wrekin said that it was a first-rate system. It is sad that, like other first-rate systems in other technologies, it is already out of date. To tell someone to buy a squarial is like today telling someone to buy a Philips cassette system.

Mr. Tony Banks : Or a Trabant.

Mr. Gale : The hon. Member for Newham, North-West (Mr. Banks) mentions a Trabant. I hesitate to put the Marco Polo satellite and the MAC technology in the same class as the Trabant. The Marco Polo satellite is as out of date as the Greater London council. I am not surprised that the hon. Member for Newham, North-West promotes out-of-date technology, because that is in line with much of his party's thinking on many issues. Marco Polo is about as much use as a flying dustbin, and we should recognise that. The MAC technology that has been

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developed is out of date. Successful digital television transmission trials are taking place in the United States, and they represent the technology of tomorrow.

Mr. Banks : I am grateful to the hon. Member, because, apart from his rather unkind comments about the GLC, he is making an interesting, useful and informative speech. He has far more technical knowledge than I, so I hope that he will tell us whether--as the hon. Member for Chichester (Mr. Nelson) said--it is impossible to establish a terrestrial channel with an allocated frequency.

Mr. Gale : I am grateful to the hon. Member for leading me to the end of my speech. My hon. Friend the Member for Chichester said that the difficulties were technical, not financial. I must gainsay that. I noted with great care the criteria listed by my right hon. Friend when he promoted the report. He said that the criteria applied by the Select Committee were parliamentary control--quite

rightly--cost-effectiveness and the fair distribution of costs. Not one criterion relates to the public availability of the proceedings of the House. My right hon. Friend also said that the difficulties were not technical, but financial, whereas my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester says that it is not technically possible.

I wish to return to a point made by an hon. Member who is not here and whose name escapes me for the moment. He has done much work on the subject, and suggested a while ago that there should be a dedicated channel as a prerequisite to the televising of the House. I supported his amendment to the last report. We were told that we were trying to obstruct further televising of the House, but the Committee went ahead and persuaded Sky Television, with help from British Telecom and Astra, to provide a channel. For one glorious fortnight at the start of the experiment, when the cameras were first switched on, there was gavel-to-gavel coverage--as the Americans would say--or mace-to-mace coverage as we would prefer to say. There were no technical problems.

My hon. Friend the Member for Chichester will intervene in a moment if I do not answer his unasked question. Technically, delivery is possible, but who can receive it? The answer is, people with Astra satellite reception, Sky or whichever system one chooses which goes directly into the home. Such systems are now readily receivable. Anyone in the United Kingdom who wants to receive the broadcast can do so. It is clear that, for the foreseeable future, the majority of people in outlying areas that will not have cable will have to rely on satellite reception, not only for the televised proceedings of the House but for the many entertainment services that will be developed.

It is possible for us to set up a unit of the House. The Select Committee saw the unit of the House that was established in Canada and the excellent OASIS information system enjoyed by Canadian members. Many of us have been to the United States--the work of C-Span has been mentioned several times. American citizens have not one, but two television channels from their Houses--or legislature--which carry not only the unedited proceedings, but valuable background information. The channels also operate when the Houses are not sitting.

In America, there has been no difficulty in filling air time on C-Span. Can anyone seriously suggest that, during the long and short recesses of the House, there is not a wealth of Committee material and material from another

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place for which there is usually no time during ordinary transmissions? Is anyone suggesting that there would not be a demand for that?

Mr. Rees : I should have intervened when the hon. Gentleman mentioned the argument, which I support, for a Department of the House. I am concerned about the lack of facilities in areas such as that which I represent. For a long time to come, I do not envisage many people in such areas being able to tap into a terrestrial channel

Mr. Tony Banks : Satellite.

Mr. Rees : --into satellite or cable. He is not answering the main question with which we are wrestling. What about the spare channel? I am not saying that we could have it, but the only way that people in my area could see the proceedings would be to use Channel 5.

Mr. Gale : The hon. Gentleman must concede that, technically, Channel 5 will also not reach the whole of the United Kingdom. That is a technical fact of life. The reception equipment for direct broadcast satellite is relatively inexpensive. Many people have already bought dishes in order to receive entertainment channels. I find it hard to believe that people who want to receive the proceedings of the House--such as those in community centres or in businesses--would not buy dishes. A whole raft of organisations would undoubtedly want to receive the proceedings, but we are denying people the opportunity to do so. I am not talking about universal coverage. I am not saying that everyone who wants to watch will automatically be able to do so by a flick of the button on their existing television sets. That is patently not so. But what I am suggesting is far better than what is proposed in the report. The Select Committee has failed the House--it is as simple as that--by not considering the whole package, by not inviting tenders or inviting willing broadcasters to come to the House, to work with us as a unit of the House but to take over the televising of the Chamber and then take the signal to the entire British public.

It is quite simple. If the Director of Television were to widen his shot to show the Chamber as it is now, the British public would see that this half- empty Chamber of the House of Commons is, if it adopts the report, going to vote to deny the public access to its proceedings.

5.49 pm

Mr. Charles Kennedy (Ross, Cromarty and Skye) : I hope that the hon. Member for Thanet, North (Mr. Gale) will forgive me if I do not pursue the aspects of the report or the line of argument that he pursued. As he is aware, I do not command anything like his technical expertise about the different systems and options which may or may not be available.

Like the right hon. Member for Morley and Leeds, South (Mr. Rees), I do not share the apocalyptic view of the report expressed by hon. Members on both sides of the House. The Select Committee has done a reasonable job. Although the right hon. Member for Morley and Leeds, South and I voted in different ways when we came formally to approve the report--I voted for the report that does not mean that the right hon. Gentleman and I depart from the sentiment expressed in the Labour party's amendment. If there is to be a Division at the end of this debate, those of us who feel that these matters are

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important should register that fact in the Lobbies. However, I would hate to see the report fall at this juncture. I suspect that the right hon. Member for Morley and Leeds, South and I share the same opinion about that, despite the fact that we voted in different ways at the end of the Select Committee's proceedings.

Of those deserving congratulations on the success of the televising experiment so far, I single out the broadcasters. I recall the original debate that was so skilfully introduced by the hon. Member for Chichester (Mr. Nelson), and I remember some of the dire warnings that were uttered on that occasion. If the word "apocalypse" is appropriate, I remember the apocalyptic speech of the right hon. Member for Chingford (Mr. Tebbit) and the dreadful warnings about what the horrible, awful, scheming, plotting and subversive broadcasters would do if, in our naivety, the House was collectively to allow the broadcasters through the door.

All political parties have rows with specific programmes, editors and certain aspects of editorial policy. When televising any set event in the Chamber or in a studio, the programme editor or director and broadcaster want to make a good, enlightening televisual package which viewers will want to watch and which will therefore help ratings and will, in the words of the BBC's charter, "inform, educate and entertain." At times we achieve all three in our proceedings in the House.

I pay a particular tribute, as other hon. Members have, to the Supervisor of Broadcasting, John Grist, and to Anthony Hall and the other people involved. Members of the Select Committee and other hon. Members who have had dealings with those gentlemen know that they are friendly, approachable and, above all, professional in their approach to the task.

I suppose that a slight pat on the back is due to the House of Commons for its wisdom in supporting the hon. Member for Chichester when he moved the original motion and for some of the side benefits that have accrued from televising. I would sum up the latter as being slightly smarter suits and slightly snappier speeches.

Other hon. Members expressed relief about the fact that the cameras have been here for the past six months. If one were to take a six-month slice of British politics since 1945, one would be hard pressed to find many more major dramatic events, ranging from a change of Prime Minister to the Gulf war, than we have had in the past six months.

The change of Prime Minister was a tremendous political and human drama, ranging from the resignation speech of the former deputy Prime Minister through to the outcome of the first ballot and then the marvellous debate on the Floor of the House after the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Finchley (Mrs. Thatcher), announced her intention not to contest the second ballot. After the first ballot, the former Prime Minister was reminiscent of Gloria Swanson in "Sunset Boulevard." After the result of the second ballot the right hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) was somewhat reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe because it transpired that Conservative Members did not, at the end of the day, prefer blondes.

Thank goodness all that drama is on tape. Future generations of school pupils and students will be able to see that living history enjoyed by hon. Members and the very few who were able to sit in the Press Gallery or in the Strangers' Gallery. Those events can be shared with future generations, and that is a tremendous tribute to the success of broadcasting.

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I recall the afternoon when the former deputy Prime Minister made his resignation statement. I agree with the hon. Member for Chichester. Many people throughout the country were able to say that they realised just how politically significant that event was because they could see the expressions on the faces of the other hon. Members around him and the face of one hon. Member in particular who winced at the comments that were being made. That brought the luminosity of truth to bear on political proceedings. Following that, there was no way in which politicians of any persuasion could present a different conception of the events that took place. That is a tremendous plus.

Mr. Peter Bottomley (Eltham) : The hon. Member is right. However, that kind of issue is not at stake. The Select Committee's hearings at Thames Television revealed that for about £5 million topics other than selected news and general current affairs coverage could be broadcast. Other issues could be covered which are not so important to most people but which might be significant to a minority who would otherwise have to refer to Hansard and therefore lose much of the immediacy of what goes on here.

Mr. Kennedy : The hon. Member for Thanet, North referred to the fishing incident. Although the 90-minute debate about that was not available throughout the north of Scotland where it was of tremendous interest, a substantial package was shown on Grampian Television's regional wrap-up programme "North Tonight". No doubt aspects of similar debates would be broadcast in the south-west or in Cornwall and in the constituency of the hon. Member for St. Ives (Mr. Harris). The regional components of the BBC and ITN allow for such coverage. The BBC has given commendable attention to the work of the Select Committees and has allowed specific points to be focused upon. I do not dissent from the point made by the hon. Member for Eltham (Mr. Bottomley). However, within the constraints available in the original scheduling, the broadcasters have done an extremely good job, given the scale of events in any 24-hour period in this building. I want to make a few brief points about the report and the implications for the future. I support the view that we should move towards a dedicated channel. The hon. Member for Thanet, North was absolutely right. As we move towards such a channel, I hope that we will consider the OASIS and C-Span facilities which we saw in Ottawa and which are also used in Washington DC. Facilities for hon. Members in the Palace of Westminster would thereby be greatly improved in terms of the visual technology available in offices and elsewhere. My second point relates to the rather vexed question of what is to become of the new control room and where it is to be located. I support the view expressed in the report that it should be within the Central Lobby Tower. I appreciate that the Accommodation and Administration Sub-Committee has expressed some anxiety about that and that it prefers the Millbank location to a location within the precincts of the Palace. Paragraph 61 of the report points out that there is much to be said for a secure on-site television interview facility inside the building--not just for the convenience of Members, but to prevent a recurrence of the sad events of recent times.

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At the time of the change in the Tory party leadership, a media circus was in progress across the street on College green. Given the number of politicians who were trotting across the green to offer their opinions on that rolling news item over a period of about a fortnight, a blind terrorist with blanks who ran amok would have been hard pushed to fail to hit someone--probably a member of the Cabinet. Similarly, special occasions such as the Queen's Speech and the Budget must now provide some of the best targets for terrorism in the world. Special prefabricated studios are now increasingly common on such occasions : broadcasters set them up so that they can use the Westminster backdrop, and they are illuminated in the evening. Finally, I want to make a third-party point. In the Committee, I represent not only the Liberal Democrats but other "third parties" in the House with an interest in this matter. I shall not stray from the subject that, technically, we are discussing--the report --but I think that it would be inappropriate for me not to point out that the "third parties" in the House have traditionally complained about their lack of opportunities in comparison with the two parties that form the "usual channels" under our existing procedures. If television is a long overdue step towards opening up the House of Commons, I hope that it will also prove to be a welcome step in the direction of further full-scale parliamentary reform that will change our methods of operation completely.

The voices of the parliamentary prophets of doom have largely become siren, if not wholly silent--although I suspect that one voice on the Conservative Back Benches is not about to be silenced. Those voices that remain are, I think, discordant, for televising has now received the general acquiescence of the House. Given what has happened since the hon. Member for Chichester opened the original debate, many of the arguments against televising that were advanced then will begin to look as bizarre, absurd and unfathomable as the powerful and emotive arguments against votes for women that were voiced earlier in the century seem now. When we read the reports of those debates, we wonder how on earth the House of Commons could have been against votes for women. I think that future generations will find it equally incomprehensible that it took so long for us to introduce a measure that proved so welcome to both Members of Parliament and the public outside.

Although I share some reservations with the right hon. Member for Morley and Leeds, South--although perhaps in a rather more optimistic fashion than other hon. Members--I hope that the report will put us on a firm footing for the future.

6.3 pm

Sir John Stokes (Halesowen and Stourbridge) : As someone who is in no way connected with the communications industry--and as somewhat of a reactionary, who can offer only limited support to the view of democracy--I rise to speak with some trepidation. However, I welcome the report, and congratulate all those involved on the work that they have done on so difficult and complicated a subject.

I do not wish to speak in detail about the various technical aspects of the report. My abiding interest lies with the effect that televising will have on our proceedings :

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I am referring not just to the presence of the microphones, but to the effect on the character of the Chamber and on how it works. The House is very precious to all of us, and I am sure that we shall all do our best to ensure that neither television nor any other invention of the future harms us in any way.

I have read the amendment carefully and I regret that I cannot support it. I believe that it would lead to considerable expense, and to the appointment of many more staff at a time when the number of employees in the public sector is growing so much that it is becoming a burden on the rest of the nation. The least that we can do in making this experiment work is to contain costs, and not impose yet another charge on the long- suffering public.

For many years I was a fervid opponent of the broadcasting of our proceedings. I confess that I have now changed my opinion substantially. I feared that our proceedings would be trivialised, that the tendency of some hon. Members to play to the gallery would be accentuated and that behaviour in general would worsen. I am glad to say that, in the main, that has not happened.

Of course, the Chamber is still conscious all the time that its proceedings are or may be televised. I have noticed a

tendency--especially among Opposition Members--to crowd behind the Dispatch Box to be sure of being in the picture. I hope that women Members will forgive me for adding that some of them tend not only to do that, but to wear their brightest clothes to ensure that they are seen. Those, however, are minor points ; what matters is that televising our proceedings provides the news media with a valuable weapon--and I fear the news media and the harm they can do to the nation.

The media love confrontation and they love entertainment. The House, however, is about serious business, and it is by no means always confrontational. Certainly it is not usually as confrontational as it appears in the weekly quarter-hour broadcast of Prime Minister's Question Time. That regular slanging match does not do much for the House's reputation, and is rather untypical of our proceedings ; it also gives a completely false picture of what political life is really about. A complex political situation cannot be summed up in one or two sentences. That was well recognised in the 19th century, when, for the first time, the popular press carried long reports of speeches by Gladstone and Disraeli--which were read avidly, line by line, by the mass of the population.

The hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mr. Grocott) pointed out that television broadcasts of our proceedings were often slotted into difficult hours when not many people were "looking in". That is because we are not show business here ; we are serious business. That is the constant difficulty with television. Question Time shows potted politics, not real politics : real politics can be found in debates on Second Reading, in Committee and on matters of moment, not in a quick quip across the Benches.

As I said, the power of the media is already very great--some would say terrifyingly great--and is growing all the time. Scenes on television of, for instance, the relatives of hostages at the start of the Gulf war, and of the present suffering of the Kurds, have an immediate, powerful and moving effect on the mass of the population. The danger is that they may come to think that what they see on television news night after night is all that is happening in the world, or is the most important thing that is happening ; and that may not necessarily be true. News

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broadcasts on radio are better and, I believe, give a more balanced picture. Television is where the cameras happen to be.

Select Committees are much televised at present. There is a danger, however, that the televising of certain Committees, in which a witness is being closely examined, could turn out to be the kind of show trial that we have seen in the United States. I do not like that. The televising of our proceedings will need to be watched very carefully. It still has great potential dangers, although the worst has not yet happened.

I should prefer a single channel to broadcast all our proceedings from start to finish. What a different picture that would give. We do not just want snippets. The other day, I happened to watch the entire coverage of the enthronement of the new archbishop of Canterbury. What an immensely powerful and impressive broadcast that was--and what a nation we are. What a show it was, with all the nation represented in that wonderful old Christian building. It was not just a snippet ; it was a full report--and how good it was. There is an increasing tendency to see snippets--little bits like the things that one has with one's drinks before a meal, but they should not be confused with a real meal.

I welcome the controls on reporting and on the use of cameras in the Chamber, especially when disturbances are taking place. Television can be a hydra-headed monster and unless we cut off some of its heads from time to time, we shall be in danger. I support firm parliamentary control.

I hope that my next remark will not be taken amiss. Let us not be too grand and important here. There has been much talk about enhancing democracy, but I do not know whether the public in England really want democracy to be enhanced. In my view, the public are not usually interested in politics ; they prefer sport and other matters. Of course, they make a general judgment at general elections, but they usually leave the details to us. They may be concerned about certain vital matters, such as capital punishment, immigration or the tax on beer, but they are usually disappointed about those important matters. So let us not be too grandiose in talking about enhancing democracy.

What is our job here? It is to control the Executive ; to approve the taxes ; and to oversee, as best we can, how the money is spent, and not, I hope, to pass too many laws, which is what, unfortunately, all Governments have done in recent years. Of course, we must also support the defence of the realm, back the police and encourage religion. We must be modest and thankful to be here and not think too much of ourselves. We must all try to do our duty and not hope to become televison stars.

6.11 pm

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