Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160
- 176)
WEDNESDAY 14 JULY 1999
MR MARK
DAMAZER AND
MR NIGEL
CHARTERS
Mr Gardiner
160. Have either of you two gentlemen ever had
anything to do with that wonderful programme Come Dancing?
(Mr Damazer) This is one of the questions I can answer
definitively: no.
161. What has intrigued me in the proceedings
of the Committee so far this afternoon is the gentle choreographic
movement which has gone on round the positions which certainly
our Chairman has put forward and the way in which you have been
manoeuvring round them. It does seem to me that what our Chairman
has, and it is commendable that he does, is a very clear vision
of what he wants. I am not sure that it is a vision which other
members of the Committee necessarily share; I know that I would
depart from him in certain respects quite markedly. He has a very
clear vision of what he thinks needs to be done and that is the
second channel, C-SPAN style operation, and repeatedly he quite
rightly bludgeons you and asks what the cost is. For your part,
because, I think and I hope because I do not agree with it either,
you disagree with that vision of what should be broadcast as BBC
Parliament, you are trying ever so politely to avoid answering
the question. What I want to get out of you gentlemen is quite
simply this. What would your alternative vision be? It may be
that you want to come back to the Committee and say actually you
do not have an alternative vision and you do not feel it is your
role to have that. The difficulty which many members of this Committee
face who do not share our Chairman's background in broadcasting
is quite simply that we do not have the technical expertise. Therefore
often, because we do not have that technical expertise, we cannot
actually dream the visions because we do not know what is available.
That is why we need your help. That is why we need to know what
you, as people with that technical expertise, who deal day to
day with BBC Parliament and with the whole of political broadcasting
for the BBC, actually think the presentation of parliamentary
coverage in this country could become within the public service
remit which you have and to the benefit of the viewers out there.
Can you give us a bit more of the vision thing please?
(Mr Damazer) I shall try. There is clearly one issue
of principle which divides the Chairman and myself and I would
expect that most people in the BBC would concur with my position
which is that there is something fundamental and valuable about
the licence fee and its connection to the output in the United
Kingdom which buttresses the BBC's independence to such a degree
that to dilute that practice is fraught with danger, though I
wholly understand that from the view of the House of Commons and
indeed the whole of the Palace of Westminster it could be argued
that there is a special case here which transcends that. It would
not be my view. I understand that is the Chairman's view and I
respect his point of view in saying that. Therefore the vision
is to some extent differentiated by that disagreement about possible
sources of funding. All of the extra parliamentary activity which
might be broadcast in a public service network on the C-SPAN model,
are perfectly envisageable if the funding proposition is solved.
Were the BBC to have particularly buoyant revenue—and I
do not wish to turn this into a pitch for the licence fee;—that
is the work of Gavin Davis and his committee and finally the Government
and then the House—then clearly some of these propositions
would become easier to envisage than others and certainly easier
to envisage than they are at the moment where the funding formula
of the BBC is such that it is impossible to see wholesale expansion.
Therefore the strategy which we are adopting is to say, here is
in the internet a mechanism which is growing exponentially in
the United Kingdom, where the costs of startup are hugely lower—as
my colleague Mr Charters was outlining—than is the case
in this other universe we are talking about, where particularly
interesting groups, schools, universities, companies with an interest
in what goes on inside the House of Commons, civic minded groups,
would be able to have relatively easy access to a much larger
range of activity going on inside this Palace than is currently
the case. Our view is that this could be developed. It could be
developed in several different ways. The BBC, at much lower cost
than developing elsewhere, could choose to boost its already well-regarded
and trusted BBC News Online site, to develop links to activities
going on inside this Palace which would become available to a
much wider audience much more quickly and it is a flexible medium
which can always be developed. Alternatively—and it is an
alternative which you may wish to consider—the House of
Commons or the Palace of Westminster itself could decide to invest
resources in setting up its own website with its own links, with
its own technology, to ensure that the range of activities which
take place within this Palace are available to a wider world.
As far as BBC Parliament channel itself in its existing guise
goes, during the course of time which has passed since we took
up the channel, we have obviously spent time consolidating its
position and building it in several different ways outlined here,
which you may wish to choose to discuss. That has been where we
have got to so far. It is absolutely conceivable that we can develop
it further in the way that my colleague suggests by using some
of that time which is currently not filled, though we would again
have to be very careful to measure the cost, its use and how it
fits with the total BBC proposition. It is something we would
undoubtedly wish to look at in the next few months and we take
it very seriously. What I am holding out for you is some development
possibly of the existing channel but using the web as the main
source of distributing further the activities of the Palace.
162. Thank you very much; that is clear. May
I press you further in two respects? I believe my colleague Mrs
Gordon may have been asking this question as well, though I am
not sure it was answered at that stage. In the existing space
of downtime on BBC Parliament which you believe it would be possible
to expand into and to provide a fuller service on BBC Parliament,
would your intention be to provide there coverage which is currently
not available of other committees or other aspects of the House
for which no feed is being generated at the moment? If so, what
are the costs of generating that feed going to be. Again I plead
ignorance on the technical side and that is why I feel that very
often we need you to guide us through.
(Mr Damazer) May I begin by reasserting the philosophical
desirable position and then pass to my colleague Mr Charters to
answer your cost and resourcing question? Clearly it would be
desirable if that spare downtime were used for material and activities
which are not currently transmitted within the existing 17 or
18 hours a day. People could choose to record it and it would
give them a greater range of things to see and sample of activities
which go on within the Palace. That is obviously the desirable
position.
(Mr Charters) The easiest way to answer is to say
that the kit with which we are surrounded now, cameras, control
system, cabling, is portable and moves up and down. Our technical
people's best estimate, because it can never be accurate until
you take up the floors and have to lay cable, is about £500,000
a year for each additional unit like this. We currently have four
available to broadcasters. We often, but not always, are using
all four portable units in select committees. I would make the
point that initially at least, when the new Westminster Hall operation
begins, that will reduce to three because one of those will have
to be used. If we need three of them to cover the extra standing
committees, select committees, there is an argument which says
that is £1.5 million. They are not cheap. This is the hardware
and cabling and operator costs.
163. May I continue this line before switching
over to the website. Given that under the new dispensation one
of those units will be tied up for a good part of the time in
the main committee, the Westminster Hall Committee, and given
that much of the kit we know has to be changed anyway because
it needs upgrading to digital, what are the chances and what are
the requirements to be able to provide enough kit to be generating
the feed which will supply a 24-hour programming on BBC Parliament
and what are the chances of that being done as originally outlined
by the House at no cost to Parliament?
(Mr Damazer) The competence is PARBUL's and it is
clearly a question which PARBUL will consider, I would have thought
in the relatively near future. It would be a mistake if I were
to try to bind them into a decision. As I am sure the Committee
are aware, the economics of the whole activity of broadcasting
committees is somewhat dependent on the number of takers for any
individual committee. BBC Parliament is clearly a very significant
voice in that but resourcing and financial resourcing is a significant
factor. I have expressed the aspiration to try to ensure that
as much as possible of any extra commitment we make to expanding
the channel to 24 hours a day is taken up with new and fresh material,
but in all honestly I cannot make that an iron clad commitment,
if we find that there are few other takers and if PARBUL is not
willing to support the activity. That may be a regrettable answer
but it is a truthful one. By the same token, we are in the early
stages of considering—is the best way of expressing it—the
feasibility both editorially and financially of expanding the
channel beyond its existing hourage. When we have more to say
on that we might well be able to come back and tell this Committee
more. We are not at that stage yet and it would be a mistake if
I were to hold that out as an immediate prospect.
Mr Gardiner: I understand that is not
necessarily your question.
Mr Hopkins
164. May I go back to some fairly basic points?
The problem is that with the development of the Scottish Parliament,
the Welsh Assembly, the more elaborate committee work, more interesting
committee work here, ideally you would like two channels, an extra
channel as you say in paragraph 6. But there are problems with
providing that. The problems are first of all that on digital
terrestrial there is not enough spectrum and if you really wanted
an extra channel you would have to look at either cable or satellite.
They are not universally available and it would be unfair to charge
the licence fee for something people cannot get. So you have come
up with this very much second best solution or temporary solution
of online services. However, online costs money in computers and
being online itself. There is an ongoing charge and there is also
the question of skill in using computers and obtaining access
to the internet which is not given to everyone, certainly not
at this stage in our development. Ideally we should like a second
channel, another channel, provided we could overcome those problems.
One suggestion I put last week was that we could suggest—Treasury
may not like it—that the Government itself finances the
provision of cable or satellite to every household—or almost
every household—in the country, within reason. That would
overcome that problem. In return for that, the cable companies
and the satellite companies would no doubt be delighted to find
that all the homes in the country were either cable or satellite
and therefore they would have more access to their market. In
return they could allocate to public service broadcasting some
of their spectrum which would be available for public service
broadcasting. It strikes me that if that arrangement could be
set up, it could work and it would possibly be appropriate also
for a ring-fenced grant, lump sum payment, by Treasury, which
would not actually undermine BBC's independence. I do take your
arguments very strongly; I agree very strongly about the licence
fee and BBC independence. You could however have a ring-fenced
grant for that one-off capital investment to cable the whole country
or to provide satellite where cable was not possible. I put this
at our previous meeting to your colleagues and I wondered whether
you think this is feasible, provided we could persuade Treasury.
(Mr Damazer) The answer to that is not an absolute,
but may I begin by making one extremely important point. We have
skirted online at the moment in the context of the broadest of
definitions of what might be achieved. I really think that we
should consider carefully the current performance of online and
its potential as against the various other digital technologies
and the existing analogue technologies for broadcasting. Online
is growing at almost a frightening speed. Mr Charters may be able
to give better figures and will correct me, but we are talking
here about the growth of a medium, the like of which we probably
have never seen. It may very well be true that in ten years' time
Online will have reached the position that colour television did
ten years after it was introduced, that is to say it will be,
if not universally available—that would not be true—certainly
very, very widely available and that the performance of online
in terms of what it can deliver to the user both in terms of speed,
in terms of volume of material, in terms of the presentation of
that material, and the combination of different kinds of material,
text, video, audio, archive facilities, search engines to get
you to exactly what you wish. The performance is so electrifyingly
good when you see the best of the kit rolled out and the improvements
in telephony, that it would be wrong to accept your axiom, forgive
me, that it is a second best solution. Clearly, and it would be
dishonest if I were to pretend otherwise, it has massive cost
advantages, that is true, but simply in terms of what it can deliver,
the flexibility with which you can grow it and change it, the
way it can keep up with events in several different places at
once, it is a remarkable medium. It may very well be that if the
correct formula is found to establish more and more of the proceedings
of the Palace on online sites that is the best answer. I am not
saying specifically BBC Online sites; there are many others who
would wish to do it and it may be that the House itself would
wish to go down this road. If I turn to your other proposition,
which is that the Government of the day regulates in such a way
as to make a second channel, multiple channels, if not compulsory
then something which looks quite close to it, that obviously must
be a matter for the Government of the day to decide. If somebody
were to come to the BBC and to present as a fait accompli
that every cable or digital cable or digital satellite operating
company had to take a certain bouquet of public service channels
which were going to be funded in some way which did not breach
fundamental BBC principles, it is something we would clearly be
foolish not to examine. The obstacles to that, in terms of the
way the industry is currently set up, in terms of its current
regulatory structure, are very great and I would have thought
one would find multiple resistances to that. Though I think it
is a very engaging and interesting notion, in the end it is not
one which I think the BBC would be right to take a lead in campaigning
for.
165. You are suggesting that online services
would be so universally available that everyone had computers,
we would all be computer literate, we would all be able to use
online and it would cost no more than having a free cable channel
providing BBC broadcasts. I am concerned about universal availability,
particularly to the less affluent. Seventy-five or eighty per
cent is not universal.
(Mr Damazer) No; I agree.
166. I should like to see universal availability
and clearly people have to buy the television sets as well. Are
you saying they would be comparable in effect after a period?
(Mr Damazer) I willingly concede that the capital
cost of buying the computer as well as the obvious limitations
on people being able to use a computer successfully enough to
navigate the web, are very real considerations. By the same token,
this may well be a generational change which the penetration of
this technology in schools, in schools of all sorts, and the ability
of the technology to cheapen itself remarkably—online technology
does not only grow more sophisticated, the individual components
which make up the online world also cheapen, if not by the day,
very, very rapidly—mean that though we will not be in a
position where there will be universal access in the way that
one would say the terrestrial analogue world resembles now, it
nevertheless will perform very rapidly. Mr Charters will correct
me if my estimates are wrong, but it may very likely outperform
very easily the penetration of digital cable, digital satellite
and digital terrestrial. It therefore may be a more easily available
platform for distribution.
(Mr Charters) May I back up what Mr Damazer has said
and perhaps offer the Committee a small piece of research which
I came across in a conference on a different topic but which made
me stop and think? It was simply this, that it took 38 years for
radio, after its invention, to penetrate or gain a worldwide audience
of 50 million. It took 13 years for television, from its invention,
to gain a worldwide audience of 50 million. It took the web four
years to gain a worldwide audience of 50 million. While I think
that we—it is a generational thing—have grown up with
the television environment, the young, the youth of our country,
are not growing up in an exclusively television environment. They
are much more accepting of using interactive technology to get
information, to be entertained, to learn and to play. This is
one of the things which we really firmly believe as we from our
side of the fence look at the development of internet technology
Yes, it is not available now and yes, there are certain barriers,
but I would suggest it is due to the initiatives which this Government
and previous governments push to get schools online, to get libraries
online, to get all sorts of places online. The other thing I should
like to suggest is that that barrier between IT or computer technology
and television technology will actually disappear before too long.
One can already buy television sets which have the computing power
of what you had on your desktop one or two years ago. We must
think in those terms. Mr Price showed you that demonstration on
the big screen at the last sitting of the Committee and said it
was a few years down the line, but the truth is that those developments
are coming on. One point I should like to add is that currently
television is a lean back medium: PCs are a lean forward medium.
If you think about it, that is a good way of distinguishing the
two. What I would suggest will happen, is in fact both will become
both, so that it will not be very long before you can lean back
and play your PC on a big screen in front of you at some distance
or read information in the normal way or put a picture in the
corner which comes from a closed circuit, a phone line, a picture
of this Committee and you could be dialling up other information
on the web, you could be using a Ceefax interactive digital text.
Your television set will become a different machine to those which
we understand at the moment. This is what we are trying to point
to. It may be that a traditional single channel environment with
a single subject on it is sort of dying. The multi channel world
and the multi format world is actually the future.
Mr Gale: It is certainly the purpose
of this Committee to try to find the way forward into the next
century rather than to deal with the back end of the last one.
Quite clearly if we are going to come up with any solutions which
are of any value at all for the House for the future we are going
to have to think in these terms. I shall come back in a minute
once more to the funding.
Mr Gardiner
167. I suppose I am the opposite of a Luddite
in many ways. What is that? A technophile or something. I did
want to pursue one of the points which my colleague Mr Hopkins
made because it seemed to me that what he was talking about and
what is very important for this Committee is that the maximum
number of people and particularly those who have least resources
should be able to have access to what it is that we are offering
when we try to broadcast all that goes on here. That is why I
wanted just to be absolutely clear from you about the distribution
that is currently available through BBC Parliament, which I understand
is 17 per cent of homes in the country.
(Mr Charters) Yes.
168. Your estimate of the likely web online
uptake, if we were to supply it, was in the region of 70 to 80
per cent of the homes in the country. Is that correct?
(Mr Charters) I have probably in that case overstated
it. Our official BBC projections say that it will be below 50
per cent by the year 2000, but just below, sort of mid forties.
169. So it would be two and a half times as
much as currently BBC Parliament is reaching.
(Mr Charters) Yes. May I just say that by then of
course we would anticipate that because it is a digital platform
that would have increased at a similar rate.
170. May I just pursue what would be required
to get a comprehensive online service? Again my concern here is
with the generation of the feed. Obviously in an ideal world,
fulfilling the remit of this Committee to take the activities
of Parliament and make them accessible and available to the general
public, ideally, were there no cost attached, what we would want
to see would be that every committee, every debate on the floor,
every debate on the floor in the House of Lords and so on were
covered. Clearly we are not going to get to that stage because
of the cost of generating the feed. In an online format, presumably
the management of access to all that archive material would be
possible. Is that right?
(Mr Damazer) Yes; clearly, and one should note again
here the way in which technology changes. My colleagues last week,
who know much more about physics than I do, explained the way
in which the pictures were likely to develop over a period of
time.At the moment, in order to get the best available pictures,
you have to spend sums of money which my colleague Mr Charters
was talking about earlier in terms of re-equipping rooms. If web
camera technology develops as rapidly as we hope, it may very
well be that to equip a very large number of rooms in this Palace
with cameras which then do not need uplinks to transponders in
order to be distributed across the cable digital satellite, never
mind the complex digital terrestrial universe, you bypass all
of that by using telephony as we know it and suddenly the startup
costs become relatively cheap. I am not saying free. Web camera
technology will always cost something. Web camera technology at
the moment gives you rather fuzzy and not altogether satisfactory
pictures, whereas we know the audio has gone in the net from two
years ago being quite primitive, certainly not much above, if
at all, rusty AM sound, to something which when I click on now
and listen to programmes like Question Time for instance, if I
missed it the night before, are very close to some standard of
FM and that will only ever continue to improve. If web camera
technology improves at the rate which we hope, there is no reason
to believe that equipping lots and lots of rooms in the Palace
with web camera technology would be anything other than a reasonable
cost for somebody to have to pay. The mechanism of payment is
something that we have discussed a little bit and clearly concerns
lots of different institutions not just BBC.
171. Absolutely. I do not want to be sidetracked
down the road of filthy lucre just at the moment. It seems to
me that what I want to get is a vision of what ideally we could
be aiming for here. It seems to me that what you have just provided
us with for technical background—and I apologise I was not
here last week when your colleagues were here so I did not get
the benefit of their advice to the Committee—what you have
just presented to us from a technical point of view is the prize
of being not only able to have coverage of virtually all the proceedings
which we may wish to be covered, but also the added advantage
of eliminating the services of your goodselves as editors, deciding
for us what we will watch as any given point in time so that at
eleven o'clock on a Thursday evening you can watch the Committee
of Public Accounts, at seven o'clock on a Tuesday morning you
are going to be saddled with the poor old Broadcasting Committee.
Here we actually have the potential to be choosing for ourselves
what we wish to see of Parliament's proceedings at a time we wish
to see them and really extending back as far as the archive will
let us.
(Mr Damazer) That is right. The speed at which all
of that becomes available and the extent to which it becomes,
if not universally available, very widely available, contains
a very large number of different factors behind it. In the way
that this universe is developing, your analysis is entirely correct.
There are archive facilities and search facilities and search
engines on the net which will enable you, once you start doing
it—clearly you have to have the material in the first instance—to
search back from the time you started it on the Standing Committee
on Asylum and Immigration as well as streaming live onto the web
the current activities of that committee.
Mr Gardiner: Chair, thank you, you have
been extremely generous in allowing me to pursue this line. I
hope I have established what I believe our vision for the Committee
should be.
Mr Gale: I am not sure you have.
Mrs Gordon
172. I find the online developments very exciting.
I think it is the way forward. I just wanted to say something
quite flippant about the A-Z guide to Parliament. It is very good.
I just hope you do not have zoo for Z or something like that.
(Mr Damazer) We have been struggling and to be perfectly
honest we may give a prize for the person who gets the Z.
173. That is really interesting and I am interested
in the education side. We do not really have time to go into it
now. Just a point of information. Can you tell me what is actually
broadcast during recess, the summer recess especially? I have
to admit not watching it. It would be a busman's holiday quite
honestly. There are acres of time there. What actually does fill
up that time during the summer recess?
(Mr Charters) Currently I have to say a 20-minute
loop of highlights which is a barker tape in the sense of a fairground
barker. Our plans, although they are not fixed but have been discussed,
are to attempt in the Easter recess of next year—and I have
not done a schedule—to see whether we could start filling
the recesses with either highlights or perhaps related public
affairs material on the C-SPAN model. As we know, when Congress
is not sitting that goes out and does public meetings, unions,
etcetera. One of the plans we have for example is to cover the
teaching union conferences, the idea being that we would keep
the unmediated, long form, basically captions to help you through
it but no commentary or cutting. I must stress that is not set
in stone. We have not done any detailed costings but this is one
of the plans which we have discussed internally.
(Mr Damazer) We shall be increasing our coverage of
party conferences in the autumn and I believe we shall be covering
the TUC for the first time. We were not able to do it last year.
For that rather busy political month, if not parliamentary month,
the channel will be up and running.
Mr Hopkins
174. A very brief question on finance. I do
take your argument about the importance of the licence fee. I
am just wondering whether there might be areas where grants in
aid might be appropriate and might not cut across BBC independence.
For example, a one-off capital grant for startup costs, for kitting
out the House for broadcasting. If it were a one-off grant, unconditional,
capital spending, I would think that would not be such a problem
and might ease some of the expenditure questions of the BBC and
be fair to those who use the BBC mainly for entertainment.
(Mr Damazer) One crucial point, if I may, is that
it breaks the model which has been established over the last decade
for the broadcasting of activities in the Palace, to wit PARBUL,
which currently is the constitutionally responsible body for the
licensing and distribution of the pictures. Of course, as you
well know, PARBUL is constituted in such a way that members of
this House have a very powerful say in all of that, but to break
that model up, and I know there are some who are not entirely
satisfied with it, in this kind of way would mean reorganising
not merely the re-equipment of other rooms, but would call into
question all the arrangements elsewhere and would clearly need
discussion first of all between the House and broadcasters as
a collective entity and then clearly within the broadcasting world
itself there are bound to be quite significant points which develop,
not all of which I could adumbrate here. That is not an absolute
no. It would be foolish of me to say that. What I would say is
that it clearly raises massive questions which PARBUL would have
to look at.
Mr Gale
175. I have listened with considerable attention
to the oral waltz which you and Mr Gardiner have been performing
and I should like to put some concluding questions to you. The
potential of the net is very beguiling indeed. Mr Gardiner seemed
to indicate that was the solution which was going to solve all
the questions which have been posed. It may prove to be, one day,
but you are particularly aware and Mr Charters is very particularly
aware that simply putting cameras on committees is not palatable
to most people and the skill of the BBC parliamentary channel
is in packaging material, taking complex and sometimes arcane
procedures, dare I say it even such as this one, and making it
palatable to people who are not conversant with all the ways of
the Palace of Westminster. It seems to me that unless that packaging
is done, unless captioning is done, particularly sub-titling for
the deaf as well, then the product is not going to be acceptable
to most people in everyday life and therefore we shall defeat
the objective, which is to bring Parliament to people and to enhance
democracy which was the grand theory behind the original broadcasting
exercise. A lot of what is already being done very well by the
parliamentary channel, dare I say it, is going to have to go on
being done, even if at the fringes there is scope for less sophisticated
coverage. That is going to have to be paid for. That does bring
us back to where we started this afternoon, which is money. I
should now like to chuck back at you the final, really the bottom
line, the last sentence in your written evidence, where you say
of the net, "A far more economical—and flexible—route
would be to provide streamed and archived video coverage via an
online website. Whether the BBC could become involved would again
have to be weighed against other objectives in the light of the
licence fee review". What the BBC is prepared to pay for,
what the BBC can pay for and what the BBC wants to pay for in
the light of all the other demands made upon the licence fee.
It seems to me it would be unreasonable to suggest that drama,
music, children's television, radio, local radio, should suffer
necessarily as a result of voracious demands of one particular
area of broadcasting, parliamentary broadcasting. Mr Damazer,
you said maybe Parliament would like to do that itself, maybe
we would like to take on and create a website. There was the prospect
at one stage of creating a parliamentary broadcasting unit which
was exactly that, not PARBUL, the Parliamentary Broadcasting Unit
Limited, but The Parliamentary Channel, run, paid for, by the
Houses of Parliament. However, the BBC has to some extent taken
unto itself that role and in so far as it is allowed to and is
funded to do so and in so far as it can reach people, given the
outlets it has got, it does it very well. It is probably some
of the most interesting people that nobody is able to see which
is currently available. We could re-invent the wheel. We could
go back to recommend we will take re-possession of all of this
and do it ourselves. My objective, which I think Mr Gardiner has
misconstrued, in seeking to suggest a ring fence is not to re-invent
the wheel. It is to say that here is a unit which is already up
and running, which is doing as much of the job as it is enabled
and financed to do and which could do more. Does it not make sense
to enable it to do it? If it does, then it is surely not up to
PARBUL, the Parliamentary Broadcasting Unit Limited, to say they
will pay for all of this, nor is it up to the licence fee payer
to say yes, they want even more of their BBC licence fee to go
into that. There has to be another way of financing it. What we
have not got to grips with and what I now want you to come back
to if you would, relatively briefly, but take as much time as
it takes to answer the question, is how we are going to do that
if we are going to protect the BBC's stake in this as the broadcasting
of Parliament.
(Mr Damazer) Might I very briefly reiterate, not at
great length, three or four points about financing direct from
subvention from the Palace of Westminster? First of all, the Royal
Charter and agreement specifically excludes that possibility.
Of course that can be changed. As you will know, that is a monumental
and at times titanic process. Second of all, there is the question
of the universal availability in the digital world because of
the digital terrestrial problem. Thirdly, and if I put this in
a demotic way I beg forgiveness, the BBC cannot be open to suggestion
that we broadcast something simply because someone has paid us
to do so, even a body such as this. This body may be the closest
one could get to to understanding the logic for broadcasting what
someone has paid us to broadcast, but nevertheless in my view
it would be a step too far and one which we would not wish to
take. Fourthly, and rather more practically, just to expand on
that point, if we are doing it for the Houses of Parliament, given
that political power is dispersed widely in the United Kingdom,
although this body is as important as you could conceive, it does
not take a stretch of the imagination to envisage the Government
saying there is a particular set of speeches or a political party
saying there is a particular event which they feel might also
be financed in this way. Of course there is a power to say no,
but it nevertheless is opening up that prospect. If I might, and
thank you for allowing me the time to say that, that encapsulates
the reasons why I am particularly anxious and suspicious about
funding in the direct way that at the beginning of this session
the Chairman was suggesting was possible. May I come now to the
question of costs and alternatives and Parliament itself doing
things and BBC doing more? Where the BBC can add value in the
way that I think we do through BBC Parliament, there is clearly
an editorial reason to investigate expanding our activities and
looking at the cost effectiveness of that expansion. That is where
we currently stand in the online universe which I have described.
It is not merely a question of the financing of the cabling and
the re-equipping which is perhaps more arcane and difficult than
I made out before, because I understand that in some respects
Parliament has decided for itself to create a subvention for PARBUL
for some of the equipment which is in the Palace, although not,
as I understand it, in the main chambers. However, one can envisage
a world where the costs come tumbling down enough, where the BBC
as part of its public service perspective is genuinely proud to
spend licence payers' money on creating the site which marries
up the streamed picture of proceedings inside the House with value
added material which the BBC is well placed to do. It is not impossible
in some respects for the House to envisage setting up in the online
world a unit for itself to do that. I say again, the advantage
of the online world is that it is not merely a question of the
re-equipment but the costs of the uplink, the transponder costs,
which have to be met if we are not talking about online, which
are a severe disincentive. Not a disincentive which is so extreme
that we say never under any circumstances, no matter how buoyant
our revenue, because it is a case we would constantly wish to
examine. As my colleagues pointed out last week, it is not a no,
it is impossible now and for ever, we could never envisage doing
it. We merely have to take a judgement about the cost effectiveness
of doing it against what we think other technologies will offer.
If at the moment we are at a point—and I sense your anxiety
about this—where we are not entirely certain that we can
say at what point the technology will take off in such a way both
in terms of its distribution and production that the total panoply
of the Palace of Westminster will be available to a very large
audience, it is only because things are changing very rapidly.
I would not be pessimistic about it. I think that the kind of
world Mr Gardiner was envisaging is one that is not difficult
to see being provided in the course of the next few years. I would
not wish to be more specific than that. The BBC will seriously
engage with what it can provide in that universe from within the
licence fee on the online universe. Whether there is a combination
of the streamed picture and the added text and the archive and
search engines which will make it a branded BBC service or whether
it is better provided by yourselves, in which case the BBC would
clearly wish to have a link established to that site such that
anybody who enters through the BBC news online world will get
rapidly, should they so wish, to that site, all of that is work
which needs to be done in the course of the next year or so in
order to establish what the best way forward is. I apologise for
not being able at this stage to give you a definitive answer.
The world is changing rapidly and it is the kind of enterprise
which will need serious business planning and editorial planning
to achieve and we spent most of the time in the last year concentrating
on consolidating and improving the existing BBC Parliament channel.
Were we to come back at some time in the not too distant future,
I am sure we would have more to say on this.
(Mr Charters) I would not want to add anything more
but to say that within our current remit we are constantly striving
to develop new strands of programming and indeed to offer as much
bang for our buck as we can. What I do not see in terms of our
cable and satellite operation is a sudden influx of money so that
we could say all is possible. My job is to maximise the resources
I have, which show no signs of diminishing but on the other hand
I have not been promised large amounts of extra money to expand
or to fill up my five hours a night.
176. It is not a question of resources diminishing
it is a question of the demands being placed upon those resources
expanding to meet the needs of a Parliament in Scotland, a National
Assembly in Wales, Parliament in Northern Ireland, regional assemblies
in the United Kingdom, a main committee here and everything which
already is not being covered here satisfactorily. How are you
going to do it?
(Mr Damazer) In terms of the Parliaments in Scotland
and Wales, a considerable degree of financial editorial resource
is already going in to making certain that in Scotland and Wales—and
there are different solutions for each because the nature of the
digital technology varies between Wales and Scotland—audiences
feel that a genuine public service proposition is being offered
for the coverage of Holyrood and Cardiff. In terms of the BBC
Parliament channel, yes, it is true that the arrival of devolution
has meant a change in the editorial configuration of the channel,
but completely understood that the Westminster Parliament of the
United Kingdom is the dominant proposition. I put it to you that
although there will be demand for people outside Scotland and
Wales to see coverage of Holyrood and Cardiff, it is bound to
be limited. Therefore significant extra resources being put in
that direction for the channel as a whole would probably be a
mistake in view of what should happen next. Although I recognise
that there are these pressing other constitutional developments
which need looking after, in the case of Scotland and Wales it
was so immediate and urgent that that was solved for Scotland
and Wales. The work has already, clearly, both been considered
and to a considerable degree done and doubtless will develop further.
There are different orders of magnitude here and different editorial
priorities which need to be addressed with different solutions
across the United Kingdom.
Mr Gale: Thank you for your time. You
have been very generous. I apologise for the fact that you were
delayed by the division on the floor of the House. If we have
any further questions we shall put them in writing to you and
I am sure you will endeavour to answer them.
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