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25 Feb 2003 : Column 170—continued
3.30 pm
Mr. Leigh: I had better give way to the Minister first.
Dr. Howells: No, it is all right.
Mr. Lansley: Perhaps the Minister and I were about to make the same point. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), but I do not want his argument to stretch too far. He appeared to agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant), but I think that the argument is being stretched too far. If the BBC were to use licence fee money to subsidise services in a way that went beyond its public service remit and interfered with competition, it would be subject to scrutiny from the competition authorities. This does not diminish my hon. Friend's argument, but we must be clear that there are certain BBC activities that are subject to scrutiny.
Mr. Leigh: I accept that. If there is unfair competition, or if the BBC is acting outwith its statutory framework, there are other ways of righting the wrong.
Dr. Howells: The hon. Gentleman's hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) second-guessed me. However, I wanted to ask the hon. Gentleman another question. This is an important debate and I am enjoying his contribution very much. He said that people should be held to account. As a veteran of the PAC, I can well imagine that, if somebody had invested in a computer system—and such systems provided great fare for the PAC in many investigations by the CAG—and millions of pounds had been lost, that would be well worth investigating. However, what about an executive who was responsible for producing a series or a top-end drama that had lost millions of pounds? How would the PAC investigate that kind of loss, where earnings could have been made from the product but were not?
Mr. Leigh: That is an important intervention and it probably goes to the heart of what concerns BBC executives. It is difficult for me to give the House a categorical undertaking. I do not speak for the Comptroller and Auditor General in the way Ministers speak for their civil servants. I cannot tell the House exactly what the CAG would want to investigate. However, I have some experience of what he would want to investigate in other parts of the public sector. The Minister has put his finger on the central issue. I suspect that the CAG would, as the Minister suggests, be interested in the purchase of a new computer or information technology system that had not been properly thought through, resulting in major financial loss for the BBC. However, I cannot conceive of any circumstances in which the CAG would think that he had the expertise to second-guess the editorial judgment of senior executives in the BBC who had thought that a particular programme or series would be popular when in fact it was a great flop that nobody wanted to watch, leading to it being taken off the air with the waste of vast sums of money.
We all accept that creative people have to take risks and that sometimes they will get ahead of what public opinion wants. However, why anybody in the National
Audit Office would think that they had the expertise to second-guess that kind of decision, I cannot imagine. It is not going to happen. It is not for me to speak for the CAG, but I think that I can give the Minister and the BBC that reassurance.
Mr. Jenkins: Does the hon. Gentleman accept that it is not what is produced that we want to consider, but how it is produced? Within the enclaves of the BBC—an organisation that is protected from the rigour of the world of commercial enterprise—we want to ensure that the most effective use is made of resources that are, in effect, a donation from the taxpayer. We are critical not of the programmes but of the methods used to put them together.
Mr. Leigh: The hon. Gentleman has put the argument far better than I could have done. What is being produced is none of our concern. We do not have the expertise to question whether a particular programme is desirable or not. However, how the BBC is run—this huge public corporation that spends £2.5 billion a year—is surely of some interest to Parliament.
Let me describe how the Public Accounts Committee works. The PAC does not question the right of the Government to make a particular policy decision—for example, to introduce individual learning accounts. If the Government of the day want to introduce ILAs, that is for the Government. We do not question that. However, we have a perfect right to say, "You introduced ILAs but you didn't get a sufficient grip and the whole thing went out of control. There was massive fraud and the taxpayer ended up losing tens of millions of pounds." A similar argument would apply to the BBC. We will not get involved in its policy decisions. That is the key. The PAC has a defence mechanism: we never get involved in policy decisions. We will not question a particular policy decision of BBC senior management to produce a series of programmes or even to set up an entirely new service. However, we would be interested in how the programmes were produced or the service set up.
Mr. William Cash (Stone): I apologise for coming to the debate rather late. I heard my hon. Friend talking about policy decisions. Does he agree that it is essential that the BBC should subscribe to its charter and to the ingredients that go with it? If it does not, it will be under attack on two fronts—on impartiality and the way that the guidelines function, and on its accounts.
Mr. Leigh: I am not going to be taken down the route of saying that we should in any way get involved in impartiality. To do so would be to defeat immediately all the arguments that I have been trying to elucidate for the past 20 minutes. It may be that the BBC is not impartial, but that is none of my business. Other mechanisms can deal with that issue, and I contend that they work perfectly well.
My hon. Friend refers to accounts management. That is something in which Parliament has a perfect right to get involved. There is no adequate mechanism—under the charter or by any other means—to question whether things are being done properly.
Another hon. Member has tried to intervene, but I must finish soon to allow other hon. Members to contribute.
Brian White: I want to ask about the BBC's quota of independent productions. Would the PAC be involved in monitoring those contracts? If so, what is to prevent it from becoming a sort of court of appeal for independent contractors who feel that they have been hard done by?
Mr. Leigh: The hon. Gentleman has done a good job in presenting some fears that BBC management may have expressed. However, some people do not understand the way in which the Public Accounts Committee operates. In this country, we raise and spend the best part of £700 billion of public money every year. The PAC is only one Committee of the Parliament. We have twice as many hearings as any other Committee but we still meet only 60 times a year. I assure the hon. Gentleman, and anybody else who takes a close interest in these matters, that the PAC will not spend the whole year—or indeed a half or a quarter of the year—crawling over every aspect of the BBC, whether quotas or anything else. I suspect that, if Parliament gets this Bill right, people in the BBC will say, "Well, we'll have to be a bit careful about our financial decisions because we could be held to account." However, there will be only one hearing, or maybe two hearings, on the BBC each year. The CAG will feel his way extremely carefully. He is very attuned to all the sensitivities about his ever getting involved in editorial independence. He will not go down any route that will get him into trouble.
Michael Fabricant: The Minister intervened on my hon. Friend to ask an interesting question from which this discussion—this sub-debate, if you like—has arisen. The Minister asked about a series, or an individual programme, that made a loss. Does my hon. Friend accept that a programme that is made for the BBC cannot, in itself, make a loss? It is not made as a commercial production, unless we have to take account of some co-production deal with, for example, an American broadcaster. Does my hon. Friend—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal): Order. This is rather a long intervention.
Mr. Leigh: I agree with my hon. Friend. I cannot conceive of a situation in which the CAG would want to become involved in decisions about the way in which the BBC is run, or in which it would be appropriate or right for the CAG to question why a series of programmes had been made. We can put that canard to rest now; it simply will not happen.
I wish to say in conclusion—I am trying to get to the end of my speech without too many interventions—that the practical and constructive work of the CAG has saved £1.5 billion over the past three years. His independence is a safeguard for the BBC and for Parliament. It is important that we keep in view the principle that lies behind the new clause: simply to increase parliamentary accountability of the BBC. In 2001–02, the licence fee raised £2.5 billion, yet although the CAG can examine its collection, he cannot look at how well the money raised is spent. That is a significant weakness in public accountability.
Arguments in favour of extending the CAG's rights of access to the BBC have been repeatedly and forcefully made on many occasions by the PAC, by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, by Lord Sharman in his review of audit and by many others. I recognise that, in the Davies review, the BBC has been subject to some external reviews and other measures designed to improve its financial accountability, but, of course, they do not provide the ongoing parliamentary scrutiny and accountability that is needed.
The Bill provides a unique opportunity for the House to rectify a wrong that has existed for too long. It is essential that the BBC is opened up to proper parliamentary oversight. This argument will not go away; nor should it until the requirements of the House and the licence payers whom we represent are met and the new clause is accepted.
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