Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 71)
TUESDAY 8 JUNE 2004
SIR CHRISTOPHER
BLAND
Q60 Chris Bryant: Gavyn Davies, when
he was Chairman of the BBC, and Michael Grade already have made
quite a lot of changes to the relationship between the Board of
Management and the Board of Governors; a separate secretariat,
and a suggestion that BBC Governors should be more independent
from the Board of Management, a recommendation which was around
from the 1940s in the Dearing Report. Do you think that is the
right direction to go in, or is this overstated?
Sir Christopher Bland: I think
you have to analyse what "more independent" means and
how that more independence is created. I see no reason why the
Board of Governors should feel enthralled to the Board of Management;
they are not appointed by them; they are not dependent on them
for their rum and rations. They are dependent upon them for information,
which is of course absolutely critical. Being more separate from
them may actually paradoxically reduce rather than improve the
information flow. We are all in favour of greater independence
for the Board of Governors, but independence from what? From politicians?
Plainly, but I think that is pretty strong. From the Executive?
What does that really mean, and how is it to be delivered?
Q61 Chris Bryant: Speaking from my
own perspective, as somebody who represents a seat where access
issues to a lot of BBC channels are very difficult, if you are
going to go digital you have to pay a subscription to Sky, which
effectively doubles the licence fee. You are paying another £16.50
a month because there is no free view. The kind of thing my constituents
would like to say is that the BBC Board of Governors should be
there to stand up for ordinary licence payers and say to the Board
of Management, "Excuse me, you're rolling out all of these
new services, but are you really fulfilling the public service
remit of getting it to everybody?"
Sir Christopher Bland: I think
the Board of Governors have got to be able to answer that question.
You have put it to them enough times to have given them every
opportunity to—
Q62 Chris Bryant: They have never
answered it satisfactorily!
Sir Christopher Bland: Satisfactory
to you in London, no, but Ireland never was contented. You know
the poem: "Ireland was contented when all could use the sword
and pen".
Q63 John Thurso: Before I ask my
question, could I just say thank you to Sir Christopher for the
interest he has taken in delivering broadband to Caithness and
Sutherland which is very, very welcome. There are a lot of people
grateful for that.
Sir Christopher Bland: July 2005
in Kinlochbervie!
Q64 John Thurso: It is wonderful!
Recently there have been accusations that the BBC has been becoming
more commercial, chasing ratings, if you will, rather than concentrating
on some of its more public service role as it should have. Two
questions based on that: firstly, do you think that is the case?
Do you think the balance is broadly right or wrong? Following
on from that: what is the core thing which the BBC should do that
justifies the BBC having a Charter and getting a licence fee?
Sir Christopher Bland: If I can
start with the second question because, in a sense, it is the
easier one to answer. In general terms at least, I think it is
to provide a quality and range of programmes that will not always,
or frequently, have been provided by commercial television and
commercial radio. It is to provide a coverage of the affairs of
the United Kingdom in the depth and of a quality that would not
otherwise be provided. It is to have complete political independence
and impartiality in providing that coverage. None of these things
are things that ITV cannot and does not do. The BBC really only
exists to do those things. In terms of its performance, as we
were discussing earlier, it cannot ignore reach and ratings because
that is as sure a recipe for disaster as if it were to allow those
to dominate. The balancing act is a difficult one. I think the
BBC, from time to time, may appear to lose the plot. It is not
for me to say whether they have in the last three years. I have
not watched enough television or radio, and I have not been responsible
for making sure that that happened. While I spent five years at
the BBC that was the job of the Board of Governors, to try and
make sure that the BBC did do those things I set out in the second
answer. From time to time it will not always succeed. It will
do certain individual programmes that will not look as though
they belong within a public service remit. We could all identify
those; but it cannot live by those and those are not what the
BBC is for.
Q65 John Thurso: Do you think it
would be helpful if the BBC were to produce less in-house and
commission more externally? There is a theory because the BBC
is responsible for so much product it almost has a controlling
hand, and whether that is in fact a dampener on a wider commercial
sector?
Sir Christopher Bland: Yes, I
do. I think that the amount of programming that goes to the independent
sector ought to be increased. I think the primary reason for that
is the independent programme-making sector is too small for really
strong viable programme-making companies to exist in any quantity.
If you increase the quota over time, and you should not do it
overnight, that would strength both the range of programmes that
are made in the private sector and the financial strength of those
companies that make them. At the moment a lot of it is Soho pick-up
television, with five people in the studio with an idea and they
last for three years and have a great time and then they have
gone. The other thing is that you do want to maintain a critical
mass of programme-making within the BBC—because that is
a real asset to the UK. I think it would be a mistake to go wholly
to the Channel 4 model for that reason. The second thing is that
the ridiculous rule by which independents suddenly cease to become
independents, because they are taken over by somebody who has
a broadcasting licence in, let us say, Luxembourg or Germany,
is plainly nonsense. That is why the BBC did not meet its quota.
It was not because the amount going outside the BBC was reduced;
it was because the rules changed because there was an acquisition.
That is a plain nonsense and should be eliminated.
Q66 Mr Flook: Sir Christopher, in
recent years the BBC in its Annual Report has crowed about how
it has increased its market share. Yet, at the same time that
commercial rivals have had a negative impact on advertising revenue,
the BBC has had an increase in its RPI plus X formula. How did
it look to you when you were given that RPI plus X formula? Did
you think, "We know we have to put some of it into digital,
but this will help us while our commercial competitors are on
the back foot" as advertising revenues collapsed towards
the very end of the 1990s?
Sir Christopher Bland: It looked
at the time like a really good and generous settlement, and it
was. The reason the BBC were pleased about it was for good reasons.
Nobody forecast both the extent and the length of the decline
in ITV revenue, including ITV. I do not think that was the reason
the BBC were pleased with the settlement. They were pleased because
they could put more money into programming. You can trace where
that money has gone. It is not the sole source. The BBC have saved
a great deal of money. They have reduced their own overhead and
operating costs. They generated more from commercial revenue,
and that has gone into programming too. It has enabled the BBC
to sustain one of the Government's and the country's legitimate
ambitions for it, which is to help the roll-out of digital services
both online and in broadcast. First of all, you can trace the
money and I think it has been pretty well spent; but not with
the aim of dishing the commercial competition.
Q67 Mr Flook: As I understand it,
the Governors are there to protect the interests of the viewers
and licence payers. What role did you have in going to the Board
of Management of the BBC and saying, "Hang on a moment, you've
just been given a huge bung from the taxpayer, the licence payer;
you've got to spend this money even more wisely"? When we
went to a BBC facility a couple of weeks ago there were more flunkies
following us round than we were. Everywhere we go there are huge
numbers of BBC staff and middle managers. Could you not do a Barclays
and put more money into the end product and less into the middle
management?
Sir Christopher Bland: Luckily
I am flunky-less today; were I the Chairman of the BBC attending
this I would not be, and you would be able to point to the serried
ranks of supporters. Actually the BBC has reduced its overhead
and its costs. You are always going to get, as you will when a
Secretary of State or even a Minister of State appears before
you, surrounding people hanging on their every word and helping
them to frame them in the proper way.
Q68 Mr Flook: They are the only ones
who are!
Sir Christopher Bland: If you
look at what has happened to the overall BBC staffing, that has
reduced. If you look at the costs of the BBC that go into programming,
that has increased. I think the percentage has gone up year on
year on year. As you rightly say, I think that was something the
Board of Governors existed to ensure. Also, more difficult to
assess, the right balance between expenditure on new digital services—which,
by definition, are not going to be available to the whole country,
and some of which the BBC got into well before its time. Digital
radio, for example, they got into that far too early, believing
that set manufacturers would have available sets at reasonable
prices five years before they did. They should have been wiser.
Q69 Mr Flook: How did that happen?
How did the BBC start producing superb radio programmes on digital
with no-one there to listen to them? When did the Governors get
involved in sanctioning that, if they did?
Sir Christopher Bland: You could
not really sanction. We just made an error of judgement. We committed
in the belief that digital radio would expand much more rapidly,
and the manufacturers would deliver sets much more quickly than
they did. It was actually a serious error of judgement. I remember
helping to make it. I remember going to the big radio fair in
Germany and seeing what were extremely elegant-looking prototypes
(and that was fine) and believing (and this was not fine, but
foolish) that these would be in production within a matter of
months. Actually five years later they still were not made. We
believed where we should have been more sceptical and we should
have waited.
Q70 Rosemary McKenna: Sir Christopher,
can I move on to something quite different with your experience.
Would you like to comment on the concerns that a lot of people
have about taste and decency in television at the moment. It may
have been a bit of kite flying by one of the Directors of Ofcom
who suggested that perhaps television programmes ought to develop
a rating system—rather than the current system of the watershed,
where everybody accepts the nine o'clock thing—in view of
the fact that recently there have been some dubious or concerning
story lines in some soap operas, for example?
Sir Christopher Bland: It remains
a matter of concern. It is very much a generational thing. The
younger you get—and I am talking generalisations now—the
more standards and attitudes of what are acceptable in terms of
language, taste and decency change. Whether that is a good thing
or another thing is a matter of opinion. You can also argue that
some of that might be the responsibility of the media for, in
effect, changing the attitude of, as it were, my 20 year-old son
or five year-old son to my own or his grandfather's. It is not
an absolute; it is relative. You see things now on television,
read them in books and see them on the cinema which 40 years ago
we would have thought astonishing, in whatever sense of that word
you like to use. Standards do change. You cannot say today what
is going to last forever. Whether a rating system would be better—I
do not think it is a ridiculous idea—you would have to decide
whether it would be really useful to the viewer, and whether the
ratings would help people to make informed choices about when
to let their children, in particular, watch a programme, or themselves
to decide whether they wanted to see it. It is very important
that viewers should not be surprised by what they see in particular
in fiction and in a soap. They should be well warned in advance.
I remember we showed a Tarantino movie late at night and had considerable
reservations. It was far tougher than I liked but it was a brilliant
movie and it was sufficiently well flagged, "Here was what
it was. Here was when it was coming", that nobody saw that
who did not either want to see it or know what they were seeing
when they switched it on. I think that is all right. The earlier
you get in the evening, the more important it is to be clear what
happens before nine o'clock.
Q71 Rosemary McKenna: I agree with
you. I do think ultimately it is the parents' responsibility to
make sure; but there are, of course, many households where the
parents are not there, the children have free access to television
etc etc. All of the programmers at some time or another announce
in advance there are concerns within the programme and parents
should be aware. They all do that. I think it is something which
is worthwhile considering. For example, parents often say to me,
"Do I stop my child watching a particular programme when
they're going to go to school the following day and it's going
to be discussed? How can we control it?" Maybe some parents
are looking for that kind of guidance?
Sir Christopher Bland: I think
it is a reasonable assumption that the major soap operas on either
BBC or ITV should be watchable by children before the watershed.
If there is pressure that they should sensationalise and move
those story lines in more energetic directions then that really
needs to be resisted if the result is something that actually
should not be shown before nine o'clock.
Chairman: Thank you, Sir Christopher.
From what you have said about the role of this Committee we ought
to place on record that it was you who instituted the Annual Report
being brought before this Select Committee. Thank you very much
indeed.
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