Examination of Witnesses (Questions 280
- 299)
TUESDAY 6 JULY 2004
BBC SCOTLAND
Q280 Rosemary McKenna: Pat, you are
Nations and Regions now?
Mr Loughrey: I am in the unaccustomed
role of being the voice of London and, as you will know from my
accent, that does not come naturally to me. I think the best form
of autonomy is meaningful economic investment. What has happened
in the past six or seven years is unprecedented investment outside
of London from the BBC and the old days of "London calling,
London calling", have changed beyond recognition. Because
it has been a gradual process what you have in Scotland now on
television, is a Scottish voice, Scottish branding throughout
the day every day. You have Scottish programmes in peak time without
challenge from elsewhere and you have the kind of investment that
allows Scottish sport, Scottish entertainment and Scottish drama
to compete with any other form of broadcasting from any other
source. Then there is radio. All the nation's radio services are
devolved from dependence on bits of Radio 4 and the old Home Service
with local programmes slotted in. Now you have got a free-standing
schedule for all the peak time hours. That is a massive change
with, likewise, financial growth. I believe those are the measures
of a significant shift in that part of the BBC away from its London
roots.
Q281 Mr Doran: We have obviously
seen an improvement over the last few years in devolution to the
regions. In plans recently announced by the BBC it seems as though
there is going to be even more of that, and indeed you have mentioned
that yourself, Mr Loughrey. We hope to tease that out a little
and ask you to say a little more about how you see the future
in Scotland. For example, there was talk of over a billion pounds
being spent outside London over the next 10 years. What is Scotland
going to get out of that?
Mr Loughrey: I have been charged
by Mark Thompson, along with my colleague Peter Salmon, with drawing
up those plans. In the past six or seven years, as I said, there
has been unprecedented growth in the three nations. It is obvious
that some of that growth has happened while there has been a degree
of neglect of the large centres of population in England. As commercial
television seems determined to move towards London and away from
their regional roots there is an obvious need and opportunity
for the BBC to take advantage of the great deal of talent which
would otherwise be dormant and in a sense of fairness about collecting
licences from across the entire UK. I guess our first priority
is to re-assert opportunities for Bristol, for Birmingham, for
Manchester, the big population centres in England. Even if we
fulfilled all of our plans that are envisaged for those three
centres in England, there is real opportunity for the three nations
to continue to grow. The figure you quoted, affecting half of
the BBC staff who will be based outside of London within the next
charter, is a remarkable commitment from the top of the BBC, from
the new Chairman and the new Director-General. The growth of Scotland
has been remarkable in the past four or five years. The momentum
is there: for example, 20% of all of the BBC's rapidly growing
children's output is now produced in Scotland. I cannot see any
future in which that growth will not continue.
Q282 Mr Doran: You talk as though
you see a commercial opportunity rather than fulfilling a public
remit. You make the point about the commercial companies withdrawing
a little. I think there are gentlemen behind you who might question
that. How does this fit in with the public remit? It is not that
the BBC has not had a commitment to the regions for most of its
existence; there is no question about that, although clearly it
is a lot stronger now. Also in the papers I noticed that there
was some suggestion of more local opt-outs. How local are you
going to get? My interest, for example, is in north central Scotland.
We have got very good studios in Aberdeen which serve a very wide
area of the north of Scotland but we still have to get the same
programmes as Glasgow and Edinburgh have.
Mr Loughrey: I do not see it as
a commercial opportunity. I see it as an opportunity to meet audience
need. There is a clearly demonstrated sense of audience requirement
for local information, local news and local contact. We have a
raft of evidence from very extensive piloting and research to
demonstrate that need. I am afraid there is evidence of ITV being
less committed to their regional roots than they were historically.
I think that is an economic inevitability for them but the BBC
has different realities. There is an obvious public service remit
for us across an increasingly devolved, granular UK. In terms
of local broadcasting I have spent most of my career criticising
the metro-centricity of the BBC with regard to London. The truth
is that that metro-centricity is every bit as true of Belfast
(where I have spent a lot of my time) dominating the whole of
broadcasting in Northern Ireland, of Cardiff the whole of Wales
and of the central belt the whole of Scotland. Our vision is to
provide a far richer service for the regions of Scotland. We have
seven Where I Live sites at the moment. That will be the
launch pad, we hope, for a local news service across the whole
of Scotland.
Q283 Mr Doran: That will be based
on digital opt-outs?
Mr Loughrey: On-line, broadband,
and as technology unfolds we will seek other means of distributing
that most effectively.
Q284 Mr Doran: One of the key areas
in our inquiry is the position of governors, Sir Robert. You are
the National Governor for Scotland and in the announcements made
last week by Michael Grade there was clearly a new local governance.
I think most of us want to see tougher governance and more intervention
and a more proactive Board of Governors. Can you say a little
about how you see that from your perspective and how it will affect
the position here in Scotland?
Sir Robert Smith: What we have
in mind, and incidentally this is not in particular a reaction
to very recent events, is continuous improvement in the BBC. For
example, when I was appointed Scottish Governor back in 1999 I
was the first Scottish Governor to have to apply and go through
an interview. Previous governors were just tapped on the shoulder
and told they were a likely lad. Governance changes the whole
time and improves in every walk of life. We have got to be seen
to be relatively distant from management now. We are not regulators,
or, rather, we are regulators in certain smaller areas and we
carry out the regulation brief from Ofcom, but we do govern and
in governing we are ensuring that the regulations are carried
out. In order to be seen to be not captured by management what
we are doing is creating some sort of blue water by having our
own secretariat and our own research people who will be employed
by us directly. They will not fit into the BBC management line.
They will report directly to us. We are also going to be announcing
in a few weeks' time a change to our complaints procedure which
we have been trying to improve over the last couple of years.
This is a major announcement for how complaints will be dealt
with in the future. Using this quite separate secretariat of people
who will be monitoring complaints and monitoring how the organisation
is carrying out its remit, as you see in the document that we
produced last week, we are going to grant licences to each of
the networks and we are going to be measuring them against a whole
list of criteria so that they create public value. I think it
is going to be more interventionist than it has been in the past
and I think it will be clear that the governors are much more
separate from management rather than being supporters, if you
like, as they might have been seen in the past. I do not think
it was like that but the perception was that it was.
Q285 Mr Doran: Next week we are going
to have the new Chairman and the new Director-General in front
of us to present the annual report and over the past two or three
years one of the criticisms that the committee has made of the
annual report has been that the governance seems to have been
fairly anaemic, to quote one of the words that came up, because
there is virtually no criticism. I think last year the only criticism
of the BBC's performance was about the number of ethnic minority
candidates who were recruited. Are we going to see anything like
a separate governors' report in the future?
Sir Robert Smith: I think you
will see a big difference this year. The report this year will
be in two parts. Because it is not published yet I cannot tell
you too much about how it will look but it will be in two parts.
One will be from the governors which will very clearly say what
the governors feel about performance during the year. The other
half will not be a company annual report brochure selling the
organisation. The first half will deal with the governance and
how it is carried out and I think you will see some criticisms.
There is incidentally fully two pages on the whole Hutton issue.
We feel that we are drawing a line under that and we want everyone
to understand exactly what happened, what mistakes were made,
what lessons have been learned and what we have done about it.
Mr Doran: We will look forward to that.
Thank you very much.
Q286 Chairman: Before I call Alan
Keen I would like to follow up the last question which Frank Doran
put to you because, Sir Robert, we have here an advance opportunity
of speaking to you and in a sense we are leapfrogging next week
because later in our inquiry we will be dealing with both the
documents that have recently been issued and the whole governance
issue and therefore it is appropriate that I should ask you about
that. The feeling last year was not simply that the BBC annual
governors' report was abysmal but that it was based upon a predisposition
to be in favour of everything that the BBC had done regardless
of its quality or justification and, although I do not want to
and indeed will rule out of order anybody else who tries to refer
to the whole Hutton issue, nevertheless what emerged from that
famous Sunday night meeting was apparently a predisposition by
the governors to take for granted what they were told. One of
the big concerns with regard to the future governance of the BBC
and why this select committee, when it was reporting on the Communications
Bill (and indeed when it recommended the setting up of what is
now Ofcom), recommended that the BBC come entirely under Ofcom—and
I make clear that that is not necessarily what the committee will
recommend this time because we do not know what will come out—was
that the BBC governors were there on the one hand to be part of
the BBC but on the other hand to hold the BBC to account and that
this was anomalous and very difficult to separate. Mr Grade, when
he made his statement on the 29, was moving towards trying to
sort that out but we would be very interested in your comments.
Sir Robert Smith: I think the
line that he came out with was that there is nothing wrong with
the governors being champions of the BBC but what they cannot
be is champions of the management of the BBC. I think you will
see in our statement on Hutton that some lessons have been learned
over that, although if you wanted really to go into Hutton there
are a lot of things that we could say about the Sunday night meeting
and the inquiry we undertook, but mistakes were made. We do understand
the difference and with regard to the line that Michael Grade
took about being champions there is one area that we are particularly
left with under regulation, which is bias. I cannot remember the
exact words but it was about impartiality, that sort of area.
I think it is right that there is a danger in concentrating all
the power in a regulator. Particularly where you take the BBC
and potential government intervention and so on, this line of
balance and balanced reporting is one area where it is right that
it is kept with the governors and away from Ofcom. I think Ofcom
on taste and decency and all these sorts of things is fine, and
underneath that the governors set guidelines which may go further
than those which Ofcom have set. I think lessons have been learned
and absolutely we are not here to champion management; we are
here to question management on behalf of the licence payer.
Q287 Alan Keen: I saw at close quarters
the working relationship between Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke and
I thought it was excellent. With your background in business you
will have seen that model repeated over and over again in the
commercial world. Of course, when the problem arose Gavyn maybe
was too close to the operations of it and would tend to defend
management. Gavyn advocated straightaway that there should be
an executive chairman, as Gavyn seemed to act as, and a separate
chairman of governance. Now we are going to get another person
who will make an excellent chairman but he has been even closer
to the operations of TV and radio, so there is a greater danger.
It is not just a danger—it would be a shame if the new chairman
could not be part of the management but it is impossible to do
both jobs. How do you react to that?
Sir Robert Smith: You are almost
getting on to my specialist subject, which is not broadcasting,
incidentally. I do not think you can have two chairmen but in
a way we have got that because you have got the chairman of what
is really a supervisory board and the chairman of the management
group. That is how it works. You have to have a good relationship
between a chairman and a chief executive. It would be totally
dysfunctional if you had a very bad relationship there. People
might say, "It is very clear that there is blue water between
them" but it just would not function properly. The Board
of Governors has to have a reasonable working relationship and
the chairman/chief executive relationship is very important. I
think we have actually got that because the board is the Board
of Governors. The Director-General, the Deputy Director-General
and the Chief Operating Officer under the new constitution are
not members of that board. That board is chaired by Michael and
that board supervises the management board, which is chaired by
Mark Thompson. It does actually work almost with two chairmen,
if you like. It is a tricky thing. The more distance you get the
more remote they are and the less co-operation there is between
the two and the more the organisation suffers. What you cannot
always have is total capture if they get too close. I am not commenting
on the relationship between Gavyn and Greg. We will make our statement
and that is it. There always is a danger of being too close and
of being too far apart.
Q288 Alan Keen: It is a tricky problem.
Can I go on to Pat? You can tell by my accent, Pat, that I was
brought up on Teesside and in those days we used to have jokes
about people from Newcastle, which seemed very large to me. I
thought London was England and that we were different, so I understand
the Scottish situation as well. How do you balance that? I look
through different eyes. I have been in West London for a long
time now; I actually live in West London now. I look back at the
north east and I know that it needs to speak as a region and not
as Tyne versus Tees. How do you balance those things? It is not
just making programmes; it is a voice for the region as well,
is it not?
Mr Loughrey: Yes. This is another
complex issue. I look across at the diversity of the United Kingdom
as a hugely healthy, energising thing, and we can provide an internal
dialogue within local radio areas, within Where I Live and within
local television and radio. That is increasingly possible. We
play a huge part, I hope, in the political life of the United
Kingdom with our politics output and our active political coverage
in news. The bit that has perhaps been neglected is in ensuring
that that voice is consistently heard across the UK, inter-regional
and across the whole United Kingdom. That is what we are pledging
to change. At the moment we have vigorous production centres in
the three nations. We have less vigorous production happening
across the regions of England and we are determined to enhance
that for the benefit of the regions but also to ensure that the
network schedules are as rich as they can be. When we produce
programmes like Auf Wiedersehen Pet they do not just meet
audience tastes in that specific region; they meet audience tastes
in the entire UK, which is a far more tolerant and far more broad-minded
audience than the old suppositions might lead us to believe. It
is about nurturing the talent and ensuring that the string of
remarkable writers from all parts of the north of England have
opportunities through to public service broadcasters from the
craft skills, costume design and stage construction. These are
important prerequisites of a vibrant industry. We are determined
to invest in those areas and build on initiatives like the Regional
Theatre Initiative (Northern Exposure) in Newcastle and ensure
that happens. There is also a renaissance happening in the cities
of England. You do not need to spend long in those to see that.
I am privileged now in my job to see a sense of pride and opportunity
for the future and an unwillingness to accept less generous services
than are available elsewhere. That is as true within broadcasting
as it is in the rest of the public service.
Q289 Chris Bryant: Can I ask you
a question from one of your own documents? It is Defining a
Nation: Wales and the BBC. Aled Eirug says, " . . . how
can the BBC adequately serve both one nation and a series of nations?
How can it contribute to a sense of cohesion in the United Kingdom
while exploring the diversity of its component parts?"
Mr Loughrey: That is an interesting
quote. I think the diversity of the UK is its greatest strength.
It is all of us from all of our different backgrounds coming together
to provide broadcasting in which we passionately believe. We believe
that broadcasting is a force for understanding and for creative
fulfilment and enrichment in society. It is the variety of languages
which we speak, the places and cultures from which we come that
enrich and enliven that debate. If we were monolithic, if all
of our identities were the same, there would not be the need for
the bit of the BBC that I lead and a central singular monolithic
voice would be adequate. Happily, the UK is a much richer and
more diverse entity than that, not just because of our historic
heritage and indigenous cultures and languages, but also because
of waves of settlement over many generations and centuries. Our
airwaves offer the ideal opportunity to ventilate and nurture
those identities. There are not easy solutions to it. It has been
an organically changing and shifting pattern. In the last decade
we have probably moved more in a pluralist direction than we did
since the 1920s.
Q290 Chris Bryant: I wonder whether
that is true because it feels from a Welsh context as if you have
decided that one of the things that you are there to do is define
Wales as Welsh and as being different from the rest of the UK
and that creates a monolith of its own. It is a small monolith,
I suppose; it is a Welsh monolith. You have spent a lot of money
on BBC2 W, which is different from BBC2, and BBC1 Wales is different
from BBC1. We get programmes at different times and some of the
biggest television news and current affairs programmes that would
be on earlier in the evening in England are on later in Wales
because there are specifically Welsh programmes put on. The governors
put a lot of money into reporting devolution. I just wonder whether
there is a danger that you adopt a kind of nationalism.
Mr Loughrey: You and I have discussed
this before. I do not think that proper coverage of the devolved
institutions of Parliament and the Assemblies is doing any more
than fulfilling our public service. In the John Birt era of running
the BBC there was very significant and very proper investment
in that work. If the accusation is that we are somehow nurturing
an insular and self-obsessed identity I do not recognise that.
If you look at the remit of BBC Wales, as we speak there is the
production of a series of excellent factual programmes on Kew
Gardens, we are about to produce Dr Who for the network.
I do not think that speaks of an insular, monolithic obsession
with Welshness but it is absolutely right, of course, that BBC
Wales provides programmes that are based on and celebrate the
unique identity of the Welsh language and heritage.
Q291 Chris Bryant: The Welsh language
and heritage?
Mr Loughrey: But not exclusively.
Q292 Chris Bryant: The BBC in the
past—BBC Wales, BBC Scotland—used to do better at
getting programmes on to the national network than it does now.
It did better in the 1950s and the 1960s, according to your own
document.
Mr Loughrey: What you say is our
own document is a series of essays that we commissioned from people
who did not accept a specific brief from us. It is to ensure that
the charter debate happens across the whole UK. These are critical
friends, if you like.
Q293 Chris Bryant: Half of them work
for the BBC.
Mr Loughrey: Some of them work
for the BBC but that does not mean in this instance that they
carry a BBC remit. Statistically I would challenge the assertion
that our network representation has fallen. The opposite is the
case. The level of production in the nations for the networks
has grown in Wales by a factor of three in the last five years.
Q294 Chris Bryant: I have not seen
many made-in-Wales programmes coming on the national network.
I know Dr Who is coming on next year and I suppose you
would say that one of the recent dramas, He Knew He Was Right,
was a BBC Welsh production but I do not see how BBC Welsh it was.
Mr Loughrey: If you look at Belonging,
if you look at the splendid Ellen MacArthur documentary, you have
on BBC Wales one of the finest factual production departments
that exists in the BBC. They had 11 series running on four television
networks at one time this year, an unprecedented success.
Q295 Chris Bryant: You said something
which I wholeheartedly agree with about there being sometimes
a tendency within both Scotland and Wales as well as England to
get obsessed and it is very depressing when you see a BBC news
story about education and they have got just about as far as Gospel
Oak in north London. I wonder what your response is to community
radio, which has been very dismissive—or has felt very dismissive.
Quite a lot of other MPs have raised with me that they are feeling
that the BBC is never very interested in anything genuinely local.
Do you think that is fair?
Mr Loughrey: I am sorry if that
is the impression. This is access radio for the community generally.
Q296 Chris Bryant: That is what used
to be called in the Communications Act community radio.
Mr Loughrey: Yes. My colleague
Jenny Abramsky and I made three specific offers of support to
access community radio. We are going through a relentless process
of digitising kit and upgrading our equipment. We are offering
to those radio stations free equipment for anyone engaged in that
kind of work, non-profit driven, community based radio. We are
offering free training in any one of our centres across the country
and I know that is happening in three or four as we speak. Lastly,
if they wish to accept it, given proper controls we will give
them our news output for use on their airways, provided it is
clearly branded as BBC news and not scattered in the service.
I think those are pretty significant offers of help. Rather than
just give you the rhetoric, we are determined to be better partners
than we have been historically across the world of broadcasting
and indeed in communities. You know our open centres and buses
only happen in partnership with education authorities in communities.
Historically the BBC was not good in partnerships. We have realised
that that is how you achieve things in the community and we are
determined to be supportive of groups like community radio.
Q297 Chris Bryant: I think everybody
would applaud the announcement last week about taking lots of
production outside the M25 area. I just wonder how easy it is
going to be because I know A Question of Sport has been
made in Manchester for some time and you have tried a version
of A Question of Pop, which you were going to do in Manchester
and artists refused to come to Manchester to do it so you ended
up doing it in London again. Are there going to be difficulties?
Mr Loughrey: Yes, because the
industry is tilted more and more towards London. It is right that
the BBC takes those risks and pushes in a different direction
because of the nature of our funding. It will not be achieved
overnight. We have set this charter period to achieve the targets
that I have quoted in the document. It will be a slow process.
As we speak almost all of the network commissioning decisions
are made within that sealed unit that is the M25. Everyone eats
in the same restaurants, walks in the same streets, attends the
same theatre. When the key commissioning decisions are made in
that milieu the talent and the industry know that those are the
places to be. When the decision-makers live in a different environment,
when they breathe a different air, when they meet different people,
I foresee and Mark Thompson foresees a change in that dynamic
and the talent will spot where the decision-makers are and follow
them, but not overnight.
Q298 Chris Bryant: So should there
be a quota which establishes that 50%, or not?
Mr Loughrey: The 50% is a very
stretching target. History tells us that quotas are not the most
creative device in our industry but you have a Chairman and
a Director-General who are passionately committed, as indeed is
the Board of Governors in its entirety, to achieving this because
it is culturally and creatively essential in the modern UK. I
foresee it happening.
Sir Robert Smith: We are talking
about moving 1,700 people. It is not just a case of, say, A
Question of Sport going there. We are talking about complete
channels having to move, complete genres having to move. It has
to be thought out very carefully. If it ends up being very expensive
we will have to think about that very carefully.
Q299 Chris Bryant: One quota that
you do have to abide by is the independent production quota. How
does that work for the regions and Scotland and Wales? Is it not
really the case that you are not going to stand much chance of
increasing this level of production outside the M25 unless you
improve your relations with independent producers?
Sir Robert Smith: Strangely enough,
on the contrary: we are exceeding that. The BBC overall just failed
to reach its quota of 25%. In Scotland, which I can speak for,
and Pat perhaps can speak for the Nations and Regions, we are
something like 30 or 33%, depending on the two measures that we
take of the thing, so we are way ahead of the game on that.
Mr Loughrey: It is a good partnership.
Of all the network production we make in the three nations for
the networks, 60% is made by independent companies. In representing
the United Kingdom on the networks, frankly I am not obsessed
with whether it is made in-house or out of house. It is important
that it is made by people who live in and care about their patch.
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