Examination of Witnesses (Questions 538
- 539)
TUESDAY 26 OCTOBER 2004
OFCOM
Chairman: Good morning, gentlemen. I
am very sorry to have kept you waiting—the responsibility
is mine personally and not that of the Committee as a whole. We
will have an opportunity on your Annual Report of discussing the
work of Ofcom with you. What the Committee is clear about is that
your presence here today relates to the BBC Charter Renewal and
it will be that aspect we will be questioning you about.
Q538 Michael Fabricant: Good morning.
As part of your review into public service broadcasting, which
is of course directly related to the future of the BBC, you suggest
the idea of there being a public service publisher, and this is
part of your Phase 2 inquiry. I wonder if you would like to expand
a little on that?
Lord Currie of Marylebone: Good
morning. May I introduce my colleagues Stephen Carter and Tony
Stoller who will, of course, help to answer the questions. The
instructions we were given by the Communications Act from Parliament
were that we should review public service broadcasting and advise
on how it can be maintained and strengthened. Our analysis suggests
that the analogue compact for commercial public service broadcasting
will come under pressure over the coming years; and, therefore,
we thought it important to reflect on how we might innovatively
think about new ways of strengthening public service broadcasting,
hence the concept of a public service publisher; not a fully-formed
idea but we think a constructive proposal to be thought about,
to be worked on by Ofcom and by others. That is the origins of
it.
Mr Carter: I have just two things
to add to that: firstly, that we deliberately put it out as a
not fully-formed idea because part of what we were looking to
see was how public service content could be generated in a fully
digital world; and, therefore, constructing it in a way that was
defined solely by traditional broadcast standards or methods seemed
to us not necessarily to be as innovative an approach as one could
have achieved. Secondly, we emphasise that the underpinning of
the idea was to find a vehicle that could provide competition
for the BBC; because inherent in our analysis was if the ability
or willingness of the shareholder-funded broadcasters, commercial
broadcasters, to produce public service broadcasting declines
you are left without a competition-forcing function for the BBC.
The one thing we said was that, in our view, if it was an idea
of merit the only institution you would exclude from participating
in it would be the BBC.
Q539 Michael Fabricant: Channel 4
of course, I think many people would agree, is a public service
broadcaster, certainly many of its programmes are providing a
public service. It is a publisher too, of course, and does not
make its own programmes and it is funded by advertising. How would
you think your PSB would be funded?
Lord Currie of Marylebone: We
set out three options: one is that it would be funded from general
taxation, in the way that the BBC World Service is funded; the
second would be a hypothecation of spectrum revenues; and there
is the possibility of a turnover tax on communications. There
are a variety of mechanisms. We pointed out the options. If this
extra money were to be put in (and it is not extra money in the
sense of being an increase in the amount going to public service
broadcasting) it is a shift from an implicit subsidy to public
service broadcasting which we have under the present arrangement—the
gifting of the fixed analogue spectrum—making that subsidy
which is currently implicit, explicit in the digital world; a
variety of mechanisms. We did not express a view which would be
better.
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