Examination of Witnesses (Questions 37-39)
LORD PUTTNAM
CBE, MR ANDREW
LANSLEY CBE MP, DAME
PATRICIA HODGSON
DBE AND MS
CLARE ETTINGHAUSEN
29 MARCH 2006
Q37 Chairman: Good morning and thank
you for coming this morning. I apologise for the relatively modest
numbers. Colleagues have a habit of drifting in; 9.30 is clearly
a little early for some of them! We are grateful obviously for
you coming today but, more particularly, for the very important
report that you have produced[1]
which in a sense has formed a backcloth to a great deal of what
we have been discussing in the Committee and we thought that,
rather than simply rely on our reading, we would hear it from
you directly. David, I do not know whether there is anything that
you want to say by way of introduction.
Lord Puttnam: I would like to
introduce everyone though they probably do not need an introduction.
First of all, Dame Patricia Hodgson, who is Principal Elect at
Newnham College Cambridge but probably has been in this room more
times than almost any of us representing the interests of the
BBC, Clare Ettinghausen who runs the Hansard Society and Andrew
Lansley, part of your home team.
Q38 Chairman: I would not go quite
that far! I know that he is moving in our direction . . . !
Lord Puttnam: Viewed from the
other end of the corridor, it looks that way! I would like to
make a couple of generalised remarks and then we will deal with
individual issues. Context: I think a year ago, you were very,
very generous about the report and, if we recognised that there
was a problem then, particularly in the area of trust, you have
to acknowledge that the problem is significantly worse today.
The point that we tried to make in the report was that whilst
there are positive things taking place in Parliament all the time—and
we can go into some of those this morning if you want—year
on year, Parliament is slipping behind when benchmarked against
almost any other organisation that in a macro sense is in the
communications business, the public facing business. There are
a number of reasons for this but we were not convinced that all
of them were being addressed. It comes down at the end to the
issue of trust. I have spent most of the past year going round—last
night in Cheltenham—talking to groups, large and small,
about attitudes to Parliament and I have formed a very depressed
and distressing view. Trust has broken down. There is not a sense
out there of being adequately represented or even when there is
a sense of being adequately represented, the public do not believe
that they are being adequately communicated with. I know that
it is invidious to compare Parliament with any form of corporation
but the truth is, in any other parallel area of life, this would
be an urgent and very worrying trend and, whilst Parliament is
wrestling with some of the problems, there is no sense of them
being wrestled with with the urgency that certainly I and I think
the rest of the Committee feel they deserve. One simple illustration.
We know exactly who speaks for the Government: it is the Prime
Minister and Downing Street. It is extremely difficult to define
who speaks for Parliament. Believe me, the public out there do
not know who speaks for Parliament. The Speaker is an all but
anonymous figure and there is no sense that Parliament has a voice
or at least a personified voice, and we felt that that was an
error. This morning, we should spend at least some time talking
about what is happening. Indeed, there are things happening and
particularly what is very, very encouraging—and thanks to
you, Chairman—are developments on the website, and I actually
think that changes to the website will make a profound difference.
And not a small difference. I think the ability of people, particularly
young people, to interrogate Parliament in their terms and about
their issues is a massive step in the right direction. The conversation
can turn to, who is to blame for the breakdown in trust? We were
criticised somewhat for not focusing at least some of the blame
on the media, but the truth is that the media can only reflect
what they see in Parliament and personally I think it is a waste
of time complaining about the media unless we are absolutely certain
that every single nook and cranny of change has been looked at,
investigated and optimised and I think our purpose here today
is to try to help in that process.
Dame Patricia Hodgson: I would
like to highlight one or two things that are in your control that
reinforce exactly what David said. It is about, I think, determining
on the purpose of your communication. A sort of quick and dirty
feel from my BBC and ITC days would be that something like 70%
of coverage is government focused, either government driven or
quangos and NGOs engaging with government; most of the rest, party
political or individual MPs locally. Almost nothing about Parliament.
So, what David says about people not understanding any difference
between Parliament and Government or understanding what you do
is not surprising. All the polls show that as well but the polls
also show a greater respect for individual MPs, their own MPs,
and it is about building on that and the work that you do here.
I do think the media is blameworthy but the point is that there
are things which you can control here whereas you cannot control
the media. There are some simple things like bringing interviews
off College Green into the workplace and like the experiment in
the Lords at the moment to relax the grammar of coverage so that
it feels real, like the rest of television. Above all, thinking
about the timing of events here. I know that sounds like lese-majesty
but almost anybody who wants to influence the public or communicate
with the public thinks about when it is going to get coverage
and I think that is something you should think about. There are
two particular things within your control for which the website
is clearly terrifically important. As David says, it is improving
exponentially but there is still a long way to go because it is
still for aficionados who find it a convenient way of looking
at what is happening now. It is not yet setting the agenda in
terms of issues. For example, last week, I typed "BBC Charter
Review" into the archive search engine and it came up with
nothing. Yet, that is a live issue and therefore anyone interested
in it is only going to get an angle either from the DCMS, ie government,
or the BBC. Whereas, if you think about issues and the young people,
the journalists who, if they went to Parliament's website first,
you would set the agenda in an independent way, and of course
the other is the BBC itself because the Charter and Agreement
are currently being debated and there is all the controversy about
citizenship and, at the same time, the BBC is being allowed to
get away with a bromide about its coverage of this place. You
either use or lose this once-in-ten-years' opportunity to write
into the Agreement a real commitment to improving the Parliamentary
channel and their own website, a commitment which otherwise you
will lose to highlights coverage on the main channels and some
real cross-promotion from those main channels to the Parliament
channel and the website.
Mr Lansley: The reason I became
involved with David and this particular Commission was because
I have been concerned for a long time, as I know many of us have,
about the lack of trust in politicians and democracy and I know,
as I suspect all of you do, that, in constituencies—and
this is generally true for a constituency Member of Parliament—you
are known and to a much greater extent trusted than the political
process as a whole and that is to do with engagement and familiarity.
The problem is that there is no engagement and familiarity with
Parliament as an institution. To give an example, I served under
David on a previous occasion pretty well all the way through the
Communications Bill. We did a great deal of work which frankly
was not party political at any point in the course of a year-and-a-half's
work or so. There is probably one in a thousand of my constituents
who know that I did that. I could spend a couple of days arguing
about a single mobile phone mast and a very large proportion of
my constituents would know about it. The public are engaged with
politicians as constituency Members of Parliament, they hear from
political parties and they see a great deal of the communications
of political parties and government, principally government but
secondarily political parties. What they do not find is a space
for Parliament. Yet, what we do hear consists in large measure
of parliamentarians working together to try and find solutions
to problems and to hold government to account and although when
you balance the proportion of the time we spend as Members of
Parliament on that task with the proportion of communications
output which is understood and received by the public, it is a
trivial fraction of that total communications output. So, from
my point of view, the purpose of this was to find a way in which
one can have a space for Parliament as an institution so that
there is a point to all the change we have made, going all the
way back to having select committees, to having a greater degree
of scrutiny and to having a greater independence for backbench
Members of Parliament. What is the point of doing all that inside
Parliament if Parliament is not at the same time creating the
communication strategy which enables that to be effectively delivered
to the public? It is not, frankly. Even on the website. I put
the word "hospitals" in the other day and the Armed
Forces Bill came up. Well, "A", Armed Forces Bill comes
first in the alphabet. So, naturally enough, it is the first thing
to pop up when you put "hospitals" into the search engine.
You could do it this morning. Under "What's on?", it
says, "The Immigration, Nationality and Asylum Bill"
and you can click on the Bill and what you get of course are the
explanatory notes and the text of the Bill. It does not actually
tell you what the Lords today are discussing that they are sending
back to the Commons. It does not engage with the issues. Frankly,
if that is all going to change, it is not going to be by web technologies
and new search engines. It can only change, as is true with any
communication strategy in any organisation, because one lives
that particular change and, at the moment, Parliament does not
have a mechanism led by its Members and determined formally inside
Parliament of a communication strategy which then informs the
whole of the administration as to how this should change.
Ms Ettinghausen: I will not bore
the Committee with all the reasons why the Hansard Society set
the Commission up under the chairmanship of Lord Puttnam but,
very briefly, it is worth saying that we set it up because we
saw and have continued to see Parliament at the centre of a healthy
democracy and we were increasingly concerned that there was a
problem with the way Parliament communicates itself and that really
democracy was moving on and Parliament was being left behind.
So that is why we set it up. It is also worth saying that we spent
some time at the Hansard Society with various members of this
Committee yesterday talking about far more procedural kind of
insidery issues about reform of the Committee stage in Parliament
or in the Commons and it is really worth saying that there is
a link between those sort of more procedural technical issues
and the perhaps more kind of jazzy communication issues and they
cannot be seen as separate more effective and efficient Parliament
covers both of those issues. Thirdly, there is a public appetite
for representative democracy. I am interested to see that the
Power Inquiry report is there on the table which certainly talks
about a more participative democracy and the public really have
much more of an appetite for parliamentary style representative
democracy. They may not vote but they are very interested in MPs
acting on their behalf. They do not want to be consulted on every
issue. They would like to know what is going on, but they certainly
do not see themselves as activists and political activists in
the parliamentary sense. They are very keen on supporting what
happens here and I think that is worth noting. Lastly, the Commission
felt very strongly that the participation of young people in democracy
was very important. We know from statistics that young people
are less and less likely to vote but we also know that they are
certainly not politically apathetic. We constantly look for new
avenues of bringing young people into the political process and
what we have found time and time again through the Commission
is that there are very few avenues to bring young people or indeed
people of all ages into the parliamentary process. One of the
two or three things that have happened in the House of Lords since
the Puttnam Commission reported is a trial to allow young people
to use the House of Lords' Chamber during recess and although
it is a discrete exercise with a debating competition taking place
there, it may have an effect on young people being able to see
their peers in something that they would only normally see adults
and older people on television. So, I think it is worth, as the
discussion goes on, thinking about avenues where young people
may be able to have a way in to what happens here.
Q39 Chairman: Thank you very much.
I think all of us would share your objective and I think it is
right that we do what we can to put our own House in order, if
you will forgive the pun. After your report was published, I did
talk to a number of journalists, particularly television journalists,
who said, for example, that it is extremely difficult to persuade
news editors to show pictures of green benches. Equally, it is
the case that quite often the only coverage of Parliament in our
daily newspapers is in the form of a sketch which is hardly likely
to inform people—it may entertain them but it clearly gives
a particular view of what Members of Parliament do, which is usually
not a particularly helpful one. So, whilst I accept that we have
to do what we can to make the changes that you describe, particularly
in relation to, for example, the website—and a great deal
of work is underway on that—I remain slightly unpersuaded
that, if we made all of those efforts, if we implemented every
one of your 30 steps, we would still find that our media, given
the state that it is in, would not respond with any more positive
coverage.
Lord Puttnam: I would like to
pick up two things, one very much a point that Patricia made.
You do have a one-time-chance in the next 10 years to influence
the way in which BBC optimises BBC Parliament. The problem does
not lie with the people responsible for BBC Parliament, the problem
lies between them and the controllers of finance at the BBC who
allocate the resources. There is only a passing reference in the
entire White Paper to BBC's parliamentary coverage. This is, in
my judgment, crazy and Parliament should be taking a firm line
as to the minimum obligations that the BBC takes on to cover Parliament
and as technology improves, as it will, the utilisation of the
BBC's website and the potential of streaming. There should be
a series of quite clear commitments by the BBC and required of
the BBC, in exactly the same way that there is an entire page,
I am delighted to say, on the BBC's obligations to training over
the next 10 years. The fact that there is no similar page on the
BBC's obligation to parliamentary and political coverage is a
serious oversight and something that you absolutely could influence
immediately. Believe me, it does not have to be empty green benches,
there are a number of ways in which Parliament can be much more
constructively illustrated. The other is that we are moving, in
my judgment, inexorably towards state funding of political parties.
That throws an enormous amount of responsibility on the degree
of interest we take in the citizenship education because we will
be funding—and it is going to be very uncomfortable for
many us—parties and opinions that we will find seriously
unattractive. We have an absolute obligation to make sure that
young people in this country understand what is being said, what
people like the BNP's Nick Griffin is saying, what the history
of extreme politics in Britain and indeed in Europe can lead to.
If we do not do that, we could well reap the whirlwind. You cannot
impose state funding on the ill-informed and the potentially even
ignorant electorate. This is a very, very important moment in
Parliament's life. A point at which it has to become far more
proactive in the situation of projecting itself to the public
and allowing the public to have a full understanding of the very
good work that goes on here day in and day out, much of which
is not party political and which may not attract the interest
of the editors of the tabloids but, I think, sure as hell ought
to interest the electorate in understanding that many of their
issues are being addressed, and addressed very intelligently.
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