Examination of Witness (Questions 390-399)
Mrs Mary Honeyball
7 NOVEMBER 2006
Q390Chairman: Good morning, Mrs Honeyball. First
of all, my apologies for the slight delay but we are now going
to proceed. May I thank you very warmly for sparing the time to
see us; I know you have rearranged things so you can be with us
today and that is very greatly appreciated. We have a number of
questions to ask you; we will aim for 45 minutes and if we go
a little bit over I hope you will forgive us. We have seven topics
we would like to cover with you, but before we start I wonder,
Mrs Honeyball, if you would like very briefly to explain to the
sub-committee your role in all this yourself and then we can go
forward.
Mrs Honeyball: I am a Labour Member of the European
Parliament, I am one of the MEPs representing London, and I am
only a substitute member of the Culture and Education Committee,
but I am actually the only British Labour MEP on the committee.
The UK is not generally very well represented; there is one Conservative
full member as well so we are the two British members on the committee
who actually attend meetings and are active. The Culture and Education
Committee is probably not one of the most important committees
in the European Parliament, but it is the lead committee on the
Television Without Frontiers Directive and as such that means
the Directive goes first to the Culture Committee and the main
rapporteur is a member of the Culture Committee—I understand
you were meant to hear from her and were not able to. Other committees
are then asked to give opinions, and that is basically how the
legislative process works, it will go to the lead committee and
other committees first. Committees table amendments and sometimes
amendments will be compromised if there is agreement on certain
things. The full committee vote on that and then what has been
voted will go to the plenary session of Parliament for first reading;
it will then go to the Council and the Council will produce a
common position which will then come back to Parliament and there
can be amendments at that stage, at second reading, but no new
information. It will then go back again to the Council if there
are any points of difference and then if we still do not get agreement
we will go into what is called the co-decision procedure where
there are discussions between the Parliament representatives and
the Council to hopefully come up with a final agreement. We are
not there yet, it has just gone through Committee and it is coming
up for first reading, that is where the legislation is now, so
you are actually getting it at a good time. My role is really
to be a member of the committee; I have put down amendments on
this which you may or may not have seen and I have been actively
interested in it.
Chairman: Thank you very much. We appreciate
entirely that when we are asking questions today you are giving
your view as a member of the committee as opposed to speaking
for the committee. First of all we would like to address the question
of scope and Lord Haskel and I will start this. Lord Haskel, would
you like to start?
Q391 Lord Haskel: We think that the
scope of the proposal is central to this because the proposal
is attempting to bring the emerging media platforms under the
existing regulatory framework. We wondered if you would consider
whether this attempt is appropriate and what are the advantages
and disadvantages which this regulatory approach might have for
citizens of the European Union.
Mrs Honeyball: The whole issue of scope was
very difficult right from the beginning and there was quite a
lot of discussion about it. Some of the Member States, notably
France and Germany, wanted much greater scope at the beginning
than we have ended up with now and wanted it to cover not only
what we call linear television but also some element of regulating
the internet and what you might call new media. It has now ended
up in its current form being mainly concerned with linear services,
with some extensions but not a lot. I think that is probably where
it needs to be, there are lots and lots of issues about new media
and regulating the internet and quite how you do that and how
you justify that with freedom of expression—the internet
is not a controlled television environment on the whole. People
should be able to write their own blogs and do whatever and all
Member States have legislation in place to prevent criminal things
happening, so there are safety nets in terms of the internet already.
We have been right to exclude that because it would be impossible
to regulate that and a lot of it I do not think needs regulating,
but we need to be aware of two things here really. The first is
what I think is a great gap in this directive, in that we have
not really dealt with internet service providers, how we relate
to them and how we discuss regulation with them and what they
should and should not be doing. There is some element of that
in the e-commerce directive but we have not really addressed it
in this particular one and that is quite an omission actually,
but I am not sure that we can go back and deal with it now. We
need to bear it in mind when this comes back again, as it inevitably
will because this is a very fast-moving area. The other thing
which we need again to be aware of for the future is internet
services becoming more like television. Google is now seeking
to do this and to effectively broadcast programmes, but what we
need to do with this whole issue is just keep very much on top
of it and be aware that it is very, very fast-moving, probably
one of the fastest-moving things that we will ever have to deal
with. We need to just take that on board really. Having said that,
those are two things that perhaps are not recognised enough so
far, but in terms of where we have got to with it now it is easy
to regulate linear services and I am quite happy with that. I
have had a lot of discussions with Ofcom and the BBC and we have
come up with something which they are now relatively happy with.
Q392 Lord Haskel: As it is so fast-moving,
as you say, do you think that the proposals are what we call "future-proofed",
or do you think that now is not the right time to be doing this,
we should wait and see what happens and then think about what
regulations there are because, after all, we are not quite sure
what we are trying to achieve. Are we trying to protect the TV
firms from going bust through lack of advertising, are we trying
to make sure there is plenty of choice for the consumer? I wonder
whether now is the right time to be doing this.
Mrs Honeyball: This is one of those things where
there is never a right time, because there will always be something
else. I do not think it is future-proofed enough and I do not
think there is enough recognition that this probably will not
last very long actually to make any sense, which is why of course
we are doing it now, because the last one was out of date. It
is just an area which will move very fast, as we discussed. In
terms of what it is attempting to do, the way I view it is that
it is essentially about consumers and what the public wants, and
also there is some element of consumer and public protection.
That has to be the focus of it and that is what broadcasters should
be doing; this is basically what it is about actually, to answer
that question.
Q393 Lord Haskel: There is plenty
of public protection in the local laws. We have got Ofcom which
gives the public plenty of protection so what is it that the EU
can add to this?
Mrs Honeyball: What it does do is actually offer
cross-border protection, if you like. Television and broadcasting
is actually very international, I have actually been quite surprised
when I have been in other European countries actually how many
English and American programmes there are, though very often they
are dubbed. I have genuinely been surprised how much is exported,
so there is a need to deal with this on a European-wide level
but this is probably less of an issue for the UK than other European
countries where there are obviously borders which can be crossed
by television signals. We are in a slightly different situation
here, we are not part of a large mass of land; the boundaries
are not quite so obvious.
Q394 Lord Geddes: Just one point,
if I may, My Lord Chairman, which is a point of clarification.
You spoke in your opening remarks about where you were and what
the process was with your committee and coming up with amendments.
Are you talking of amending the 20 October 2006 draft or the December
2005 draft; which draft is your committee amending?
Mrs Honeyball: It is the Commission's proposal.
Q395 Lord Geddes: The original proposal,
not the Finnish Presidency's redraft.
Mrs Honeyball: No.
Lord Geddes: Thank you.
Q396 Chairman: That is very helpful,
what you said, but could I just ask a couple of questions. What
do you think the fundamental objectives are, is there real clarity
of objectives behind the desire to redraft and are they objectives
to look at television as it was regulated and ask whether those
regulations, that framework, is still appropriate in a world whether
there are hundreds and hundreds of television channels and more
choice? Is that the objective, to maintain the internal market
and readjust the regulation in the light of that choice, or is
the objective to say we have always regulated television, therefore
we should regulate anything that is what is now called audio-visual
media services and just because we regulate television in a particular
way so we should regulate the new delivery platforms, the internet.
What is the starting point, do you think, in the European Parliament
when they look at this, or are the two mixed up? You have been
very clear in your mind that at this stage the regulation should
not really be going into the internet.
Mrs Honeyball: The two are mixed up and it is
actually an update of something that was there before, it is not
the first one, and that was the original intention, that the Commission
wanted to move the thing on a bit. That was their objective and
I do have some sympathy with what your view is, that you do think
this is trying to be very clear, and I do actually have some sympathy
with that view because there are quite a lot of unanswered questions
to this. At the beginning the Commission did think that some sort
of regulation of the internet was a good idea, and they are now
finding, in the course of this going through committee and further
discussions, that this is a very difficult area and perhaps the
level of regulation that they were hoping they would get is not
desirable. That is not necessarily a bad thing, that is what happens
when legislation goes through Parliament, it is actually part
of the job that we do, so I would not necessarily criticise it.
Chairman: We must push on, but if you
are dying to bring something in could you bring it in at an appropriate
point as we go on. We have six more topics and Mrs Honeyball has
been very clear on the first area. Baroness Eccles is going to
introduce the country of origin issue.
Q397 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
Mrs Honeyball, we have gathered through various discussions that
this is quite a knotty one, the country of origin principle, and
we understand that there are different views about it across the
Member States. In your opinion, has the operation of the principle
in respect of the provision of broadcasting services benefited
European citizens and Member States and do you consider this principle
to be now under threat, particularly as the revised presidential
draft, the Finnish draft of 20 October, makes some proposals about
the country of origin principle, and whether this would weaken
it? It is really a general view about it and also a specific on
the Presidency proposals, the Finnish draft.
Mrs Honeyball: European legislation, up until
the Services Directive, was always based on the country of origin
principle, it is a very clear part of the way that things operate.
We are still becoming familiar with the fall-out from the Services
Directive, where the whole thing has changed quite considerably.
So far we are still maintaining the country of origin principle
in this legislation, which I actually think is probably the only
way that you can sensibly do it, but there has been quite a lot
of discussion within it as to how the country of origin principle
will work, and I actually did have discussions with Ofcom yesterday
about it. The Swedes want some sort of mandatory principle of
co-operation, which Ofcom really do not want at all because they
would then be having to deal with potentially 26 Member States
on particular issues, which is probably not very sensible. I know
Ofcom's solution to this is to have some element of voluntary
co-operation where you can actually do it in a more unwieldy fashion
really, so I suggest that we need to look at this and think how
it would work in practice. We should uphold the principle in general.
Q398 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
You have actually helped to answer something that has been bothering
us a lot about whether the Swedish wish—and we know what
that is—would be binding or not, but co-operation that would
be mandatory is something different. The two terms do not actually
combine because if you are doing something that is co-operation,
how is it mandatory?
Mrs Honeyball: Exactly, but that is what the
Swedes want, they actually want mandatory co-operation. They have
particular issues with this because they have very strict regulations
and there is a broadcaster which has set up in the UK which broadcasts
to Sweden and gets round a lot of the Swedish regulations. The
Swedes are therefore very anxious to maintain what they already
have, and this is part of an attempt to do that, and I think that
is right. Different Member States will have different views on
things and you do not necessarily want to stop that altogether.
What they do is actually better than what a lot of Member States
do and that should not be undercut and undermined.
Chairman: Can we push on then and have
a first look at minimum content rules; Lord Walpole is going to
introduce that.
Q399 Lord Walpole: Good morning.
On advertising, do you agree with the liberalisation of the quantitative
rules and do you consider that they need tightening or do you
think they could be liberalised further?
Mrs Honeyball: There has been an awful lot of
discussion about advertising, the breaks that you have to have
and how long you can go before you have a break and all that kind
of thing. We have had a lot of discussion about it and there has
to be a balance here. Most Member States do not have the BBC and
they are not used to public service broadcasting in the way that
it is done in this country, so there is much more reliance on
advertising and it is much more of an issue in Europe than it
is in many ways here. We have discussed this and come up with
something which the Committee feels is all right, and I do not
really feel that I can argue with that particularly because we
have quite a different regime here in a way. We have probably
got there on advertising and also if you are broadcasting services
which actually need advertising revenue to exist, you cannot cut
back advertising to such an extent where it is going to be problematic.
You have to balance these two things.
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