Examination of Witnesses (Questions 280
- 299)
WEDNESDAY 3 JUNE 2009
Mr Peter Knowles, Mr Peter Lowe, Mr Toby Castle and
Mr Simon Mares
Q280 Chairman:
Was that for a regional programme?
Mr Mares: This was on a regional news programme.
I watched the debate, it was an interesting debate, an engrossing
debate, but when I came to try to work out what I could use it
was very difficult. With heart in mouth I would say that a lot
of Your Lordships refer back to what other people have said, and
possibly in the middle of a sentence. If you want to get a clear
distillation of views, so that you can say that this peer said
this and that peer said that, it is sometimes very difficult to
get it in the succinct time period that we have available to use
in news. Without wanting to appear too impertinent, I think people
need to be able to sum up their arguments, as well as engage in
the debate with everyone else. I do not think a debate full of
sound bites is the answer, but I do think that when people are
making their speeches they need to be able, if they want their
views covered in a news bulletin, to précis and sum them
up in a way that we can use.
Q281 Chairman:
The obvious difficulty—and I speak as someone who has been
a Member for many years—is that you do not necessarily set
off making your speech thinking it is going to be in the press
or the news. You set it off in order to argue with your opponents
on the other side of the chamber a point that has just occurred
to you and so forth.
Mr Mares: I take your point exactly, and I would
not want it to be purely to get your bit on the television, but
I am saying that within your thoughts, as you are making that
speech, should be "How do I sum it up?" If someone is
looking to get something which is 15, 20, 25 seconds long, to
sum up your arguments is what we need—and I am being generous
there in the amount of time that we use. Sometimes you think,
"They're making a fantastic point," but halfway through
they go off to answer about three or four points someone has made
and then come back to the point, and you think, "I can't
use it. It's really good but I can't use it." It is very
frustrating.
Q282 Chairman:
Are there any other contributions on that before I call on colleagues?
Mr Castle, Westminster News Editor.
Mr Castle: Indeed, I am Toby Castle. I am based
in the press gallery, working for ITV News. We obviously share
an office with Channel 4 News and I must apologise that Gary Gibbon,
Channel 4 News Political Editor, is not here.
Q283 Chairman:
There are a few other things happening.
Mr Castle: Yes. He is rather busy. It is my
role on a daily basis to report back to my office. I take part
in a conference call every morning, when, as a disembodied voice
on the phone, I tell the collective news editors, programme editors,
and Gray's Inn Road, our head office staff, what is going on in
Westminster. I am making a judgment from whatever I am seeing
in the newspapers or on the morning bulletins or on the radio
on what is going on, and then through the day I am advising them
on coverage. Obviously Your Lordships want coverage. Unfortunately,
that is often decided by things that are totally out of both your
control and my control, the news agenda. That is the point that
I really wanted to make, that often there can be something that
Your Lordships know should be on the news bulletins but because
of the vagaries of that day's news it does not appear. The other
point I would also like to make is on the world we work in. We
have Peter here from Sky News, a rolling news channel that operates
on a minute by minute basis. Often we will be phoning up offices
here in the House and saying, "We need an interview on Abingdon
Green in the next 15 minutes to make our bulletin, are you available?"—that
is very much the timeframe that we, I am afraid, work to, purely
because that is the nature of the beast—and if people are
available, they get on the television. That is often the case.
Q284 Chairman:
Peter Knowles.
Mr Knowles: My Lord Chairman, I think I heard
you say in your opening remarks that you do not expect to reach
a mass audience through the likes of Yesterday in Parliament.
Q285 Chairman:
We would always like to, but we are more thinking on how we reach
the audience that we do not get to at all at the moment.
Mr Knowles: Before we do consider that wider
audience, I would just ask you to consider this: do not underestimate
the reach of those specialist programmes. Yesterday in Parliament
within the Today programme reaches millions. Today in
Parliament has a regular nightly audience of half a million.
These are really big numbers and big audiences for what is dedicated
coverage of your work and the work of the Commons.
Q286 Chairman:
A Member of the House of Commons only has to make a joke; we have
to stand on our heads—yes?
Mr Knowles: No, I do not accept that at all,
I am afraid. The Fisheries debate on Monday had five or six minutes
on Today in Parliament; questions yesterday about security
issues; and today the Policing and Crime Bill. No, I am afraid
I cannot accept that you have to act the clown to get on air.
Mr Lowe: My Lord Chairman, as Toby said, as
a 24-hour news channel you would think that we have an enormous
amount of space and time on which to carry debate in the Lords
and interview Members of the House of Lords, but of course the
reality is that the Lords does not feature in our output very
much. We are driven entirely really by news events. I know this
is stating the obvious, but very often with political events,
if you see what is happening today, if you see what has been happening
over the last few weeks with the issue of MPs expenses, if you
look at the way in which most—not all of course, but most—government
announcements are made in the House of Commons and most political
coverage tends to be about the Government and, at the moment,
particularly, about the Prime Minister and so on, it is harder
for the Lords to come to the fore. But it does not mean we are
not interested, we are interested where it is relevant. Again
it sounds like stating the obvious, but there have been times
in the past—I am thinking of the 90-day debate, the Education
Bill, and various other bills that have been going through Parliament—where
we have been tremendously excited about what is going on in the
Lords because, as I have said, we are driven really by news events.
We are more interested in events than we are process, even though
process in itself may be very interesting for those who want to
get stuck into it.
Chairman: Thank you.
Q287 Lord Puttnam:
This is going to sound critical, and it is not intended to be,
but we are caught in a Catch-22 situation, in that news is driven
by what interests people and what interests people is what is
in the news. I watched PMQs today. There was a lot of sound and
fury but there was not one single thing said in that half hour
which is going to change anything in the lives of anyone in this
country. There was not one moment of significance. I found it
slightly embarrassing to watch. It certainly did not do the dignity
of Parliament very much good. My point is this—and this
is me musing, if you like—today is the 65th anniversary
of D-Day. A vast number of people, men and women, lost their lives
65 years ago. Tomorrow is the European elections. There has not
been a single programme on the meaning of Europe—why we
are in Europe, what we are doing in Europe, where Europe is going—since
the last European election. That means that you have a generation
of young people who will vote for the first time, not ever having
been informed by the public sector broadcasters as to what they
are voting for, why they are voting, why it might be a good idea
or, indeed, why it might not be a good idea. I realise you are
in the news business, but is this not, to an extent, a dereliction
of duty?
Mr Knowles: The coverage of Europe in the build
up to the election has been tremendous. I have been responsible
for a whole series of half-hour specials. If you look at programmes
like Daily Politics, the Politics Show, the regional
news output, everywhere I have turned in recent weeks I have seen
attempts to explain what is a very difficult parliamentary system
to explain. It is very difficult because it is so vastly different
from ours: the way the Groups work, the way they work in relationship
to each other, the consensus style politics. It is a big effort
of imagination An awful lot of work has gone into all the different
programmes of which I have been aware, as well as the specialist
European output for which I am responsible, to try to explain
this. It is a big job. It is a system which could not be more
different from our own: winner takes all, one side in or the other
side in: it could not be more different. A lot of effort has been
put in to trying to explain it.
Q288 Lord Puttnam:
I do not disagree. There have been a lot of programmes. The nature
of this subject surely requires a minimum six-part series by Simon
Schama explaining what we do in Europe, what we get out of Europe.
I have two teenage grandchildren of 19 and 17. They have no idea
what tomorrow's vote is about. None at all. I do not think they
are peculiar; I think they are absolutely normal for their age.
Nobody has set about attempting to explain it or even putting
DVDs into their schools that would allow them to be taught it.
I feel it is part and parcel of the process. We are sucked into
a system which feeds off itself and it seems unable to step back
and say, "What are the really big issues? What do we really
need to know about in order to be properly informed citizens in
the 21st Century?"
Mr Knowles: I love your idea of the Simon Schama
series.
Q289 Lord Puttnam:
Let us do it.
Mr Mares: I wonder how many teenagers would
watch that six-part series, however much we admire Simon Schama.
There has been quit a lot of European coverage. The ITV regional
political shows quite often go over to Strasbourg and will do
a whole half-hour programme from there. Central have done it three
or four times to my knowledge. We had a team over there not so
long ago, using a five or six-minute package trying to explain
what Europe is about which was used in quite a lot of the regional
shows, and in a round of shows last month we had quite a lot of
MEPs in the studios to try to explain what it is about, why you
should vote and why it is important. Whilst, yes, we are not doing
a big "Tah-rah! Important! Here is a serious bit of masterpiece
television," we are getting it into the news agenda. We do
have a correspondent out in Strasbourg who just feeds stories
into us, and where they are relevant, they are covered on the
regional bulletins. In television news in the South West, to my
knowledge, because I used to work for them, there is an enormous
amount about fishing and an enormous amount about farming. Because
they have a lot of fishermen and a lot of farmers down there,
they have covered it throughout the year. There is coverage there.
It is not up in big flashing lights, though.
Chairman: We will draw the European stumps
there. Lord Jones.
Q290 Lord Jones of Cheltenham:
Peter, you seem to be suggesting to us that the House of Lords
should be more confrontational with what is going on in the House
of Commons if we want to get coverage. We are a very gentle chamber—that
is what I like about it—compared with the Commons. We are
a little reluctant to be that strong at doing things, but I take
what you say. I wanted to ask Simon about the conciseness of speeches
made in the Lords. Do you think we need some kind of media training,
so that somewhere in our speech we just put in that 25 second
slot that makes your job easier.
Mr Mares: Yes, it would. I am married to a woman
who used to be a debater at college and she says that you tell
them what you are going to say, you say it, and then you tell
them what you have said. If you follow that model, we will get
our bit that we can pull out. Perhaps I can pick you up on the
point about the confrontational chamber, because there is a scrutinising
role which I think is very important. A Member of Your Lordships'
House recently, in a freelance operation—and I am talking
bout Lord Archer of Sandwell—had the hearings on contaminated
blood which produced for us an enormous amount of coverage. Because
it was people from our regions who were coming to Westminster
to testify what this dreadful scandal had meant to them and their
families and their lives, we covered that from the beginning right
the way through to the end. I know it was not official House of
Lords business, it was a freelance thing, but it was an example
of a group of Lords scrutinising what the Government had done,
really shining the light on it, and producing for us powerful
television because it was testimony from those people whose lives
had been affected. You do not have to be confrontational all the
time. If you shine that searchlight, you can get stuff as well.
Mr Lowe: My Lord Chairman, I want to clarify
to Lord Jones that I was not suggesting that the Lords should
be more confrontational. There are many occasions when the public
appreciates and realises that the Lords is the scrutinising body.
I was only saying that there are fewer times when that scrutiny
by the Lords comes to a head, if you like, around a news story
or around a news event. There are fewer times that that happens
in the Lords than it happens in the Commons, but, in a way, the
beauty of the Lords is that it is more gentle and scrutinising,
as you have suggested.
Q291 Baroness Billingham:
We are a very different place from the House of Commons and we
are also very different from the European Parliament. If I had
wanted to speak to you, Simon, when I was in the European Parliament,
we would have fought over two minutes in order to speak. We did
not have long periods; we only had very short moments. My office
would put out a press release and send it straight to you. Are
you really suggesting that we modernise ourselves to such an extent
that 600 or however many of us would put out press releases to
you? I think that would completely defeat what you are trying
to achieve. Maybe we ought to have some consensus view of what
sort of information it would be best for you to receive in order
to make your life easier, in order to reflect what is going on
in the Lords.
Mr Mares: We are different beasts, are we not?
Q292 Baroness Billingham:
Yes.
Mr Mares: Peter's role is different from mine
and from Tony's. Mine particularly is to represent the regions.
My colleague Gerry Foley is on Tyne Tees, for instance. I asked
my colleagues for stuff beforehand and they have done quite a
bit of stories from the Lords, people talking about the issues
of the rail line or one of the Bishops from the North East talking
about the problems of unemployment where it was located in the
region. If you are talking about whether you should alert us to
something that is going on, if you are talking about something
that is happening in Northampton or whatever, then I am sure Anglia
or Central would be interested. It does not come to me. That would
help, yes. We are overwhelmed with information. With the best
will in the world, you cannot watch everything all the time. If
somebody says, "You might be interested in this," it
would help. That does help.
Chairman: We are going to follow on,
particularly, on the question of the experience and expertise
of the Lords.
Q293 Lord St John of Bletso:
Peter, in your paper you said that to many members of the public
the House of Lords "still feels like a cloistered arcane
place they don't understand." I entirely agree with that.
A suggestion made by the BBC as well as yourselves was that the
House could do more to promote its Members by presenting a database
of the experience and expertise of peers, so that they could be
available for interviews. Do you think this suggestion would be
well received by other broadcasters? Certainly the public, in
the submissions we have had from others, really have no idea of
the depth of experience of Members on subjects and certainly from
our side we would like to be more proactive in interview.
Mr Lowe: I certainly think it would be worth
being more proactive. I can see at least three Members of the
House of Lords in this room who have appeared on Sky News on a
number of occasions, but the point I was trying to make is that
across a 24-hour news agenda you cover myriad subjects that we
deal with on a daily and yearly basis, some of them of great national
importance, some of them merely of interest en passant,
and in the House of Lords there is an enormous amount of experience.
There are certain Members of the House of Lords who are the most
eminent people available to speak on certain subjects but, with
exceptions, we rarely get them on the air. I think it is probable
quite often that our own journalists do not know enough about
who those people are. Very often journalists in newsrooms (not
necessarily in Westminster) will say, "Let's get the Chairman
of the Transport Committee" but they mean the Chairman of
the House of Commons Transport Committee, because they are more
used to that. Whether Members of the House of Lords like it or
not, to most people, as I have said, it is an arcane place because
not much of its workings are seen. You could say that is partly
our fault, of course, but there is an issue of access, there is
an issue of availability of Members. Certainly when I discussed
this with our Political Editor Adam Boulton we were agreeing that
very often, if you contact Members of the House of Lords, they
are not available. Of course they may be not available for perfectly
good reasons, in the same way that Members of the House of Commons
often are not, but Members of the House of Commons I think are
much more active in getting their views across than Members of
the Lords necessarily are.
Q294 Baroness Coussins:
Could I follow that up. I do think it must be very frustrating
for you, as it is for us, when you are trying to get hold of one
of us and we are not available. I think there might be a particular
problem with Cross-benchers like me, because amongst my colleagues
on the Cross-benchers will be some of the most eminent people
whom you might want to get to make a comment about something specific
but the trouble is that a lot of us are not here full time. We
have been appointed as Cross-benchers because we have expertise
that we are still practising in the outside world and a lot of
us do not have offices. I have a desk which I share with two other
people and I do not have any staff. I think quite a few people
will fall into that category. If we were to be more like a university,
which one of you at least suggested in your written submissions,
and provide you with a database of all our areas of expertise,
what would we need to do to make that work for you and for us?
Given the 24-hour news agenda if some of us are not here all the
time, what else do we have to do to make that function to the
satisfaction of both our sides?
Mr Castle: I think that is an absolutely perfect
idea for contacts. We all have a system of contacts between us
and we have numbers, but it is up-to-date contacts, it is email
addresses. It is having methods of getting in touch with people
and something that is quite easily researchable for people's expertise,
on where we should be directing and why.
Q295 Chairman:
Are you saying, in very basic details, that those of us who are
interested should send you each a piece of paper about ourselves?
Mr Castle: Or somewhere centrally accessible
to, say, members of the press gallery or to the main broadcasters
that those members of the House of Lords who wish to be contacted
in terms of interviews and appearances. It is you going out there
and selling yourselves, not only for wanting to comment and feeling
qualified to comment on a particular subject but also very much
to publicise this Place.
Mr Knowles: My Lord Chairman, our recommendation
to you that you provide such a database with contact numbers has
to go with a heavy health warning from us that we will use it.
You are absolutely right to make the point that being a Lord is
not the same as being a university professor: it is not a job
and you are not paid to be on call to be an expert. That all has
to be worked through on your part, as to what you are prepared
to offer, but we will gratefully accept what you offer and we
will use it. If you look at the debates you have tomorrow and
the expertise that is on display on a normal Thursday, you have
two debates, the science and technology debate, in which you have
a professor of manufacturing, a professor of pharmacology, President
of the Royal Society, and a former director of northern engineering
industries, and the creative industries debate, in which you have
a former Chairman of the Royal Opera House, a former executive
of Granada Television, and of course the current Deputy Chairman
of Channel 4 and film producer, Lord Puttnam. I recognise that
is a typical Thursday, so, my goodness, the appetite to tap into
that wealth of experience is there.
Lord Selsdon: I have over the last ten
years assembled the greatest database on the expertise and knowledge
of the House of Lords of anybody, but it is private information.
I will not explain how it has been researched, but in 10 minutes
I could tell you who are the peers who are in the Gloucester area.
I have used as an example, defence. We obviously have more people
who have served in the Armed Forces in the Lords because of age.
We have six former secretaries of state. We have a whole range
of people. I asked the defence group, and some of them—I
must be careful—are not the right people to speak on it,
but when you take defence you have the housing problem and you
have all the social security problems too. When I asked the group,
we could provide you with a list of all members of that group
and select out of it their telephone numbers, their background,
when they were secretaries of state, when and how and where, where
they have lived, what their rate was, leading aircraft men and
all of that. I could do that very quickly, just as an example,
but I must respect people's confidence. The information I have
is public information; for example, if you want to know whether
they have been in the Armed Forces, you can look that up. It runs
as a spreadsheet from about here to the end of the room, but I
would do that if it was acceptable.
Chairman: I am waiting for your question.
Q296 Lord Selsdon:
The question is do you think that would be helpful?
Mr Mares: Yes, I do. I support the idea of a
booklet or some kind of directory of experts. It is knowing what
you can talk about, how to contact you. As everyone has said,
most times in broadcasting we want to talk to you yesterday. It
is speed. I accept the point Lady Coussins made, that a lot of
people are not here all the time, so there is a bit of hit and
miss. If this works and we start using you, colleagues from other
channels will say, "Who was that really good interviewee
they had?" and the interest is there. It is a virtuous circle:
once we get you into the group you tend to find that people watch
it and say, "We saw that person talking about that issue
that time, the story has come up again, I wonder what they will
say this time."
Q297 Lord Puttnam:
I think we are on fertile ground here. One of the big news items
shortly will be the run up to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference.
In this House we have Lords May, Stern, Turner and Rees. If you
add David King and Brian Hoskins, you have six of probably the
20 leading experts on climate change in the world—all of
them here. I would suggest that Lord May and Lord Turner would
form a roster for you. It is absolutely in their interests to
ensure that good, accurate stuff is available to you, and just
make sure that in the run-up to Copenhagen they agree that one
or other of them will always be available. It is in your interests,
their interests, in the interests of this House and in the interests
of good governance. I think that is a really productive area.
We could pursue this, Chairman.
Mr Lowe: I think that is a terrific idea.
Mr Knowles: There is something else that we
can do on our part, with the airtime of BBC Parliament, with these
Thursday debates and the next time climate change is debated by
that extraordinary panel. As well as its regular slot on the channel
the next day, what we do more and more of is extracting the general
debates on Thursdays and showing them again at different times
of day and in recesses and so forth, and that would be an obvious
candidate.
Baroness Billingham: I have to add Julian
Hunt to that list.
Lord Puttnam: Yes, Julian Hunt. There
are others.
Baroness Billingham: He is par excellence.
Q298 Lord Taylor of Warwick:
As you know, there are certain physical areas of the Palace where
the rules say you cannot film, and it is clear from the written
submissions from you broadcasters that you find this very frustrating.
Particularly the ITV and the BBC say that the rules are confusing.
Which areas in addition to the official interview rooms would
you like to film in? How would that help the viewers to understand
the workings of the House of Lords?
Mr Knowles: I think Toby put this very well
in his submission. He said there should be a "presumption"
of access. We completely understand that we cannot go everywhere
whenever we want, that there should be no rules and it is just
a free-for-all. We absolutely understand why for many reasons
that has not been the case. But if we came at this not from a
very complicated inherited set of rules, which is where we are
now, but from the presumption of access, the presumption of access
to public events for cameras, the presumption of access to public
areas to do sit-down interviews—in Portcullis House, around
the café tables there, for example—then that would
be huge progress. That is, I think, where we are all coming from.
Mr Castle: I am the liaison between Westminster
and head office, and they do not understand the rules that we
are ruled by, where we can film within the precincts of the buildings.
Often you appear to be obstructing what is wished by head office,
that somehow—we were talking about it before we came in—you
have gone native by working out of the press gallery. "I
am sorry, we cannot do that" is something that I am afraid
I say on a daily basis because of the rules about where we can
film. For example, we cannot come into Your Lordships' offices
to do an interview, say. We have one position where we can film
and that is it.
Q299 Lord Puttnam:
I wish you would, because the expenses thing would go out the
window here if you were to see the real conditions we work in.
Mr Castle: Absolutely. A point that a number
of Your Lordships have made to myself and to my colleagues is
that, whenever ITV News does report about the House, we always
use the State Opening of Parliament picture and do not show the
fact that this Place is one of such importance constitutionally.
We have already made the point that line by line scrutiny—which
is obviously so essential and so crucial to the function of this
Place—is not interesting television, but, also, you do not
go around wearing ermine every day and, unfortunately, that is
because we do not get very much access with our cameras. Access
is a real issue.
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