James Purnell speech to the Oxford Media Convention
17 January 2008
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In one of my first acts as Secretary of State for Culture, I set out three goals for media policy.
An open market to provide the best climate for innovation and creativity. Universal access to distinctive and original content of the very highest quality. And third, enabling consumers to be in charge. At the same time – in the RTS speech I gave in September – I announced a major initiative that will be instrumental in taking us towards those goals.
I'm delighted to say that the Convergence Think Tank is about to start its work and I believe it will be crucial in shaping the communications landscape over the next few years. The Convergence Think Tank will be based around a series of seminars which starts next month and I urge everyone to get involved and help to shape the future. I’m for an interim report from the Think Tank later this year. But this afternoon I want to start by focusing particularly on one aspect of this work – public service broadcasting.
Public service broadcasting is a living thing. It is like Orwell’s remark about the photograph on the mantelpiece of you in your younger days. It doesn’t look much like you at first glance. There is a resemblance but it’s increasingly faint as the years go by. In fact, it doesn’t look much like you at all. Apart, of course, from the fact that you happen to be the same person.
I think public service broadcasting is like that. It has changed radically since 1927. But if Lord Reith reappeared today and turned on a TV or computer, or listened to the radio, he would still recognise it as the same idea in a new era.
Broadcasting has been through three eras. First, the BBC monopoly. Then, the analogue era, with limited competition between television and radio stations. The last twenty years have been the era of multi-channel. We are now entering the fourth era. It might come to be known as the digital decade, if it lasts that long, or perhaps the time of on-demand. It might be called something completely different. We don’t know.
But we do know two things. We know that our broadcasting is still widely considered, at its best, to be world-class. Of course not everything on British TV is excellent but a lot is and we want to retain it.
The second thing we know is that public service broadcasting will have to adapt. That may sound paradoxical. But it’s the same argument as Edmund Burke once put forward: that the aim of constructive change is conservation. The paradox is that those of us who believe in conserving public service broadcasting – including myself – have to be the most willing to see it change.
And that is also true of the legislative framework. The most recent attempt by government to ensure a viable regime was the 2003 Act. It’s interesting to look back on the debate and see some of the wilder predictions that were around. I’m still looking forward to my intelligent fridge and to TV coming through my electricity socket. In the Victorian era the phrenologists used to predict the future by feeling people’s skulls. In broadcasting, people who want to predict the future might try that.
But, for all that, the Act which emerged was very radical – a converged regulator; concurrent competition powers; a market-led, independently delivered spectrum policy. And the aim of radical policy of course was partly to conserve – to ensure a viable broadcasting ecology survives a rapidly changing climate.
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To a large extent I think the Act succeeded.
But I think one of the characteristics of the industry now is that legislation approaches its sell-by date quicker. Now I think we are on the threshold of more significant changes which may require further reform.
That is my main message today: that we need to be bold. Over the next year, OFCOM and government will be reviewing the framework for public service broadcasting. I’ll be categorical. I’m prepared to be bold in establishing the appropriate framework.
But I have no desire to boldly go where no other government has gone before and question the very purpose of public service broadcasting. I still believe in that person whose photograph we can see on the mantelpiece. I set out my reasons for that continued belief at the RTS in Cambridge and although things change quickly in broadcasting my beliefs remain the same as they did on that occasion.
That said, we need to be bold enough to be sure we are anticipating change, not reacting to it after the fact. This is where the convergence think tank comes in. It is rare that Secretaries of State have a monopoly of wisdom on any topic. It may happen somewhere but not in this sector.
That’s one reason I’m delighted to call on the distinguished brains who are going to help us think through the intriguing questions that broadcasting policy now has to face. I won’t, in my remarks today, try to be comprehensive. There are plenty of important questions I will leave for another day. I want today to do little more than anticipate some of the central questions.
I want to touch on five questions. First, we need to think hard about why convergence matters and what it means for policy. Convergence should, to some extent, create open markets and break down barriers to entry but a thousand flowers never bloom until they are planted. To what extent will we need an active competition policy? And how will competition policy need to adapt?
Second, assuming the converged market will be vibrant and alive, which I do, we need then to ensure that the goods are available to everyone. Universal access used to be a relatively simple affair in an era of limited spectrum. Now it is a lot more difficult. The arguments for which services need to be universally provided are more fine-grained and the regulation needs to be a lot more sophisticated.
Third, we need to think about content. What are the objectives of public service content in a converged world and what forms should it take in the future? To what extent will the market provide content which meets public service objectives? Or will the fragmentation of the market make it harder to invest in original content, such as programmes for children, drama or arts?
Fourth, the Ofcom PSB Review made the point very clearly that reduced spectrum scarcity and increased competition mean that Government is no longer in a position to offer exclusive access to spectrum in return for extensive public service broadcasting obligations. So if we want to ensure a plurality of public service providers, how do we do so? And how can we ensure that public service content continues to have reach and impact when audiences are fragmenting and people are finding their favourite output not just in niche broadcasting on the TV but on-line too? When they are getting what they want when they want rather than at the time prescribed by the oligopoly broadcasters.
This leads us to the huge elephant in the room. Michael Lyons took it for a trot this morning and now I’m going to take it for another one. Michael is absolutely right to say that we need to answer the prior questions before we address issues of funding. I’m not yet able to indicate what we intend to do, but it would be perverse not to acknowledge the question. Let’s put the question, and it is only that at this stage, starkly: do we think it’s sustainable for every penny of the licence fee to go to a single organisation in an industry which now has very many providers rather than just a handful?
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Would some form of contestability for licence fee funding help to sustain quality, innovation and efficiency? Or would the potential risks that Michael outlined outweigh any benefits?
This is a complex issue.
I don’t think, for example, that the idea of just funding individual programmes would be a viable model. Such an Arts Council of the Air would itself become the commissioner of programmes but would not have the necessary relationships with the audience. The chances of the programmes and the audiences meeting, sometimes by chance, would be impaired. Not everything watched on television was demanded in advance. I think the risk that posh programmes disappear into a space all of their own, rarely to be visited by those without a prior grounding in the subject matter, is very real. I think that, albeit with noble intentions, this proposal does threaten something important and worth preserving about British broadcasting.
This issue will need to be addressed and resolved in our review of public service broadcasting funding beyond the BBC, once we have the conclusions of Ofcom’s current PSB review. And it’s right that this conference starts the debate.
The fifth issue is how do we develop the regulatory response to make sense of this new environment? In a market that moves very fast, with consumers who are fickle and used to their demands being satisfied rapidly, how can regulation adapt quickly enough?
There is a host of interesting questions. Can self regulation help? If we empower consumers, will regulation be less necessary? Should we regulate through principles rather than through detailed rules?
It was once said that we are at our best when we are at our boldest. The flipside for broadcasting is: people are at their worst when they are at their most conservative. Change is necessary and constant, to preserve what we value and make it compatible with the world we are living in rather than the world we have left.
Really, the greatest unwitting enemies of public service broadcasting are those who say we just let it be. I’m afraid the world doesn’t allow for that. Innovation and risk-taking are the ways in which we preserve the essential excellence of broadcasting.
The Convergence Think Tank gives us a chance to take a fresh look at broadcasting – in the wider context of how people use, interact with and absorb information from the media as a whole. In doing this we are reliant on the people who know and understand the best of the old landscape and the evolving possibilities of the new one.
I think that, despite all the change, we can still talk sensibly about public service broadcasting having a continuous history that brought us to where we are today. It is one of the greatest great cultural resources in this country and precisely because I welcome the opportunities that the new broadcasting environment will bring, I am confident that it will remain relevant long after this and many subsequent review processes are forgotten.