The Downing Street Years (109 page)

The world of the media had in common with that of the arts a highly developed sense of its own importance to the life of the nation. But whereas the arts lobby was constantly urging government to do more, the broadcasters were pressing us to do less. Broadcasting was one of a number of areas — the professions such as teaching, medicine and the law were others — in which special pleading by powerful interest groups was disguised as high-minded commitment to some greater good. So anyone who queried, as I did, whether a licence fee — with non-payment subject to criminal sanctions — was the best way to pay for the BBC, was likely to be pilloried as at best philistine and at worst undermining its ‘constitutional independence’. Criticism of the broadcasters’ decisions to show material which outraged the sense of public decency or played into the hands of terrorists and criminals was always likely to be met with accusations of censorship. Attempts to break the powerful duopoly which the BBC and ITV had achieved — which encouraged restrictive practices, increased costs and kept out talent — were decried as threatening the ‘quality of broadcasting’. Some of Britain’s television and radio was of very high quality indeed, particularly drama and news. Internationally, it was in a class of its own. But the idea that a small clique of broadcasting professionals always knew what was best and that they should be more or less immune from criticism or competition was not one I could accept. Unfortunately, in the Home Office the broadcasters often found a ready advocate. The irony that a Reithian rhetoric should be used to defend a moral neutrality between terrorism and the forces of law and order, as well as programmes that seemed to many to be scurrilous and offensive, was quite lost.

The notion of ‘public service broadcasting’ was the kernel of what the broadcasting oligopolists claimed to be defending. Unfortunately, when subject to closer inspection that kernel began rapidly to disintegrate.
‘Public service broadcasting’ was extremely difficult to define. One element was supposed to be that viewers or listeners in all parts of the country who paid the same licence fee should be able to receive all public service channels — what was described as the concept of ‘universality’. More important, though, was the idea that there should be a proper balance of information, education and entertainment offered through a wide range of high quality programmes. More recently, the public service obligation had been extended to cover particular ‘minority’ programmes. The BBC and the IBA — which regulated the independent television companies — mainly gave effect to this public service obligation by their influence over scheduling.

So much for the — somewhat nebulous and increasingly outdated — theory. The practice was very different. BBC1 and ITV ran programmes that were increasingly indistinguishable from commercial programming in market systems — soap operas, sport, game shows and made-for-TV films. To use Benthamite language, the public broadcasters were claiming the rights of poetry but providing us with pushpin. Good fun perhaps. But did our civilization really depend on it?

Furthermore the duopoly was being undermined by technological developments. Scarcity of available spectrum had previously determined that only a very few channels could be broadcast. But this was changing. It seemed likely that ever higher-frequency parts of the spectrum would be able to be brought into use. Cable television and direct broadcasting by satellite (DBS) also looked likely to transform the possibilities. There was more opportunity for payment — per channel or per programme — by subscription. An entire new world was opening up.

I believed we should take advantage of these technical possibilities to give viewers a far wider choice. This was already happening in countries as diverse as the United States and Luxemburg. Why not in Britain? But this vastly increased potential demand for programmes should not be met from within the existing duopoly. I wanted to see the widest competition among and opportunities for the independent producers — who were themselves virtually a creation of our earlier decision to set up Channel 4 in 1982. I also believed that it would be possible to combine more choice for viewers and more opportunity for producers with standards — both of production and of taste — that were as high as, if not higher than, those under the existing duopoly. To make assurance doubly sure, however, I wanted to establish independent watchdogs to keep standards high by exposing broadcasters to public criticism, complaint and debate.

The Peacock Committee on Broadcasting, which had been set up by Leon Brittan as Home Secretary in March 1985 and reported the following year, provided a good opportunity to look at all these matters once again. I would have liked to find an alternative to the BBC licence fee. One possibility was advertising: Peacock rejected the idea. Willie Whitelaw too was fiercely opposed to it and indeed threatened to resign from the Government if it were introduced. I felt that index-linking the licence fee achieved something of the same purpose — to make the BBC more cost-conscious and business-like. In October 1986 the ministerial committee on broadcasting which I chaired agreed that the BBC licence fee should remain at £58 until April 1988 and then be linked to the RPI until 1991. But I did not drop my long-term reservations about the licence fee as the source of its funding. It was agreed to study whether the licence fee could be replaced by subscription.

At least as important for the future was the need to break the BBC and ITV duopoly over the production of the programmes they showed. My ministerial group agreed that the Government should set a target of 25 per cent of BBC and ITV programmes to be provided by independent producers. But there was a sharp division between those of us like Nigel Lawson and David Young who believed that the BBC and ITV would use every opportunity to resist this and Douglas Hurd and Willie Whitelaw who thought that they could be persuaded without legislation. Douglas was to enter into discussions with the broadcasters and report back. In the end we had to legislate to secure it.

I also insisted, against Home Office resistance, that our 1987 general election manifesto should contain a firm commitment to ‘bring forward proposals for stronger and more effective arrangements to reflect [public] concern [about] the display of sex and violence on television’. This produced the Broadcasting Standards Council of which William Rees-Mogg became the very effective chairman and which was put on a statutory basis in the 1989 Broadcasting Act.

After the election there was more time to think about the long-term future of broadcasting. Apart from the opportunities for more channels which technology offered and the continuing discussion about how to achieve the 25 per cent target for independent producers, we needed to consider the future of Channel 4 — which I would have liked to privatize altogether, though Douglas Hurd disagreed — and the still more important matter of how the existing system of allocating ITV franchises should be changed. The Peacock Committee recommended that the system be changed to become more ‘transparent’ and I strongly agreed with this objective. Under the Peacock proposals, if
the IBA decided to award a franchise to a contractor other than the highest bidder it should be required to make a full, public and detailed statement of its reasons. This had the merit of openness and simplicity as well as maximizing revenues for the Treasury. But we immediately ran into the morass of arguments about ‘quality’.

In September 1987 I held a seminar to which the main figures in broadcasting were invited to discuss the future. There was more agreement than I might have thought possible on the technical opportunities and the need for greater choice and competition. But some of those present took a dim view of our decision to set up a Broadcasting Standards Council and to remove the exemption enjoyed by the broadcasters from the provisions of the Obscene Publications Act. I was entirely unrepentant. I said that they must remember that television was special because it was watched in the family’s sitting-room. Standards on television had an effect on society as a whole and were therefore a matter of proper public interest for the Government.

We had a number of discussions during 1988 about the contents of the planned white paper on broadcasting. (It was eventually published in November.) I was pressing for the phasing out of the BBC licence fee altogether to be announced in that document. But Douglas was against this and a powerful lobby on behalf of the BBC built up. In the end I agreed to drop my insistence on it and on the privatization of Channel 4. But I made more progress in ensuring that Channel 3 should be subject to much less heavy regulation under the new ITC (Independent Television Commission) than under the IBA.

Of course, one could only do so much by changing the framework of the system: as always, it was the people who operated within it who were the key. The appointment of Duke Hussey as Chairman of the BBC in 1986 and later of John Birt as Deputy Director-General represented an improvement in every respect. When I met Duke Hussey and Joel Barnett — his deputy — in September 1988 I told them how much I supported the new approach being taken. But I also did not disguise my anger at the BBC’s continued ambivalence as regards the reporting of terrorism and violence. I said that the BBC had a duty to uphold the great institutions and liberties of the country from which we all benefited.

The broadcasters continued to lobby fiercely against the proposals in the Broadcasting White Paper on the process of auctioning the ITV franchises. My preferred approach was that every applicant would have to pass a ‘quality threshold’ and then go on to offer a financial bid, with the ITC being obliged to select the highest. Otherwise a gathering of the great and the good could make an essentially arbitrary
choice with clear possibilities of favouritism, injustice and propping up the
status quo.
But the Home Office team argued that we had to make concessions — first in June 1989 in response to consultation on the white paper and then at report stage of the broadcasting bill in the spring of 1990, when they said there would be great parliamentary difficulties otherwise. These unfortunately muddied the transparency which I had hoped to achieve and produced a compromise which turned out to be less than satisfactory when the ITC bestowed the franchises the following year ‘in the old-fashioned way’. Still, the new auctioning system — combined with the 25 per cent target for independent producers, the arrival of new satellite channels, and a successful assault on union restrictive practices — went some way towards weakening the monopolistic grip of the broadcasting establishment. They did not break it.

In 1988 and 1989 there was a great burst of public interest in the environment. Unfortunately, under the green environmental umbrella sheltered a number of only slightly connected issues. At the lowest but not by any means least important level, there was concern for the local environment, which I too always felt strongly about. Indeed, every time I came back from some spotlessly maintained foreign city my staff and the then Secretary of State for the Environment knew that they could expect a stiff lecture on the litter-strewn streets of parts of London. But this was essentially and necessarily a matter for the local community, though the privatizing of badly run municipal cleaning services often helped.

Then there was the concern about planning — or rather the alleged lack of it — and overdevelopment of the countryside. Here there was, as Nick Ridley became somewhat unpopular for robustly pointing out, a straightforward choice. If people were to be able to afford houses there must be sufficient amounts of building land available. Tighter planning meant less development land and fewer opportunities for home ownership.

There was also widespread public concern — some merited but much not — about the standard of Britain’s drinking water, rivers and sea. The European Commission found this a fruitful area into which to extend its ‘competence’ whenever possible. In fact, a hugely expensive and highly successful programme was under way to clean up our rivers
and the results were already evident — for example the return of healthy and abundant fish to the Thames, Tyne, Wear and Tees.

I always drew a clear distinction between
these
‘environmental’ concerns and the quite separate question of atmospheric pollution. For me, the proper starting point in formulating policy towards this latter problem was science. There had always to be a sound scientific base on which to build — and of course a clear estimation of the cost in terms of public expenditure and economic growth foregone — if one was not going to be thrust into the kind of ‘green socialism’ which the Left were eager to promote. But the closer I examined what was happening to Britain’s scientific effort, the less happy I was about it.

There were two problems. First, too high a proportion of government funding for science was directed towards the Defence budget. Second — and reflecting the same approach — too much emphasis was being given to the development of products for the market rather than to pure science. Government was funding research which could and should have been left to industry and, as a result, there was a tendency for the research effort in the universities and in scientific institutes to lose out. I was convinced that this was wrong. As someone with a scientific background, I knew that the greatest economic benefits of scientific research had always resulted from advances in fundamental knowledge rather than the search for specific applications. For example, transistors were not discovered by the entertainment industry seeking new ways of marketing pop music but rather by people working on wave mechanics and solid-state physics.

In the summer of 1987 I instituted a new approach to government funding of science. I set up ‘E’(ST) as a new sub-committee of the Economic Committee of the Cabinet which I now chaired. This replaced ‘E’(RD) that had been chaired by Paul Channon as Industry Secretary. I also set up a Cabinet committee of officials and experts — ACOST — to replace ACARD which had been shadowing Paul Channon’s committee. ‘E’(ST) and ACOST examined departmental science budgets, breaking them down between basic science and support for innovation, giving greater emphasis to the first. My ideal was to search out the brightest and best scientists and back them rather than try to provide support for work in particular sectors. What those who have no real understanding of science are inclined to overlook is that in science — just as in the arts — the greatest achievements cannot be planned and predicted: they result from the unique creativity of a particular mind.