Come on, Ofcom
Stop the destruction of ITV regional news
THE NEXT few months will be a defining time for the future of high quality broadcasting in Britain. Commercial broadcasters are trying to dodge their obligation to provide ‘public service’ programming and there is a clamour to allocate them some of the BBC’s licence fee income as a bribe to keep them to it.
The regulator Ofcom has been conducting a large-scale review of public service broadcasting and is about to rule on ITV’s bid to cut almost by half its spending on regional news and current affairs.
JEREMY DEAR sets out the background and explains why the battle to save the regional news is one the union must win.
LEAVE IT to the market and broadcasting will display less quality, less originality and greater conformity. That’s not to say there wouldn’t still be fantastic programmes produced — America proves that even in a profit-driven culture quality drama can still find a place — it’s just that once profit becomes the deciding factor there would be fewer of them, they would be narrower in range, and minority interests would be at best marginalised, at worst not catered for at all.
In a shareholder-driven broadcasting environment, costly programmes that don’t deliver big bucks audiences to advertisers are not considered viable. What we call “public service” broadcasting (PSB) — quality children’s programming, news and current affairs, investigative journalism, special interest programmes and broadcasts catering to a diverse range of communities and cultures, including the UK’s nations and regions — would begin to disappear.
This is not just union scaremongering aimed at preserving jobs but a reality already being felt across the UK as ITV axes yet another swathe of local programming. In a digital age of expanded choice and fragmented media consumption, traditional broadcasters are facing new financial pressures.
The regulations still require that ITV submit its plans to cut regional budgets for approval by Ofcom. In its confidential submission ITV tried to show that the costs of fulfilling its public service role would outweigh the benefits by the end of this year.
For its part Ofcom, according to a report leaked in July, concedes this will be the case in 2011, and reckons that by 2012 its PSB commitments will be costing ITV £60 million a year.
ITV chairman Michael Grade has threatened to give up PSB status, hand back its licences and take Channel 3 off the airwaves, confining its broadcasting to the internet. Meanwhile Channel 4 claims to need up to £150 million a year of public funding to fulfil its own public service mission. And of course the knives are always out for the BBC.
Ofcom suggests additional annual public funding of £350-£400 million will be required to ensure plural provision of public purposes in 2012, the year when terrestrial “analogue” TV will be switched off and all broadcasting will be digital.
But while an air of gloom and fierce debate swirls around parts of the industry there are opportunities to build a successful public broadcasting environment for the future. Britain has been fortunate to have a strong public service broadcasting culture; it has been under attack since Margaret Thatcher’s government introduced the 1990 Communications Act, but it has survived successive governments and changing social attitudes.
REGULATION and policy decisions were easy when you only had three channels, then four and even five. Now audiences have access to hundreds of channels, 24 hours a day, and programmes at times to suit them, through a variety of delivery mechanisms, policy makers face real challenges.
In September Ofcom will release the results of its latest consultation. According to the leaks it will allow ITV to cut drastically its regional news, halve its commitment to other regional programming in England and Wales, reduce its current affairs programming by a third and reduce its out-of-London production quota. Channel Five and Teletext will receive more modest reductions in their regulatory load.
Among other areas under consideration are the privatisation of Channel 4, shared use of BBC resources, handing over BBC assets, such as Worldwide, to Channel 4 and direct government funding of public service broadcasters. Reports also suggest that the regulator proposes to allocate part of the BBC licence fee to other broadcasters and allow them to compete for funds under a Public Service Authority, a move the union says would undermine the future of the corporation.
While everyone recognises the current model is unsustainable in a digital world, there is a danger that politicians go for the easy, but dangerous, answers.
In recent weeks former Culture Secretary Chris Smith has joined the chorus of critics demanding Channel 4 and ITV be saved by sharing out the licence fee cash — effectively allowing broadcasters other than the BBC to compete for public funds. Such a route does nothing to strengthen public service broadcasting, one of Ofcom’s statutory duties; it would use public funds to underwrite failing commercial broadcasters while they continued to reward shareholders and executives.
Such “top-slicing” of the licence fee would threaten the future of the BBC and may drive it towards an advertising or subscription-based model, fatally undermining the universality that is at the core of public service broadcasting and providing an even greater threat to other broadcasters.
It might look attractive to politicians: the BBC is big, sometimes arrogant and management-wasteful. But when newspapers run their “axe the licence fee tax” campaigns, or Rupert Murdoch lobbies for BBC income to be cut by 75 per cent, they do it for pure self-interest. But they are powerful voices. And the drip, drip, drip campaign against the BBC can have an impact on the public.
A Recent Ipsos/MORI poll showing falling public support for the licence fee may only encourage that kind of simplistic knee-jerk response from a government that desperately craves popularity. It’s clear there is a serious threat to the future of the BBC and in turn to PSB.
Take ITV. If you ask local people if they want ITV to cut a whole tier of its local news services and seriously undermine its regional service to viewers they answer emphatically “no”. Previous research by Ofcom showed that 97 per cent of viewers want the same or more coverage of current events in their region — not less. Yet ITV plans to have just nine regional programmes covering wide and inappropriate geographic areas and to implement a 50 per cent cut in regional news funding because it is deemed commercially unviable.
ITV says it cannot afford to continue producing regional programmes. Its numbers don’t add up, but even if they did there are other solutions. Publicly owned “spectrum”, the frequencies allocated with broadcasting licences, could be granted free or at a discount in return for delivery of public service broadcasting purposes.
The scarcity of digital TV spectrum and the range of delivery options available shows that a new system, based on the principle of universality and the provision of PSB programming, could be the basis for a new deal.
On top of that public service broadcasters could be given commercial advantages in bidding for “listed” events — those defined by legislation that must be available to the public free-to-air. In return those broadcasters would provide free-to-air content across all platforms, including specific public service content.
A levy on the turnover of UK-licensed broadcasters that do not currently provide regional or PSB programming could encourage new entrants or provide funds to existing broadcasters. BSkyB in particular is an immensely profitable commercial company that contributes, relative to its revenue streams, a tiny amount of original programming. A levy on Sky would redistribute some of its revenue for much needed regional and/or public service broadcasting programming.
The consequences of a failure to act in the public interest are there for all to see. In the commercial sector current affairs programming now represents just 2.6 per cent of peak time programming.
News and current affairs, regional and other public service programming should not just be another commodity to be bought and sold, but a valuable benefit to enable informed citizens and greater democratic participation in society.
Public service broadcasting currently offers an antidote to that purely market-led model, and we can’t afford to lose it.
WHAT ITV Wants to do
The ITV NETWORK consists of 15 theoretically separate operations, each licensed by government to broadcast in a region of the UK. But the once 15 companies merged into one through a process of takeovers from 1993 to 2005.
The monopoly company says it spends £120 million on regional programming and that it wants to make cuts of £35–40 million to its regional news service.
However its 2006 corporate responsibility report stated: “Our budget for production of national and regional news programmes is approximately £100 million.”
Since it spends £40 million a year on the national and international news contract with ITN, that leaves £60 million for regional and local news spend, and cutting this by £40 million will have a devastating affect on local news and on the journalists that produce it.
The plan the network has submitted to Ofcom for rubber-stamping — or rather, for rigorous official scrutiny — cuts the number of regional bulletins across the UK from 17 to nine, but in reality the current number is 25 when local “opts” are added in. Opts are bulletins that come in whole or part from outside the main studio.
The 2006 report boasted that ITV had increased its news output, with new local programmes for the Thames Valley, Tyne Tees and Yorkshire regions.
A year later, in September 2007 when Michael Grade returned to head the company, it announced that all these new programmes faced the axe, just months after they were launched at a cost of millions.