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What the BBC is for. Royal Television Society Fleming Memorial Lecture

Speech by Sir Michael Lyons, Chairman of the BBC Trust

1 November 2007

Please check against delivery

Let me echo that warm welcome to all of you.

Now I must admit that despite more than 30 years of public speaking and lectures, I face this evening with some trepidation. In part that's because you are – to a person – well informed and discerning.

But it's also because this still seems early days to be offering confident views about the future of the BBC. After all, my apprenticeship is far from complete.

As has just been made clear, it is only six months since I took up my post as Chairman of the BBC Trust.

And what a six months! The shaping of the strategy for the next six years; editorial failings and a public debate about deceit and trust in broadcasting; decisions about significant new technologies including BBCiPlayer and Freesat; the abduction and release of Alan Johnston - covered so eloquently in last week's Panorama.

So, on one level, I am still a newcomer to the BBC.

But it's also true that I have known the BBC my whole life.

When I try to capture the "Rosebud" moments from my childhood in the 1950s, broadcasting is always part of them.

The Archers, a regular feature of family weekends, offering an enticing glimpse of life in a small rural community but strangely foreign compared with life by the docks in London's East End.

And I can remember our first television, a Baird, with that odd little screen that took an age to warm up and then – magic! – Rin Tin Tin jumping over a log – ITV, I know, but part of a magical cocktail which also included another model of family life - The Woodentops! And later, those great adaptations of Dickens and other classics: though I have to say that the most recent adaptation by Andrew Davies of Bleak House stands out amongst anything I can recall in the 1950s.

Regular visits to the theatre did not play the part in my upbringing that they do for my children; the BBC opened that door for me, introducing me to the work of Dylan Thomas on Radio and John Osborne on Television, and later Bleasdale and Poliakoff.

Creating an appetite and ensuring that drama would always be my favourite art form. Mark Haddon's impressive play on BBC One, Coming down the Mountain, is a recent viewing pleasure of mine, and illustrates that the BBC continues to find outstanding new talent.

And let me not miss the impact of the Today programme, celebrating its 50th anniversary this very week.  Jack de Manio, Brian Redhead, Sue MacGregor, John Humphrys and their colleagues forming a continuous chain of well informed, authoritative, challenging voices, constantly drawing attention to the big issues of the day. A really influential part of my life, and perhaps the inspiration for my choices to take on big jobs in public service and to spend some time in local politics.

The BBC has been a trusted guide through great national events, big controversies and the constant reshaping of our nation. It has played an important role in making me the person I am today.

And one thing has always been clear to me. The BBC is – or ought to be – more than just a broadcaster, more than just a commissioner, producer and transmitter of wonderful programmes.

Its purpose should be bigger than that. It should engage with licence fee payers as citizens as well as audiences.

What I want to explore with you tonight is the scope of that mission. I want to try to answer the question: What is the BBC for?

And, more to the point, what is it for now as the 21st century unfolds and technology, markets, audience expectations, and society itself, all continue to change around us?

The BBC has a new mission – beyond the one Reith identified

Let me begin, as all BBC Chairmen should, with John Reith.

Reith summed up the BBC mission in three words: information, education, entertainment.

Today we have a new mission statement. It's based on Reithian foundations, but it goes much further. Our new duties focus, as they should, on getting wonderful programmes to audiences. But they also emphasise the importance of the choices made in the creation of those programmes and the wider social and economic benefits that the BBC can deliver.

Following extensive and rigorous public debate, including within Parliament, this new mission is spelled out in the BBC Charter that came into force at the start of this year.

Questions such as: "What is the BBC for? Why does the BBC exist?" were at the centre of those debates and the Charter provides this answer:

"The BBC exists to serve the public interest."

The Charter then breaks down that overarching duty into six constituent parts: six BBC Public Purposes that set out the ways in which the BBC is expected to serve the public interest.

Out of these six Public Purposes it is easy to quarry Reith's "inform, educate and entertain." But it's clear that the BBC is being asked to do more.

What might Reith have made of being asked to "sustain citizenship and civil society"?  Or "represent the nations and communities of the UK"? We clearly cannot rewind the clock, but I suspect that he might have shared the common view of the time: that Britain constituted a single nation, the nation of the old BBC motto of "nation speaking peace unto nation"; and as to communities – he would almost certainly have seen his Britain as largely homogeneous.

The mission set out in the six Public Purposes recognises the fact that the UK is in some key respects almost unrecognisably different from the Britain Reith knew. This is not just about changes in the technology of broadcasting. It's not just about the explosion of choice across the media. It's also about Britain itself changing, about very different expectations in an age of customisation; of new confidence amongst minorities now able to join up across the world; about power devolving to the nations; about communities undergoing rapid change; about social and economic relationships fracturing and re-forming in new and different ways.

For the BBC to be fit for purpose in this changing Britain, it has itself to change, and to change significantly.

And that – possibly rather late in the day – is what the BBC has now begun to do. The BBC's plans for the next six years, agreed by the Trust and presented by the Director-General Mark Thompson two weeks ago, were widely reported as being simply a response to a lower than hoped-for licence fee.

But this is by no means the whole story.

The key driving force was the recognition that Britain is changing very rapidly and the BBC has to change very rapidly too.

In our discussions with the Executive the Trust has made three challenges:

In a moment I'll explore some of the implications of those.

But first, let me say a little more about the role of the public in all this.

Is there any evidence that the public buy into the idea that the BBC should be more than just a broadcaster?

The short answer is: Yes, they do.

The public do not see their relationship with the BBC as simply transactional: "We give you the licence fee, you give us great programmes". Their expectations of the BBC go much wider than that. They expect the BBC to engage with them as citizens as well as audiences.

This was shown, for example, in the research done by DCMS during the Charter Review process, which found that the public valued the BBC for reasons that went well beyond the provision of high quality programmes.

The public valued the BBC for its independence, its role in setting standards in creative leadership, its role in knowledge-building, its contribution to an informed democracy and for the part it played in promoting British culture.

What we see here is a clear expression of the value placed by the public on some of the wider roles the BBC is asked to play.

The Trust carries out its own extensive programme of research, consultation, and listening to audiences, and this has confirmed these findings – both among the public in general, but also, perhaps more surprisingly among 15 to 24 year olds. Their top priorities, as you might expect, are: "a wide range of interesting and enjoyable programmes" and "the BBC having lots of fresh and new ideas." 

But would you have expected that they would place very nearly the same importance on their third top priority – that the BBC should:

"ensure that audiences within the UK are aware of, and understand, what's going on in the world"?

As a group, late teens and early twenties do not tend to be particularly heavy consumers of BBC output. And yet they still believe that one of the most important things the BBC should do is to inform people about what’s going on in the world – evidence I believe that people are prepared to pay for the BBC, even though they may not, right now, consume a great deal of its output – because they recognise that it is providing public goods, and they support that provision.

The BBC's role in building a strong and cohesive UK society

Now, how should all this play out in what the BBC does with the money the public gives it?

Take, for example, the call to "represent the UK, its nations, regions and communities".

How should the BBC translate this into concrete actions – into programmes, but also into the way it conducts its business?

In the Agreement that sits alongside the Charter, this particular Public Purpose is glossed in part as: "reflecting and strengthening cultural identities"; and "promoting awareness of different cultures and alternative viewpoints".

So, what the BBC is asked to do is, first, build up communities’ sense of themselves. And, second, strengthen their bonds with other communities.

In other words the BBC is being challenged to play its part in reinforcing social cohesion in an increasingly diverse society.

I think it's a hugely important task for the BBC. All of my previous work, and especially the inquiry I led into the role and funding of local government, as well as my long association with urban regeneration, has convinced me that diversity both within and between local communities is a source of strength rather than weakness – and that the UK will become stronger the more it recognises and builds on that diversity. The BBC can and should help with this.

It's something that the Trust knows from our consultations resonates strongly with the public.

Licence fee payers identify themselves with many different and distinctive communities. Communities of interest, of belief, of ethnicity, of identity and of place. These are tremendously important to them and they want the BBC to acknowledge this more strongly in its output.

I have spent much time in my first six months going around the country listening to different audiences and one of the issues constantly raised is that people want to see their lives reflected in BBC output – they want to be represented. And many people don't think the BBC does a good enough job of this.

One of the most worrying findings from the consultations we've done with the public is that people's loyalty to the BBC drops noticeably the further away they live from London. The figures are really striking. Compare 83% in the South East agreeing with the statement that they would "miss the BBC if it wasn't there", to 63% of those in Scotland and 64% of those in the north of England.

Audiences are telling us that the BBC is still too London-centric – and that has to change. The BBC has to deliver value to all its licence fee payers, wherever they live.

The planned move of 1,500 BBC jobs from London to Salford is part of the answer.

Of course the move will bring tangible economic benefits to the region, and it is an opportunity to develop more efficient ways of working and to deliver better value to licence fee payers, and those are all things worth doing for their own sakes.

But for me, the key benefit of the move is that it will strengthen the BBC's ability to reflect the realities of the communities of the north of England.

The truth is that everyone's perceptions are shaped by the place in which they live. That applies to BBC producers just as much as anyone else. One of the reasons why people who live outside London feel less loyal to the BBC is because they do not see the reality of their communities properly represented by the BBC. Moving BBC jobs to those communities may not be the complete answer, but it is an important contribution.

Recently I was in Glasgow for the opening of the new BBC Scotland headquarters at Pacific Quay, the most sophisticated digital broadcast facility anywhere in Europe. It offers big efficiency gains, but the real opportunity it offers reflects not technology but geography. Together Salford and Glasgow have the potential to change the very nature of the BBC and its relations with the people of this country – it should not be missed.

Mark Thompson used the opening of the new building to commit the BBC to a significant increase in network deliveries from Scotland. This promise to reflect in network output more of the experience of communities in Scotland offers the BBC another opportunity to reconnect with audiences outside London and the south east of England.

I think the BBC has sometimes been too slow to recognise its out-of-London responsibilities. And this issue of the BBC delivering value to all its licence fee payers, wherever they live, will be a subject of continuing challenge from the Trust.

The BBC is asked not only to strengthen bonds within communities, but also between them.

A key role for the BBC here is providing accurate and impartial information about each community, so that others can begin to understand their ways of life and their concerns.

I know from my own experience in local government how easy it is for one community to develop myths about another, and how easily such myths can become a source of inter-community tension - and sometimes of inter-community violence.

But accurate and impartial "myth-busting" information is only the beginning.

The BBC should also seek to engage communities in debate, one with another. This is particularly important at times when difficult decisions have to be taken. The test of a strong society is its ability to allow strongly held views to be voiced frankly and openly, yet within a culture of mutual respect.

The BBC must also seek out opportunities to bring disparate communities together to share a sense of being part of something much larger – the national community. The BBC can do this, for example, by bringing very large numbers of people together to share common experiences. Covering big national sports events, or broadcasting great state occasions can achieve this. But high quality popular entertainment can achieve it too, drawing large and diverse audiences and providing the currency of shared conversation at bus stops or in canteens or around the office coffee machine. Life on Mars, Spooks, Strictly Come Dancing, Who Do You Think You Are, and Tribe are all good examples of programmes that do just that.

We will also press the Executive to do more to reflect the full diversity of the public who pay for the BBC on air and on screen. And to do more to achieve a workforce that fully reflects the diversity of the public.

A workforce that reflects the diversity of the public that pays its salaries is right in itself. But it may have other important effects.

The recent BBC Trust report on Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century drew attention to the potential dangers of what it called "groupthink" among BBC staff, and of "the risk of the BBC's employment policies bleeding across into editorial judgements."

Ensuring that the BBC casts its employment net as widely as possible is one way of ensuring the BBC remains open to the widest possible spread of views.

Trust is of the essence here. If the BBC is to continue to be trusted across the UK at a time of profound change, it must be able to demonstrate that it can understand and reflect in its output the views and interests of a very wide range of communities:

That is why the Trust, like the Governors before us, continues to emphasise that the search for impartiality requires constant debate, exploration and testing against the perceptions of the public.

The BBC's role in promoting thriving civic life

I want to turn now to another of the Public Purposes, the wording of which John Reith might have scratched his head over: the duty to "sustain citizenship and civil society".

In truth, the meaning lies very close to the Reithian verities. Underneath the modern wording is a familiar instruction to the BBC to provide accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming. Reith would have had no problem with that.

But of course, impartial news and current affairs is not an end in itself. It is a means to promote a thriving civic life in the UK by providing citizens with the necessary information and insight to take an effective part in the debates on which democracy hinges, and hold those in power to account.

This means effective coverage of the formal institutions of government at local, regional and national level. But in working to support an engaged and informed debate about how we govern ourselves as a modern nation, and how we make the difficult choices confronting us about lawmaking and taxation, it is not enough for the BBC to provide coverage only of the formal institutions of politics.

It must also take in the single-issue pressure groups that are now such an important force in the wider political landscape – and are, incidentally, often much more successful in capturing the interest and engagement of the young than are the traditional political institutions.

The recent Trust report on impartiality, which I mentioned earlier, speaks of the dangers of "institutional bias" in the BBC in favour of the politics of Westminster – a bias which may lead its journalism sometimes to miss important currents of opinion in the country that, for whatever reason, fail to find a voice in Parliament.

The BBC has to develop better ways of covering the issues that resonate with those of its audiences who do not necessarily see the traditional institutions as fully reflecting and representing their concerns.

The Public Purpose asks the BBC specifically to sustain "civil society" – in other words the network of organisations through which citizens organise and promote their interests and values.

Charities, voluntary organisations, political parties, trade associations, self-help groups, sporting groups, faith-based organisations – these and other institutions of civil society have much to contribute to the national debate, and the BBC needs to develop sensitive antennae to pick up the significant vibrations.

But it is also the BBC's duty not to allow them to crowd out the voices of individual citizens and of the wider public – to find the right mechanisms to give the institutions of civil society their appropriate weight, but also to question and to remember that there will still be those outside their memberships who deserve a hearing too.

And let us not forget that the BBC itself has a duty to challenge power and hold it to account on behalf of the public – whether that power is conferred by economic strength, or privilege, or by an electorate.

The BBC is trusted, nationally and internationally, to do this job of challenge and scrutiny. But the BBC must never take that trust for granted. It must ensure that it is never put at risk through carelessness or deceit, or partiality however expressed.

Recent events have cast some disturbing shadows on that reputation and the BBC Trust will not be content until we are convinced that the remedies we have agreed with the Executive – and which they are now energetically pursuing – have eradicated the problems.

Information and understanding about the institutions wielding power in the UK must be freely available to every citizen and every community. No one, from whatever background, should feel shut out, disempowered by lack of the right information or lack of the right understanding of the mechanisms of power in a democracy.

This is one reason – and an important one – why the Trust continues to stress the importance of the reach of the BBC: informed democracy requires an informed electorate, not just an informed elite.   

The BBC's on-line services, for example, which have established strong loyalties across the population, have very different audience profiles from the BBC's traditional services and we have supported extra investment here.

This is also why, after vigorous discussion, we agreed with the Executive that the BBC should, for the time being at least, maintain all its digital channels. They still have a job to do in preparing for the digital switchover but more importantly they are potentially important routes to distinct audiences and we want that to become clearer still in the future.

The BBC's contribution to the UK economy

The final area I want to consider tonight where the BBC is asked to play a wider role is in the contribution it should make to a strong UK economy.

It does this directly, through its own investments in such things as content production and the development of advanced technologies, and also indirectly, through its promotion of knowledge and, in particular, creativity. I would argue that the UK economy as a whole is stronger for successive generations' investment in the BBC and the strength it has built up from that investment.

This economic role is reflected in the BBC's Public Purpose of leading digital switchover and delivering the benefits of emerging communications' technologies and services. But it also forms a strong thread running through many of the other purposes.

The BBC makes an obvious contribution to the creative economy of the UK. Its in-house production talent – producers, camera operators, editors, musicians – have established a world-class reputation. And, of course, about a third of the BBC's income goes to non-BBC creative companies and individuals: performers, producers, facilities houses and independent production companies.

Everything it does provides solid underpinning for the creative sector, which is one of the big success stories of the UK economy.

According to a recent Work Foundation report for DCMS, creative industries in the UK, taken together, are now equivalent in value to the financial services sector, and are growing at almost twice the rate of the rest of the economy.

The UK remains the second largest exporter of television programmes in the world – only the US does better. Part of that success rests on the heavy investment in training made by the BBC as, in effect, "trainer to the industry".

The BBC also supports some particularly uncertain areas of creative endeavour by British talent.

British comedy, for example, is one of the riskiest creative genres there is. But the BBC has recognised how much value audiences place on original UK comedy and it has become the biggest investor in the genre. It has backed the genre not just with money, but also with the spread of its portfolio of channels, using its digital channels to try out and develop new talent before launching the best on mainstream audiences. Outnumbered, a recent comedy on BBC One, took a creative risk by including improvisation amongst child actors, and has been well received by audiences and critics.

Popular music is another area where the BBC has made a policy decision to support emerging British talent. Last week's second annual Electric Proms is a recent example. The commitment by Radio1 and 1Xtra to live music and to new British music is widely acknowledged in the industry as playing a key role in bringing on new British bands who have gone on to national and international success.

Could we be confident that a commercial operator of Radio 1 would invest in new British talent in this way?

The Trust wants to see more here. One of the clearest messages BBC audiences gives us is that they want the BBC to produce more that is fresh and new, more content that surprises and delights them and that they cannot get from any other source.

That's why, when we were discussing with Mark Thompson and his team their strategic plans for the next six years, we insisted that investment is steered towards innovation.

One key quality here is distinctiveness – content that takes creative risks, or sets standards for the whole industry, or that you simply won't ever get from other broadcasters.

There is always a tension for the BBC here, between distinctiveness and competitiveness – since it is much easier to gain competitive edge by concentrating on certain genres than others, but only with a loss of distinctiveness. That's the challenge we've put to the Executive. And the Executive's recent decision, for example, not to develop plans for a fifth weekly episode of EastEnders, reflects their response to our challenge to them to keep BBC schedules distinctive.

We also want to see continued innovation from the BBC in the development of new technology – often in partnership with others – to ensure the BBC can continue to deliver its purposes into the future. Freesat, High Definition and the iPlayer will meet audience demands for more choice, better quality, and easier access.

But the Trust is very clear that in making our decisions about investments in technology, the public interest is also served by avoiding damage to the investment and services of other suppliers which help to meet the public's desire for choice.

We will simply not allow the BBC to act in an anti-competitive way or in a manner that stifles enterprise and innovation outside the BBC.

It is important, for example, that the BBC does not use the privilege of a guaranteed income to overbid for talent – thereby raising costs for the industry as a whole and reducing the value delivered to licence fee payers. This is an area where we know many members of the public have raised concerns.

There are tensions here, too, between the demand from the public for the BBC to bring them the best available talent, and a real concern that the BBC might contribute to inflated fees and salaries by responding too meekly to demands which reflect US realities rather than domestic values.

To help us understand this issue better, the Trust is commissioning a study of the costs of on-screen and on-air talent so that we can satisfy ourselves that the greatest value is being created for audiences.

We intend to publish the report in full – subject only to considerations of commercial confidentiality.

But let's return to the BBC's wider contribution to the UK economy. Increasingly, the qualities that mark out a successful modern economy are the intangibles – innovation, imagination and creativity. The BBC is particularly well-placed to support the growth of these qualities through its very broad-based provision of knowledge-building content.

This runs from basic literacy initiatives such as RaW, through formal educational materials such as the online GCSE revision guide Bitesize, right on to the very large programme of informal knowledge-building via the BBC's output in the areas of history, natural history, arts, science, current affairs and religion, as well as in leisure and lifestyle.

But the potential of the BBC's contribution is bigger still, fostering creativity beyond the creative industries. There is a current and live academic debate about the important economic value of fostering creativity and the advantage it gives in a global economy. 

The BBC has a big part to play here. Its own outstanding creative record is a powerful force for stimulating creativity in all walks of life and the new mission and public purposes explicitly recognise that it is capable of doing more – stimulating creativity across the whole of Britain's economic, social and civil life.

I believe it's important that, as BBC Trustees, we ensure that the BBC creates the maximum possible value for the UK economy.

To help us do this, we are commissioning a wide-ranging study of the value the BBC creates for the wider UK broadcasting and creative sector and it will take a specific look at the BBC's potential role in fostering creativity more widely. The study will provide evidence of the scale of these benefits and costs for the UK as a whole, and for each of the four nations. Once again, we will publish the report.

Conclusion

I said at the beginning of this lecture that the UK of today is very different from the UK of John Reith’s day.

The BBC's mission to inform, educate and entertain is enduring. But we now have a more complex mission to fulfil, a role that recognises licence fee payers as citizens as well as audiences.

This makes answering the question I posed an even greater challenge: what is the BBC for?

My short answer is that the BBC must contribute to the success of the UK as a whole.

Through the economy, society and Britain's democratic process, it plays a vital role in helping us as individuals make our own contribution.

Of course, this has been true of the BBC throughout its history. But changing technology, markets, audience expectations, society and the global economy mean our demands are greater.

The BBC, and the licence fee that supports it, can only be justified if the BBC delivers something of real value to everyone in the UK, and is valued by them in return, both for its programmes, and its wider contribution to the UK.

How can the BBC deliver more than it does already without losing sight of its need to be distinctive?

The answer certainly doesn't lie in the BBC simply doing ever more. Indeed, it has made a commitment to do less and do it better.

The answer lies in the BBC understanding that – through its programmes and the decisions it makes about what, how and where it makes those programmes – it can fulfil a greater role.

For the BBC to discharge its public purposes, to realise its own potential and to respond to this big challenge I have outlined tonight, it must reach all parts of the population, whatever their age, wherever they live, whatever their ethnic background, whatever they are interested in.

To achieve that goal it needs to reshape and do some things differently.

That inevitably means there are difficult choices to be made. And the announcements Mark Thompson has made recently about the Corporation's six year plans show that the BBC is making those difficult choices.

Whilst the demands on the BBC are great, the six Public Purposes laid out in the Charter provide the necessary focus. The Trust is clear that our role is to help the BBC stay focused on its mission. 

This is my first speech as Chairman and the Trust has not yet completed its first year as the BBC's new governing body. There is much ground for us yet to cover and in the months ahead I will look for opportunities for further exploration of the ways the BBC can contribute to the success of the UK, and in particular its role on the international stage fulfilling its purpose to bring the UK to the world and the world to the United Kingdom.

In closing, I would like to make a final remark.

On behalf of the Trust – and more importantly on behalf of the people who own and pay for the BBC – I have outlined some very high expectations of the BBC. I have no doubt that the BBC has the creativity, the talent and the commitment to make the changes necessary to fulfil them.

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