Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [395]
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