That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the Communications and Digital Committee Breaking News? The Future of UK Journalism (1st Report, Session 2019-21, HL Paper 176).
My Lords, I am pleased to introduce the debate on this report. I am grateful to the staff for their assistance in preparing the report. Our clerk was Alasdair Love and our policy analyst Theo Demolder. They and the committee were provided with great assistance by Rita Cohen. I would also like to thank Professor Jane Singer, who provided expert advice throughout the inquiry.
I am especially grateful to noble Lords who sit on the committee, many of whom are speaking today and all of whom made a huge contribution to this inquiry where, typically, despite starting out with a range of perspectives, after listening carefully to the evidence and discussing the issues, we ended up on common ground and with a real sense of the need for urgency in addressing the issues that we identified. I look forward to hearing from my noble friend the Minster and welcome him to the Dispatch Box for the first time responding to a report from the Communications and Digital Select Committee, and warmly congratulate him on his appointment. Today I will be able to cover only some of our main findings and I am sure other colleagues will fill in some of the gaps.
Print circulations of newspapers have been falling and news is increasingly consumed online, yet only 8% of people pay for news. Even when the growth in digital subscriptions is taken into account, the average national newspaper circulation fell by 57% between 2009 and 2019. For regional newspapers, the decline was 85%. These figures are stark. We heard of the closure of hundreds of newspapers, with many more forced to consolidate and lay off staff. And this is not just about the loss of long-established publications. HuffPost and BuzzFeed, not so long ago held up as the outlets of the future, have both dramatically cut their UK operations.
Of course, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic deepened the challenges facing the media industry. But these long-term, structural threats will not go away. With so few people paying for online news, publishers are dependent on the online advertising market. The boom in online media inevitably means a tougher time for newspapers, having to compete to sell advertising space with an ever-growing number of content providers.
However, as the Competition and Markets Authority has proved, the online advertising market is opaque and unfair. In 2019, Facebook and Google’s dominance allowed them to take 80% of the £14 billion spent on digital advertising in the UK. Even in the £1.8 billion “open display” market, in which content providers sell advertising space on their own websites, publishers receive only 65p of every £1 that advertisers spend. The rest goes to a range of intermediaries, which are owned overwhelmingly by Google. We asked Google if it could name any other market in which such clear conflicts of interest, from operating on the buyer side as well as the seller side, would be permitted. It could not. Put simply, publishers are finding that the game is stacked against them. That Google would behave as it has is to be expected. It is the slowness of the Government and regulators to act to stop it that is the cause of frustration.
My Lords, when I was a lad growing up in the north-west, there was a programme on Granada Television called “All Our Yesterdays”. Looking round the Room, I am reminded of that programme.
Since I am not a member of the committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, I have the opportunity, without any self-interest, to pay tribute to him and to the other members of his committee for a job well done.
I can tell the noble Lord that, when I was leader of the Lib Dems in the first decade of this century, there were regular sorties, partly from down the Corridor, to try to wind up this committee, or make it a temporary committee. I say to the members of the committee and to noble Lords, “Cling on to this committee, because it has never been more needed than it is today and will be in the future”.
There have always been tensions between journalists and politicians. The late Simon Hoggart put it best when he likened the relationship to that between a dog and a lamppost. But we have to remember that, 30 years ago, David Mellor warned journalists that they were drinking in the “last-chance saloon”. Today, we have a former Daily Telegraph journalist in Downing Street, and the press, I suspect, feels more secure than ever from real regulation and accountability.
Only recently I was contacted by a lady whose daughter had been killed in a hit-and-run accident and who had been forced to suffer the tragedy of her loss but also the cruel insensitivity of the behaviour of the Daily Mail. She found that IPSO did not answer her complaint. I know the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, will be speaking later, but the truth is that IPSO does not fit the criteria that were set out in the Leveson report for a truly independent regulator.
There are those who would argue that Leveson is now in the past and that the new technologies make the old print media merely a sideshow. I am not sure that Leveson is now yesterday’s news. It was the first time in decades that anything remotely approaching a workable framework had been passed by Parliament. We now have a statutory body, the Press Complaints Commission, which is a model of arm’s-length independence, permitting no political interference. We have a recognised press regulator, Impress, which complies with all the Leveson criteria for independent and effective regulation and now has over 100 publishers signed up to the editorial code that it imposes. That structure protects the public from press abuse, protects journalists from being pressured into unethical and criminal behaviour and protects the whole concept of a free press from being pressured into a race to the bottom.
My Lords, it is a great honour to speak in this debate as a member of my noble friend Lord Gilbert’s committee, though I had very little input into this report and so can speak objectively about it. My noble friend Lord Gilbert began by praising our clerks and the people who work for the committee. Of course, he himself deserves a great deal of praise as a superb chair of our committee. He steers it with a deft hand at the tiller and it has been a pleasure to serve with him so far. Has that got me a lot of brownie points? Yes—good. Next time I apply to ask a question at an evidence session, I will be top of the list.
There needs to be a dose of realism about the future of UK journalism because a lot of the crisis in journalism has been brought about by journalists themselves—or, more accurately, by the proprietors. Let us not forget that newspapers were established not as an act of altruism or charity but to make money. Eighteenth-century newspapers were vehicles to carry advertisements and the news was an aside. Like many other content industries, whether music, television or film, newspapers have struggled to adapt to changes in technology. Indeed, the disruption of technology has brought about new news providers because everyone will fill a vacuum—whether it is Tortoise, Politico, Axios or Sifted. There will always be an opportunity for us to get news.
The reason why we talk about newspapers and journalism and why we talk, as politicians and policymakers, about intervening is, to echo what my noble friend said, the huge importance, particularly in our democracy, of people having access to trusted sources of news and journalism. By the way, in my earlier remarks, I did not want to denigrate in any way the professional qualifications and training that many of our journalists have. That is why it is important that we debate this and that we have this report.
I declare an interest as a freelance TV series producer developing content for Netflix and the Smithsonian Channel.
I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, for his able chairing of the Communications and Digital Select Committee, on which I, too, have the honour to serve. This afternoon I will concentrate my remarks on the recommendations in this report to make the media financially sustainable and to support freelancers, who are the backbone of the creative industries and the media.
We heard during the inquiry about the financial pressures on so many media businesses as they face an onslaught on their revenue from tech giants. As the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, said, the committee has reported on the huge concerns that these companies are using their monopoly control of the digital advertising supply chain to drain the lifeblood from media companies. I am pleased that the DMU has been set up to confront this digital ad monopoly and I, too, urge the Minister urgently to introduce legislation to ensure that it is given statutory powers.
Likewise, media revenues are suffering from underpayment or lack of payment for the use of their news content on tech platforms. The Government’s response is that a code of conduct is being introduced. I urge the Minister to go much further and look at introducing a bargaining code. It must be fair to media companies both large and small, but, if our journalism is to be financially sustainable, it needs to be able to rely on an income stream for the use of its news content by the tech giants.
I also want to use this debate to draw attention to the plight of the people who supply the content: the journalists. They are the ones suffering as the media battles to reverse the downturn in its fortunes. Staff jobs have been cut to be replaced by freelancers. According to the ONS, the number of freelance journalists has doubled in the 10 years to 2019, and during the last two years that trend has accelerated as staff jobs have continued to be cut. Media companies such as the BBC and HuffPost have replaced employees with freelancers, while smaller companies now rely almost entirely on freelancers for copy.
My Lords, it is 20 years since I was a journalist, so perhaps you would spare me the rotten oranges this afternoon. I am very glad I am out of it, frankly, because there has been a revolution. The revolution has been caused by digital developments. If you can get most of your news for free from a telephone, are you going to go down to the local shop and buy a newspaper? That has happened, it is going on and this report summarises it well. The noble Lord, Lord Gilbert of Panteg, in his brilliant and magisterial introduction, made proposals to level the playing field with digital media. I will not repeat what he said because he said it better than I can.
I want to focus on two specific threats to the future of journalism that this report does not touch on. The first is the online safety Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Gilbert of Panteg’s, committee said in a previous report that it was concerned about the exemption from regulation of what the Government call “citizen journalism”. The trouble is that there is no clear definition of citizen journalism. If my next-door neighbour takes against the council’s policy on traffic, does his research, argues his case, puts it out online—yes, that is journalism, and yes, it can be protected. However, if the next-door neighbour instead takes against my approach to transphobia and posts vile threats against my family, is that citizen journalism? Not so much.
My second concern is journalistic standards. To be a journalist you do not have to have a professional qualification, as you would to be a lawyer or a doctor. I just got rung up one day and asked if I fancied a job as a journalist. There is no register that you can be thrown off and forbidden to practise. This seems to me inadequate.
What should take the place of this free-for-all? The proposals of Lord Justice Leveson, referred to earlier by the noble Lord, Lord McNally, at least gave people abused by the press a proper system for complaining, backed in the last resort by a royal charter. The remedy was generally accepted, including by Parliament —and then the rats got at it. Leveson recommended protection from costs for newspapers that joined a regulator compliant with his recommendations. So what did the Government do? Though Parliament passed the legislation, the Government simply refused to implement the critical Section 40 that would bring those cost-sharing things into effect. As a result—and we will come back to this in a minute—nobody much has joined any regulator that is Leveson-compliant. Not surprisingly, politicians prefer sucking up to Rupert Murdoch to protecting the public.
My Lords, I join with others in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, and his committee on this excellent report. As well as the report, I also had the pleasure of reading much of the evidence that was given to the committee, which added a great deal of texture to the comments the report contained. Apart from as a consumer of journalism and a legislator, I hardly need to declare my interest as the chairman of IPSO, which has been much maligned already in this debate. It is of course tempting to enter a sturdy defence of IPSO into this debate, but I do not want to divert from the real issue, which is the future of journalism. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to convince the noble Lords, Lord McNally and Lord Lipsey, of the virtues of IPSO in the “last-chance saloon”.
I think and trust that newspapers in the United Kingdom are better than they were when Leveson looked at the standards of the press. IPSO regulates 90% of national newspapers by circulation and almost all local newspapers. We have had 100,000 complaints in the last seven years. I do not consider that to indicate a failure by journalists or editors; most of the complaints are outside our jurisdiction or do not violate the editors’ code. Rather, I would hope that this is an indication that consumers value regulation.
The product that a reader of conventional newspapers has is regulated and curated by editors, but newspapers, and thus journalists, are now painting on a much-reduced canvas. Most people consume their news via social media—an area untouched by Leveson. There is no regulation and the curation of content is largely by algorithm. The absurdities that can result from algorithms was well illustrated by Peter Wright, in his evidence to this committee, and by the noble Lord, Lord Hague, in his article in the Times yesterday. Do noble Lords think that algorithms have much to do with the search for truth in a democratic society, or are they designed for the benefit of advertisers?
I, too, add my congratulations to my former Whip, the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson; I am glad I did not impede his progress up the greasy pole here in your Lordships’ Chamber. My entry into journalism was in 1960. I joined Hugh Cudlipp’s fantastic Daily Mirror enterprise. I did six years as a trainee sports journalist, and when I left, we were selling 5.25 million copies every day. I left, and look what happened—it is rather sad.
My natural state is combative, and I read the report of my noble friend Lord Gilbert’s committee ready to take up arms against some of its recommendations. I was terribly disappointed. I agree with every single word of the report; I agree with everything that has been said thus far; I am hoping that somebody will say something I disagree with in the remaining time.
I shall concentrate on the issues of copyright and dominant positions. Copyright means nothing to the new media internet giants. When I was at ITV the last time, I was at an internet conference, I was asked about Google, et cetera, and I described them as “parasites”. I said that they feed off other people’s investment; they make money out of the investments that other people make. I was immediately invited to lunch by the head of Google in Europe, who said to me, “Michael, what’s your problem?” I said, “Well, you had 300 million hits with Susan Boyle on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’. Nobody asked me if you could use it. We have invested tens of millions of pounds in this show, and you’ve made a fortune out of it; we have got nothing out of it.” “Well,” he said, “if you want it taken down, just give me a call and we’ll take it down.” “Oh”, I said , “so if I go to Harrods and steal a gold watch and they ring me up and say ‘Can we have it back?’ and I give it back, it’s not a crime?” I said, “You’re stealing other people’s material.”
That is compounded by the fact that they have been allowed to achieve what no one—not even my noble friend Lord Faulks—could argue is not a dominant position. I have spent many hours in competition arguments about defining the market and what is a dominant position. This is the most dominant position that you could imagine. They abuse their market position by stealing other people’s material and short-changing them by just giving them a tip when they steal their material, publish it and make money through advertising—so the advertising market needs looking at very quickly.
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Our committee first called for the CMA to conduct a market study in April 2018. This recommendation having initially been opposed, it took until July 2019 for the study to be launched and until July 2020 for it to conclude. In this report, we again recommended that the Government should set up the proposed Digital Markets Unit as a matter of urgency. The Government announced its establishment on the day our report was released—surely the least time it has ever taken for a Select Committee recommendation to be accepted.
The devil, though, is in the detail. The Digital Markets Unit currently operates as a shadow: it does not yet have the statutory powers it needs to act and it appears that it will not be fully operational until 2023 at the earliest. As one publisher told us, whereas Facebook’s motto was
“Move fast and break things”,
the Government’s seems to be
“Move slowly and allow the platforms to break everything”.
Among the Digital Markets Unit’s responsibilities should be the enforcement of a mandatory bargaining code to govern the relationship between platforms and publishers. Facebook, Google and others profit from publishers’ content in a variety of ways. Links to news stories provide an incentive for people to use the platforms’ services, where they can show them advertising and collect data on their interests. However, publishers need the platforms much more than the platforms need the publishers, so they cannot afford to walk away: more than a third of publishers’ traffic comes from Facebook and Google alone. Although the prospect of regulation has prompted platforms to pay some publishers for the use of some of their news in some countries, these schemes are highly limited and tend to favour the largest companies. As the CMA noted, publishers
“have very little choice but to accept the terms offered by these platforms, given their market power.”
The platforms’ opposition to the mandatory bargaining code in Australia offers a preview of how they will fight to prevent such a code being drawn up in the UK. Google threatened to withdraw its search engine from Australia if the Bill establishing the code passed. Facebook banned news from its service for four days. Although the platforms were able to water down the code, it provides a useful base on which our Government should build. Establishing a mandatory bargaining code is not about special pleading or pretending that the news industry can return to a bygone age. It is about fixing the problems to which the platforms’ untrammelled market powers give rise. So I ask the Minister: do the Government rule out a bargaining code?
Although it is in orders of magnitude smaller, we need to give serious thought also to how the market power of the BBC affects smaller players. As well as being the most watched and most listened to, in the age of online news the BBC is now the most read source of news in the UK, competing with newspapers, including local newspapers, as never before. We recommended that the BBC website should include an aggregator section to drive traffic to smaller and local websites. Our inquiry was not about the BBC, nor media regulation, but the economic security of the news industry and the future of journalism. None the less, the BBC plays such a dominant role in the news landscape that it was an important part of our work, especially in relation to diversity and plurality, which I will now turn to.
There is a lack of data on diversity across the industry. But, from the statistics available, it is clear that there is underrepresentation of people from black and other minority ethnic backgrounds, and of disabled people. There is also great concern about retention and progression, an area where much greater data is needed. Will my noble friend the Minister give Ofcom the power it needs, and has asked for, to collect a wider range of data from PSBs to enable it to better to monitor diversity?
Many great journalists entered the profession without completing higher education. Now, though, across the industry 98% of early-career journalists come from the 50% of young people who go to university. Many must also comply with costly master’s programmes and low-paid internships, further narrowing the pool of talent. The Government have taken some steps to make the apprenticeship levy more flexible, but, once again, witnesses we spoke to were critical of the levy, which is failing the industry and young people in this sector. We repeated our call for urgent reform of the levy if we are to have a news media that truly reflects and understands the public it serves.
It was clear to us that it is important that news organisations, in addition to be being representative of the country in terms of protected characteristics, hire people from a geographical range of backgrounds and, especially in the case of PSBs, from a range of perspectives, to avoid a homogeneity of mindset that gives rise to partiality of output.
It is not the job of news organisations to please politicians, but rather to be constantly challenging us, and we should be very wary about levelling accusations of bias when we hear something we do not like. However, BBC staff, who cannot be dismissed as ideologically driven, have criticised the BBC’s liberal metropolitan outlook—which is not the same thing as political bias. We must take seriously warnings such as that of Roger Mosey, former head of BBC TV News, that the BBC appears to be “edging towards groupthink”, and Sarah Sands’ observation, when stepping down as editor of the “Today” programme, that the BBC
“can treat social conservatism with polite incomprehension”.
For the most part, this is not journalists setting out to sway the audience one way or the other; it is born of a blindness to perspectives and experiences different from their own.
We welcomed Tim Davie’s commitment to impartiality and his efforts to apply high levels of editorial standards to the use of social media by BBC presenters, but we felt that, to protect impartiality in the long run, Ofcom should be empowered to ensure that public service broadcasters monitor the accuracy and impartiality of their journalists’ public social media posts, and take appropriate action where necessary.
More broadly, it has become harder over recent years to distinguish fact from opinion—or outright fiction—online. Dire warnings about a “post-truth age” and a “pandemic of fake news” are not always backed up by rigorous data. Nevertheless, it is clear that more needs to be done to equip people with the critical and technological skills they need to navigate online news. Media literacy means more than identifying “fake news”; it is about understanding journalistic processes and their value, how news is presented online and how it is funded. This is not only something to be taught in schools; we heard that older people can be among those most in need of support. There are many commendable initiatives in this area, but they lack co-ordination. There is a role for the Government to use their convening power to help guide Ofcom, the BBC, schemes run by the platforms and those in the third sector toward greater coherence.
We have a short debate today, and I will be brief in concluding. We covered a number of other areas, and made recommendations about the need for much greater co-ordination of the wide range of journalism funding schemes, especially the funding of innovation, and envisaged a convening role for government to ensure that these schemes are truly delivering greater plurality, while equipping journalists to stay ahead of, and to use, technology to maximise the reach of their content. We welcomed moves by the Charity Commission to recognise public interest journalism as a charitable purpose. We recognised the vital role of journalists, especially at a local level, in publicising the work of public bodies, especially the courts, and we welcomed the Government’s commitment to improve journalists’ access to court proceedings.
We looked at another aspect of the dominance of platforms—the significant control platforms have in determining how and whether users see news stories, and in censoring whomever and whatever they wish, based on their political sensibilities, their business interests, or seemingly sometimes simply on a whim, rather than bringing plurality. We were concerned that the growth in online news will mean more and more control for Silicon Valley elites over what we read—and, ultimately, how we think.
I look forward to hearing noble Lords’ views on this and the many other recommendations in our report, and I hope that the report, and today’s debate, will inform the House’s thinking as we look forward to the upcoming media Bill and legislation to establish the Digital Markets Unit.
This year, as every year around the world, dozens of journalists have been killed doing their work and hundreds have been imprisoned. In Afghanistan, journalists have been rounded up and beaten today. So, when we call for urgent action to support journalism as the industry journalists work in goes through huge structural change, we are calling not for intervention to support a declining industry but for recognition that journalists are a pillar of our democracy and, in this rapidly changing, polarised world where a range of voices needs to be heard more than ever, there is something precious that we will miss in more ways than we can imagine if we do not act urgently. I beg to move.
If the opportunity to build that groundwork around our media is refused by the big media owners, they cannot expect to be excluded from the provisions of the upcoming online safety Bill. My view is that we should split Ofcom into a technical and content oversight organisation, and allow no carve-out for print media from regulation by a revamped Ofcom. This makes sense as the line between print and online news becomes more and more blurred.
One other aspect of the report to which I draw attention is media literacy—the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, referred to it in detail in the report. The famous quote after the extension of the franchise in 1867 that now
“We must educate our masters”
is more true than ever. The noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, also referred to the need for the BBC to mend its ways.
Perhaps, in that process, I might make another suggestion. Perhaps the print media could take a leaf out of their own financial pages. Often, when there is a story carried in the financial pages, you will see at the bottom, “The publishers of this newspaper have a financial interest in the takeover”, or whatever it is. So perhaps when the Times, the Mail or the Telegraph run their almost-daily anti-BBC stories, we could have a little note to say, “Our billionaire, non-UK resident owners will become even richer if they can succeed in reducing the funding and reach of the BBC.” It is just an idea.
In short—my five minutes is up—I think that this is a job well done by a very important committee and a useful primer for the online safety Bill to come.
I also use this opportunity to echo, to a certain extent, what the noble Lord, Lord McNally, said. It is exhausting how often the BBC is attacked. We need to take a step back and realise just how extraordinarily lucky we are to have that institution in this country. There is no such thing as a perfect institution. I do not necessarily believe that it is the billionaire proprietors who are pushing this agenda; it is just easy, lazy journalism to always attack the BBC. We threaten its future at our peril, not the BBC’s peril.
I congratulate the committee that took all the evidence and produced this report on its instant win with the establishment of the Digital Markets Unit. My noble friend Lord Gilbert was quite right to press the Government to bring in the legislation to make it work.
I want to focus only on one point and one recommendation in the report, because of the short time allotted. It is the point that my noble friend Lord Gilbert referred to about collaboration of the different organisations that seek to support local news and journalism. There is a lot of good will out there, but good will can often be misdirected or energy can be wasted. We have Facebook giving money, we have Google giving money and Ministers are constantly demanding that the BBC support regional news and give it a platform. But all these efforts could be much more effective if they were more co-ordinated.
It was remiss of me not to take yet another chance to welcome the new Minister to the Dispatch Box—I welcomed him earlier in Questions. This is a chance for him to show his mettle. He is dressed elegantly today because he took a Question on fashion, but he is also a man of action. I know that, having listened to the chairman of our committee, he will leave this debate, go back to his officials and say, “Action this day. We want to see Facebook, Google, the BBC and others in my office”—because Covid restrictions are at an end—“for a face-to-face meeting to discuss how we can put all their efforts together to make it more joined up and co-ordinated to provide financial support for regional news journalism.” As I say, regional news has brought many of its problems on itself. If anyone tries to access a story in a local newspaper on their mobile it is a nightmare—a terrible experience. However, maybe we can help it at the other end by co-ordinating the efforts of the major platforms and of our much-loved, cherished BBC.
However, not only are the rates for freelance copy falling like a stone, but freelancers are suffering from late payment, payment on publication and unfair kill fees. Freelancers have always suffered from kill fees when their content is not used. Sometimes this is because it is not of good enough quality, but often it is because the news cycle has moved on since the article was commissioned and it is no longer needed. As a result, the journalist can receive as little as 20% of the original fee negotiated.
An increasing problem, especially in the last few years, is the late payment of fees. I spoke to one journalist who had been commissioned to write a series of articles for a medium-sized media company. The 30-days payment on their invoice was repeatedly missed. Each time the journalist called the company, they were told that it was being dealt with by the financial department and that the delay was just a logistical difficulty. After many hours of calls and emails, most of the payments were six months late and some were even nine months late. In desperation, the NUJ took the company to court for breach of contract on the freelancer’s behalf. As a result, they were paid but knew that they would never receive another commission. This story is very familiar to freelancers, especially those working for medium-sized media and small online companies.
When this issue was raised in the report, the Government’s response was that they should not interfere in contract law and that freelancers should negotiate protection for themselves. However, that is to ignore the massive imbalance between the companies and the sole-trader freelancers. It is David against Goliath. In the uncertain world of freelancing, all people have is their reputation, and once that is stained by an attempt to renegotiate a contract or a legal case to reclaim fees, they are tarred as “troublemakers” and work dries up pretty quickly. The report recommends that the Government should consult on legislation strengthening the rights of freelancers, and that the Small Business Commissioner should receive extra powers to address the growing problem of these unfair payment practices.
The Government’s response has been a welcome consultation to look at the new powers for the Small Business Commissioner. I have spoken to the dynamic new holder of the post, Liz Barclay, who has been in situ for 100 days, but who reckons it will take three or four years for legislation to be enacted and these powers to take effect. In the meantime, she is campaigning to make late payers aware of the havoc they are creating. Currently, the Commission can deal only with businesses employing more than 50 people. In an industry with decreasing numbers of employees and increasing numbers of freelancers, this criterion needs to change so that much smaller companies come within her scope. I ask the new Minister to take this very seriously and pass on these concerns to his colleagues in BEIS. Give the Small Business Commissioner the powers to campaign against all bad payers and tilt the balance towards the Davids and away from the Goliaths.
At a time when we have heard so much about supporting the British worker, in the face of skills shortages it appears that, instead of getting higher pay, many of these British workers are struggling to make a living. Action needs to be taken now. Every day, British media companies are reducing news content and failing to cover council meetings and courts and to disseminate vital information to keep citizens informed so that they can play their part in our democracy. I urge the Minister to take these issues seriously and deal with them urgently.
Instead we have IPSO, whose distinguished chairman is here today. As a regulator, IPSO has been shredded by a new publication by the academics Steve Barnett and Gordon Ramsay, entitled IPSO: Regulator or Complaints Handler? It quotes the Media Standards Trust research showing that, of 38 Leveson recommendations, IPSO satisfies only 13 and does not satisfy 25.
There is a compliant regulator under the rules set by the Press Recognition Panel, which is Impress, but the big publications have ignored it. IPSO procedures are designed to be procedurally flawless and substantively useless. I complained recently about a bogus poll in the Daily Express, which used methods that would have shamed a junior cub reporter on a local paper. IPSO ruled that this completely bogus poll was okay. Successive chairs—I hope the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, is an exception—have flailed about in the IPSO quagmire, without success. We remember Sir Alan Moses, who became IPSO chair, breathing fire over its inadequacies, only to retire hurt.
If journalism is to flourish, good journalism needs to be protected and bad journalism punished. One way to punish bad journalism would be an effective complaints regulation system. IPSO is no such system and never will be. Bring back Leveson—or something even better.
The online safety Bill is full of good intentions. I endorse the recommendation that it should include a mandatory bargaining code, for the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, gave. It is pioneering legislation, and all parliamentarians should give it support. Whether it will deal with the alarming practices employed by, for example, Facebook, described by Frances Haugen in her evidence to Congress is, however, rather doubtful.
Diminishing circulation and advertising revenue have represented a major threat to newspapers, and thus to journalists. Covid has of course accelerated this trend, although, in my view, journalists have done well in the course of Covid, and IPSO intends this autumn to publish a paper describing the journalistic response to the pandemic.
In addition to the danger so well described in this report, I reiterate the problems that face local newspapers, for all the problems of access to news described by the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey. Nine hundred local media titles written by quality journalists find their way to 40.6 million consumers via print and digital channels, but the BBC—much unfairly maligned, I hasten to add—is the largest online publisher, driving away some commercial news producers. Owen Meredith, the chief executive of the NMA, put it rather crudely, perhaps, but forcefully in an article in the Times the other day headlined “Local media need protection from the predatory BBC”.
This report makes a number of truly excellent suggestions. The future of journalism is of concern to all of us. I congratulate the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, I very much congratulate the Minister on his appointment and I look forward to working with him and the committee in helping maintain the high standards of journalism that we have come to expect and will very much need in future.
Regulation is desperately needed. In the history of broadcasting and the media, regulation and statutes always lag behind the way the market and technology move, but there is no time to lose. I urge the Government to read every line of this excellent report again and again and take action. I ask the Minister to give us his assurance that, when he goes back to the office, he will bang the desk.