On 18 September, the new culture, media and sport secretary, Lisa Nandy, gave the keynote address at the Royal Television Society’s London Convention. It was her second major speech since taking office in July, following an appearance at the Science and Industry Museum, and she used it to set out her priorities for the creative industries.
As ministers across Whitehall departments have done over the last three months, Nandy talked about “resetting the relationship” between government and the media. The consistent Labour message is that the last 14 years of coalition and Conservative rule have been dark times but that a page has been turned and the country is making a fresh start. “Our government,” she told her audience, “will be different.”
She also emphasised, as many of her colleagues have done, the need for fundamental change. After reminding listeners how different the media landscape was when her last Labour predecessor, Ben Bradshaw, spoke to the RTS in Cambridge in 2009, Nandy warned dramatically that “the dogmas of the past are no longer fit for the stormy present”.
The overall theme of the culture secretary’s address was the importance of engagement, of citizens across the UK feeling a connection to the output they see on their screens. Children’s television, for example, “gives people and communities in towns like mine a connection to what and who they see on the screen and a belief that the broadcasters behind them are part of their story and belong to them.”
She asserted the government’s commitment to public service broadcasting and to the BBC, with the corporation’s royal charter due for renewal in 2027. Confirming that the licence fee would remain in place at least until that point, Nandy came back to the issue of public engagement:
“The most important consideration is how to ensure the public feel ownership of their national broadcaster. That it belongs to and is responsive to them. That it enriches their lives, wherever they live and whatever their background. A truly national broadcaster in which all of us have a stake.”
With the charter review still three years away, this kind of rhetoric could mean anything. Many will be reassured by a wholehearted endorsement of the BBC as a critical part of our cultural and social landscape, and a commitment to public service broadcasting. On the other hand, governments which claim to speak for the people, to articulate the concerns of “the public”, are sometimes putting on a mantle which indicates they will brook no opposition. While the secretary of state promised that “the era of government-stoked culture wars is over”, it seems likely that the Labour government will still seek an active role in shaping the media and will expect organisations like the BBC to fulfil certain societal and quasi-political roles.
A likely area in which the government will want to see change was indicated when Nandy talked about representation and opportunity.
“I want to ask: If you aren’t commissioning content from every part of the country—towns and villages as well as major cities—why not? If you bus people in rather than recruit locally, stop it. Talent is everywhere. Opportunity is not. And if you’ve moved jobs and people and content, but the heads of departments and commissioners are all still in an office in London, do something about it.”
The media landscape’s Londoncentricism still dogs Britain says Lisa Nandy
Image- BBC Broadcasting House
She went on to remind her audience that working-class people make up only eight per cent of those working in television, that 23 per cent of programming is commissioned from companies outside London and (she strongly implied a causal link) trust in the media had fallen by 30 per cent in the last decade.
The iron fist in the velvet glove was revealed only at the end of her remarks. Nandy told her audience that if they had not visited media companies outside London “you have no right to call yourself a public service broadcaster. Because public service means serving the whole people, recognising their contribution and reflecting them in our national story.”
The government, which has relatively interventionist instincts in many areas, clearly sees the media as having a responsibility to contribute to economic growth and, in particular, to widening opportunities and encouraging growth and investment beyond the capital. This is consistent with the way in which culture was treated (albeit very briefly) in its election manifesto.
It contained one section entitled “Access to arts, music and sport”, which framed the government’s priorities as a matter of social equality. There was a pledge to “improve access to cultural assets by requiring publicly funded national museums and galleries to increase the loans they make from their collections to communities across the country”.
The other context in which the Labour Party placed culture was as part of a wider picture of economic growth and prosperity. It promised a “creative industries sector plan as part of our Industrial Strategy, creating good jobs and accelerating growth in film, music, gaming, and other creative sectors”, and perhaps went some way towards combining these two ideas, of equality and prosperity, when it argued that “there is huge potential for growth in the creative industries that benefit every corner of the UK”.
The creative industries, the manifesto argued, could be a motor to drive economic development, and they could do so across the country, bringing opportunities to the four nations of the United Kingdom and the regions of England as well as the domineering capital. The BBC was also seen in this light, as the manifesto contained a promise to “work constructively” with the BBC and other public service broadcasters to “support the creative economy by commissioning distinctively British content”.
This is undoubtedly a strong sector of the UK economy and one in which we are genuinely global players: creative industries employ more than two million people and represent more than five per cent of the economy, over £100 billion a year. This focus on financial and economic performance is not wholly new territory. The previous government published a “sector vision” last year which sought to add another £50 billion and a million extra jobs.
In March, the then-chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, found £25 million of funding to help launch Crown Works Studios, a huge proposed TV and film production facility in Sunderland, because the partners involved, Fulwell 73, Cain International and Sunderland City Council, relentlessly advertised the economic and regenerative benefits of the project. In the end, 8,500 jobs, skills and training and an annual boost of £334 million was a very persuasive case.
We must remember that, unusually in the current cabinet, Lisa Nandy did not expect to be doing this job. From September 2023 until the general election, she was the opposition’s lead on international development, while the culture, media and sport brief was held by Thangam Debbonaire. She was a rare politician who both wanted the culture brief and had qualifications for it: she trained as a cellist at the Royal College of Music and has performed professionally. She was arts and heritage spokesman for most of 2016, though later said she had virtually no contact with her party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
When she was given the job of shadow culture secretary last autumn, Debonnaire, having spent two and a half years in the dry managerial role of shadowing the leader of the House of Commons, seemed genuinely enthused by the prospect of carrying it into government. She said on social media: “Thrilled to take on this exciting role. As a musician I know the value of these incredibly important sectors to people’s lives, jobs and our economy.” She also pledged to be a “national champion for the arts”.
However, at the general election on 4 July, as many had feared and opinion polls strongly indicated, Debonnaire was heavily defeated in her Bristol Central seat by the Green Party co-leader, Carla Denyer, trailing by 10,407 votes.
Sir Keir Starmer had carried out a substantial reshuffle of his shadow cabinet in September 2023, putting a “strong team on the pitch” and making it clear that the choices he made were in preparation for government. He made good on that promise of continuity, and of the 19 mainstream government departments, 18 are headed by those who shadowed them in opposition.
Nandy is the odd one out. She was elected to Parliament in 2010 and appointed to the opposition front bench in 2012, but handled a range of briefs some way from her new responsibilities: children and families, energy, foreign affairs, housing and international development. Nor had she any culture or arts background in her career before Parliament.
She had written about the BBC for Labour List when she was a leadership candidate in 2020 and expressed support for continuing the licence fee model, but pointed towards some measures of reform in terms of the broadcaster’s relationship with the public. “To maintain the BBC as an institution, it must be accountable to those who fund it—the British people,” she argued. To achieve that she proposed a restructuring of the board to ensure “genuine public representation and participation—and greater commitments to transparency”, which in turn would underwrite the BBC’s independence from government.
As the culture secretary noted in her recent speech, when the current iteration of the BBC Charter, the broadcaster’s constitutional blueprint and strategy, expires, a new charter will need to be negotiated. Nandy told Radio 4 earlier in the summer that she was ”coming to it with an open mind, prepared to work with the widest range of stakeholders, including the public. But the firm intention is to secure the future of the BBC and ensure that it can continue to thrive and do its vital work into the future.”
An expert panel was set up in March 2024 by the Conservative government to consider the future of the licence fee. It is expected to report in the autumn, but its origins under her predecessor, Lucy Frazer, give Nandy a degree of latitude in responding to its conclusions. If she agrees with them, all well and good: if she doesn’t, she has the choice of using the panel as a shield of independent opinion if she thinks they need to be implemented anyway, however unpalatable, while if she merely wants to discard them she can point to the fact that the whole process was created by the last government and she should not be constrained by it.
The sustainability of the licence fee and the funding of the BBC is an immensely complex and challenging issue. The growth in television subscription services has provided the licence fee—since April, £169.50 a year—with clear comparators which, while not necessarily fair, do not show the BBC in the best light, given that Netflix starts at £4.99 a month and Amazon Prime can be less than £100 a year.
The licence fee is, fairly or unfairly, seen much more in those terms now rather than a universal levy to fund the BBC, with the important difference that the licence fee is compulsory for anyone who owns “any television receiving equipment such as a TV set, digital box, DVD or video recorder, PC, laptop or mobile phone to watch or record television programmes as they’re being shown on TV”. It does not matter if you watch any BBC programming, you are still obliged to pay. Yet there are currently around 24 million active TV licences, and the fee represents about three-quarters of the BBC’s income.
Nandy recognised the BBC’s “vital need for sustainable public funding”, especially to support the World Service. She was critical of how the previous government had approached the corporation: “for too long Ministers have patched this up, with pressure to commercialise sitting uneasily alongside the BBC’s ability to provide content for all audiences. And I believe that this is untenable.”
Regulating on-demand
As well as public engagement and economic growth, there is the thorny issue of regulation. Nandy noted that the Media Act 2024 contained “important reforms to the regulation of television and radio services that will ensure that as the way we consume media changes, the landscape changes with them”. The new powers contained in the act were put into force in August, and Nandy announced that she would be writing to Ofcom, the media regulator, to begin a review of the video on demand market. The purpose of the review is to “lay the ground for a more level playing field for all mainstream services, with video-on-demand services regulated to the same high standards we expect from traditional broadcasters.”
The approach of the new government will clearly place many demands on the creative industries, or, as the secretary of state framed it, “us doing our bit and you doing yours”. Labour is comfortable with the concept of regulation, as we have seen in discussions about how more stringent controls might be imposed on social media after the widespread rioting in August. This is dealt with in the Online Safety Act 2023, and is the bailiwick of the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology which assumed responsibility for digital policy from DCMS when it was established in February 2023.
Allied to regulation, though probably subject to a lighter touch, is the expectation that the creative industries will become more open, will extend opportunities to demographics which have been neglected and will develop a more balanced geographical economic footprint than is currently the case. One question is how this will be encouraged and driven: the new film and television facility in Sunderland, for example, was made possible by a Treasury grant of £25 million, but the mood music coming from the current chancellor suggests that this kind of funding is unlikely to be replicated.
The BBC and its allies—and it has many, for good reasons—will be reassured by Nandy’s apparent commitment to the future of public service broadcasting, to creating a long-term, stable basis for the corporation and by her backing away from any discussion of further commercialisation. It is clear, however, that the government expects the BBC to play a major part in the societal changes mentioned above, as well as to deliver economic growth across the United Kingdom.
Bottom lines top of the page
The key to the BBC’s future, however, is funding. That Nandy guaranteed the continuation of the licence fee only until the charter renewal in 2027 does not mean she or the government intends to scrap it for the next charter period. Recently, she raised the issue of mutualisation of the BBC. This would address her concerns over public engagement, as the process would mean that the corporation would be owned and directed by licence-fee payers, giving them a “stake” in the BBC and, in Nandy’s view, making it easier to justify the existence of the licence fee.
It is not clear how mutualisation would work in practice. If licence-fee payers also owned the BBC, it could be that they would elect representatives to the BBC board, and some matters like budgets and executive pay could be decided at an annual general meeting open to all members. This kind of approach was advocated in 2013 by former culture secretary Tessa Jowell, and raised again in 2016 by Conservative MP Steve Baker and Labour’s Gareth Thomas.
The scheme has many advantages in principle, but there are significant practical challenges, one of the most serious of which is the likely level of public participation in these elections and AGMs. For many years, the United Kingdom could boast of a high level of engagement in democratic politics, with turnout above 70 per cent at every general election between 1922 and 1997, but that has declined significantly in the 21st century, and at July’s contest only 59.8 per cent of voters went to the polls. It was the lowest figure since 2001 and the second lowest since 1918. Participation in other elections, for positions like police and crime commissioners or directly elected mayors, is generally much smaller, below a third or a quarter. This would put any proposed BBC board subject to election at risk both of lacking legitimacy and of being captured by activists or special interest groups.
The conclusions of the funding review established by the previous government are expected to inform the negotiations on the next charter period. While the new administration has been non-committal, Nandy has made it known that mutualisation is one of the options which will be examined in these negotiations.
The future of the BBC is in some ways a microcosm of the wider creative industries. New technology has created an ecosystem with ever-expanding choice, which is of course a benefit for content consumers, but it necessarily goes hand-in-hand with fragmentation and greater competition for finite resources. Moreover, this huge increase in choice has changed the climate in which culture exists: content of any kind now is more an object of individual consumption than mass participation.
This is demonstrated by the rise of streaming and prestige films being released immediately for home viewing, at the expense of cinema audiences and therefore the profitability of cinemas. It also means a diminution of film and television as mass cultural events. The ability to view on-demand has largely eroded any notion of an audience all experiencing a film or series at the same time, but there has also been a huge decrease in the sheer quantum of viewing for individual events.
Disparate viewers
Coverage of occasions like the closing ceremony of the London Olympics in August 2012, the funeral of Elizabeth II in September 2022 and the King’s coronation in May 2023 can still attract audiences of around 20 million, more than a quarter of the nation. However, while Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley, broadcast on BBC1 on Sunday evenings, was comfortably the most popular drama on television in 2023, it attracted an audience of just under 11 million; by contrast, on Christmas Day 1986, EastEnders was watched by more than 30 million people, at the time more than half the population.
The BBC is also a microcosm because of the clear expectation of the new government that it will contribute to a political agenda. State funding of culture has never been wholly free of strings, of course: think of Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V, which ended up costing an unexpectedly high £475,000 to make (by contrast, 1942’s In Which We Serve had cost £240,000). Much of the budget was supplied by the government on the grounds that the film was a stirringly patriotic performance, and it was dedicated to the “Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain the spirit of whose ancestors it has humbly attempted to recapture”. Its release in November 1944 was only weeks after the Allied setback of Operation Market Garden.
This kind of symbiotic relationship is clearly envisaged by the current government. The creative industries are to contribute to the nation’s overall economic growth, certainly, but they are to perform more specific tasks too, in terms of driving regional prosperity, improving opportunities across the socio-economic spectrum and pursuing an elusive sense of identity and cohesion. This last was indicated in Nandy’s RTS address when she talked about a “truly national broadcaster in which all of us have a stake”. It is clear that the BBC and the sector as a whole must adapt to these priorities in order to benefit from financial and other support from the state.
The arts have never existed in a vacuum. The challenge for government and the industry is to find a balance between producing high-quality culture which people want to experience and fulfilling a political agenda of socio-economic goals. This balance is framed by straitened economic circumstances, with the government repeatedly referring to a “black hole” in the public finances of £22 billion, and a public mood of scepticism about elites and authority of all kinds. Those who cherish the cultural achievements of the creative industries and champion the virtues of the BBC cannot pretend that every criticism of the “artistic establishment” and of public service broadcasting is unfair or false.
Britain enjoys not only a rich and possibly unparalleled cultural and artistic heritage, from Shakespeare to Stormzy, but it possesses a formidable engine of prosperity. The creative industries contribute nearly £125 billion to the UK economy, and locations around the country have played host to Game of Thrones, the James Bond franchise, several episodes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power. Clearly the potential exists for the government and the sector itself to succeed in their separate goals, but the devil is always in the detail. How much freedom will the industry be granted? How much direct and indirect financial support? Will directors and producers wholeheartedly embrace goals of social mobility and economic improvement?
Growing cultural ecologies
Perhaps the most fundamental question is the tenor of the relationship between government and industry. Conservative governments have traditionally had changeable relationships with the cultural sector, enthusiastic for the economic benefits of cinema and television as well as a positive contribution to “Brand Britain” but wary of the generally progressive political outlook that pervades the arts. Labour, on the other hand, has always leaned heavily on the emotional and cultural impact, seeing in art a way to broadcast values to a global audience and sometimes shying away from the brutally commercial aspect of film, television, theatre and music.
The tension between state and culture was heightened by the “culture wars” that Lisa Nandy has pledged to end, though she may not find it as simple as she thinks: it tends to be the case that politicians see “culture wars” only where they do not agree with the objective which is being contested. Nandy has arrived in a job she did not expect and had not prepared for, and one which is not generally regarded as being in the first rank of cabinet portfolios. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport only has a budget of £1.6 billion and around 3,000 civil servants, and it has seen 17 secretaries of state in 20 years. It has relatively few direct levers to pull but its portfolio encompasses areas which matter profoundly to people: what they watch on television, the sports they follow, the way our history is shaped and presented and much of the built environment in which we live.
If Lisa Nandy embraces an opportunity rather than endures a hardship posting, and if she approaches the cultural sector in a spirit of co-operation and partnership, she could contribute to lasting societal change. What will matter, however, is less what she says, and more what she does. That is yet to be seen.
Image top – Lisa Nandy, Wikimedia Commons; Creator: Gus Campbell;
Copyright: © gus campbell photography
