From
Ofcom
Opening Speech to Westminster Media Forum
Thursday 10 April 2003
Richard Hooper
Chairman, Shadow Content Board, Ofcom
Over the last two months my deputy Chairman (and fellow Ofcom main Board
member) Sara Nathan and I have travelled around the UK interviewing a wide
range of candidates for membership of the Content Board. Nolan-style, we
have used ten different independent assessors in Glasgow, Cardiff, Belfast
and London, to help us select nine new members. It has been a real privilege
and education to discuss content regulation with so many informed people.
The Content Board will thus have eleven part-time members which includes
Sara and myself, plus executive staff members.
Let me tell you briefly in my allotted ten minutes about the role of the
Content Board interwoven with who those new members are.
The Content Board will spend the majority of its time on the regulation
of broadcasting – tiers one, two and three, plus annual reports on
broadcasting and quinquennial reports on public service broadcasting. All
the eleven part-time members of the Content Board have been involved in
broadcasting, as producers or presenters, in management or governance.
At the heart of the Content Board, as required by the Communications
Bill, is the need for strong representation of Nations & Regions. Using four
different recruitment consultants in Glasgow, Cardiff, Belfast and London,
and local/regional/national advertising, we believe we have found members
for Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England who will help us navigate
the important waters, sometimes choppy, of Ofcom Nations & Regions.
Five of the eleven part-time members of the Board live a long way from
London and the M25, two of them in rural areas. It is important to get
UK-wide thinking rather than London metropolitan thinking into the Board’s
soul.
The Member for Northern Ireland is Rosemary Kelly. She brings wide
experience of broadcasting governance, having just stepped down as Secretary
and Head of Public Affairs for BBC Northern Ireland. Before that she was a
radio producer and news reader. She is Deputy Chairman of the Ulster
Orchestra, President of Help the Aged, and a founder member of the Board of
the Irish Film & Television Academy. Rosemary will be one of a number of
members with first hand experience of public service broadcasting, central
to our Tier Three responsibilities.
The Member for Wales is Sue Balsom who has just ended her term as Vice
Chair of the Broadcasting Council for Wales. She has a keen interest in
research (central to the Content Board’s operation). Sue runs her own PR
business with 22 employees in rural Wales so brings an understanding of
small businesses – Ofcom regulates not just the big batallions but also
smaller broadcasters and smaller production companies. Sue speaks Welsh as a
second language and has recently been hosting taste & decency focus groups
for the Broadcasting Council – taste & decency/harm & offence are central to
Tier One’s socalled “negative” content regulation.
Six of the eleven part-time Members of the Board are women, five are men.
Gender balance was a critical part of our Board design.
The Member for Scotland speaks English as a second language, his first
language being Gaelic – Matthew MacIver. He was Chairman of the Gaelic
Broadcasting Committee from 1996 to 2001 working closely with the ITC and
the Radio Authority. He was an eminent headmaster in Edinburgh until 1998 so
brings wide experience of children and young people – training is one of our
(at the last count) 51 statutory remits so he will be helpful there too.
Matthew also brings us regulatory experience as Chief Executive today of the
General Teaching Council for Scotland, a self-regulatory body for the
teaching profession. Ofcom has a duty to promote self- and co-regulation.
All eleven part-time members have widespread Board and Committee
experience, including chairing – they will need it.
Ofcom, unlike the ITC, Radio Authority and BSC, will have a Member for
England. We have selected a young man, aged 36, a physicist by background,
committed Christian, tv presenter, living in Newcastle. Jonathan Edwards is
the current World Record holder in the triple jump. Jonathan will connect
well, I believe, to the English regions.
Let me now talk about the other new members of the Content Board – these
people have been chosen to reflect not represent a wide range of views,
experience, background and skills.
For example, Adam Singer who will join the Board is a distinguished
television industry figure. He has run Telewest, Flextech and John Malone’s
TCI International on both sides of the Atlantic during the last decade. He
also brings to the Board, as any of you will know who have heard him speak,
expertise in new media and futures and technology and the commercial context
of content production and distribution.
In addition to the regulation of broadcast content, the Board will deal
with such matters as media literacy and advice on plurality in newspaper
mergers. Paramjit (Pam) Giddy is known for her strong interest in politics,
democracy, citizenship and access. She was Director of Charter 88 until 2001
and before that a political producer on Newsnight. A British-born Indian
Sikh, she will also bring her own contribution to Board discussions of
cultural diversity and ethnic minority broadcasting.
The eleven part-time members have a wide spread of religious belief,
including Christian, Jewish, Quaker, Sikh, plus non-believers. The age range
is 36 to 63.
One in ten of the UK population is legally disabled. By some estimates as
high as 40% of the population are effectively unable to use information
systems, mouses, pcs and EPGs. Kevin Carey who is joining the Board has been
blind since his 20s. He is Vice Chairman of the RNIB and a leading writer
and thinker on access by disabled people to communications. He has a strong
interest in the broader issues of the information poor and the role of IT
and digital technology in reducing social and information exclusion.
The penultimate name – there is no significance in my order of
announcement beyond weaving a narrative for you this afternoon – is well
known in current broadcast regulation circles. She is a Member of the
Broadcasting Standards Commission – Kath Worrall. You will have noticed at
Ofcom Board level, and with Stephen Carter’s top team appointments a couple
of weeks ago, that about one third are drawn from the existing regulators.
Sara, Kath and I come from the existing regulators – three out of 11. This
is vital to the Board not dropping the regulatory ball in 2004 for which
there will be no prizes. The Content Board needs to have some real
experience and some history of the niceties of due process in content
regulation, for example adjudicating fairness & privacy cases (Tier One).
Kath also brings strong regional television experience which is central to
the Board’s Tier Two concerns – she was Director of Broadcasting in the
1990s for Border Television and a member of the ITV Network Broadcast Board.
She is a Quaker and lives in Cumbria.
Finally, we have appointed a Member who is well known to those people in
the audience who watched Playschool and Playaway in their childhood. She was
born in Trinidad and came to England at the age of 10. She runs her own
independent television production company, something which will inform the
Board’s understanding of Tier Two obligations in relation to independent
production. Floella Benjamin is a Millennium Commissioner and Governor of
the National Film & Television School. In 1999 she was a member of the
Advisory Panel on Children’s Viewing for the British Board of Film
Classification, one of the range of content self-regulators with which the
Content Board will develop strong but informal relationships.
Two executive staff members of Ofcom will also join the Content Board –
Kip Meek, Senior Partner Content & Competition and Tim Suter, Partner,
Policy Development in Content & Standards. They bring further wide
experience of media and communications, public service broadcasting and
public policy.
The Content Board is not going to be operated as a state within a state,
looking after all broadcasting and leaving telecoms and spectrum to the main
Board. Ofcom is a converged regulator with the main Board demonstrating a
continuing interest in content issues because the borderline between content
and competition/economic issues is not always clearcut. The Chairman David
Currie and the CEO Stephen Carter will be able to attend Content Board
meetings by invitation.
The Content Board will meet for the first time in May and then monthly,
two weeks ahead of the main Board. Even though we will not be regulating
until the end of the year, there is much policy formulation, listening and
thinking to do.
My ten minutes are up. I look forward to what speakers from the podium
and the floor have to say and will summarise my reactions at the end of the
afternoon, joined by Sara. As appropriate we will then talk more widely
about the Board’s aim, role and function.
