Jesse Norman: ‘Priorities can’t be driven by media obsessions’

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jun/28/bbc-future-licence-fee-jesse-norman

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Jesse Norman is three working days into his new job as chair of the culture, media and sport select committee and the Conservative MP is keen to talk about about football, regional arts funding, rural broadband and mobile coverage.

But with charter renewal negotiations set to start this summer, questions about the BBC’s future are at the top of of the list. How involved in the process will his committee be?

“We’ll be demanding information, so the general public can see that the process is transparent,” he says. “We would try to encourage innovative ideas and things that might be left out of a purely bipolar argument between the BBC and the government.”

It’s the first in a series of very cautious, diplomatic answers from Norman that reveal only hints about his stance on the key issues his committee will face in coming months and years. A former banker at Barclays, Norman has not worked as a professional journalist or broadcaster and his experience leans towards the culture and sport parts of his brief. He is a director of the Hay Festival and trustee of performing arts space The Roundhouse (founded by his father), and has been helping to revive Hereford United as Hereford FC after the Southern League club’s owner went bankrupt in December. In the last parliament he spent five years on the treasury select committee.

Despite his lack of media experience, he shows a clear grasp of the different arguments around the BBC, broadcasting and press regulation. He just doesn’t want to say which sides of those debates he’s on yet. So on the BBC’s determination to provide something for everyone, from arts coverage to Strictly Come Dancing, he appears sympathetic to the idea it helps create a “broad tent” of public support, but then offers the counter-argument that “people don’t watch channels the way they used to. The argument for [the BBC] supporting the less served parts of the broadcasters’ output and audiences is probably stronger now than it was in a very channel-driven age.”

His predecessor was the more outspoken John Whittingdale, who led the committee for a decade before being appointed culture secretary following May’s election. Not only was the committee active around phone hacking and the Leveson inquiry, but one of its last big acts was the publication of a 164-page report on the BBC’s future in February.

Norman praises the “good work” that went into the report, singling out suggestions on the charter renewal negotiations . Yet he says the new committee “will have to hear the evidence and come to its own views. We have a new government, with a different mandate, and therefore it’s important to come at these things with a fresh mind.”

He also stops short of wholeheartedly backing the report’s proposal to scrap the BBC Trust, something the new government is expected to push for, despite sharing concerns over its dual role governing and regulating. “The Trust has had its ups and downs to put it mildly,” he says. “But it may nevertheless be the case that the committee or indeed the government or the BBC decides that even if it is unsatisfactory in some respects, this is a better arrangement than an alternative and more change is not necessarily what is demanded at this stage.”

He has less time for BBC executives’ claims that decriminalising non-payment of the licence fee – estimated to cost in the region of £200m a year – would lead to service cuts. He says the figure is a “relatively small proportion” of the corporation’s more than £5bn turnover and “a public service has not been created that is not quite expert in pre-arguing its case”. But, he adds, “we haven’t got to the point of assessing those arguments”.

The BBC may take heart from the fact Norman is not seen as a rabid right-winger. In 2006 when David Cameron was in the midst of trying to detoxify the Conservative image, he published a book called Compassionate Conservatism and he has been described by the Independent as “a natural member of the party’s One-Nation centre-left”. His voting record is more mixed – he voted for both equal marriage and continued retention of communications data. That more centrist outlook comes through in his response to a question about home secretary Theresa May’s reported plans to use Ofcom to pre-screen broadcasts for extremist content.

“I’d be instinctively nervous about pre-screening content on broadcasting,” he says. “It is not generally historically a good idea to get the content of political speech regulated in advance, whoever does it.” Yet he still says the committee will have to “see how [the extremism bill] transpires. Obviously there will be overlapping responsibilities with other agencies on this, and that’s another reason for not putting the cart before the horse.”

On the Leveson inquiry and press regulation he seems prepared to be a little more proactive, suggesting he expects the committee to “take an active interest” in assessing the regulators already set up and any changes the government decides to make. Is press regulation a priority for Norman? “We’ve got a lot of priorities. There are things you are interested in, and your readers are interested in, and there are things that people who are not Guardian readers are interested in. Those include Fifa, broadband, mobile services, regional funding for the arts, tourism, our national collections, an enormous array of other things.

“It can’t simply be driven by whatever the media obsessions are of the moment. It’s got to be holding the department to account across the full spectrum of its activities, even if some of them are of relatively less interest to journalists.”

In a bid to make sure the committee has a broad scope, Norman says he’d like to hold its sessions around the country. He also wants to look at spreading arts funding more evenly around the regions, and suggests that national collections based in London could lend some of their most famous pieces of art to smaller venues outside the capital. His support for a less London-centric approach also drives his calls for better broadband and mobile coverage. “You talk about the capacity not just to generate content but to make sure everyone has a chance to get it through broadband and mobile services. To support the last 3% or 5% of the country, which in many cases is larger than that, who can’t get these services or struggle to get these services.”

For all his early caution, Norman’s background suggests he isn’t likely to remain quiet once he has settled in. He has been described as a rebel after abstaining from a Commons vote on intervention in Syria – which cost him a place on the No 10 Policy Unit – and voting against the House of Lords reform. Norman disputes the tag, saying he has “rebelled against the government precisely once” and “the reputation is unearned”. All it indicates, he says, is that he has “an independent mind”.

More importantly, he is a big fan of the power of parliament to hold government to account. He has written a well received biography of famed parliamentarian Edmund Burke, and it is when we get round to the democratic process that he starts to display something resembling uninhibited enthusiasm. He says select committees have “undoubtedly” gained in power following the shift to electing rather than appointing members and he’s keen on their growing willingness to scrutinise a wider range of government activity such as appointments. “Under Blair and Brown, where you had these enormous majorities the government became far too powerful compared to the legislature,” he says. “So this is a very welcome reassertion of parliamentary authority, and one that may continue.”

Another topic that gets him going is football. He has mooted the possibility of the serious fraud office looking at whether sponsors should be investigated for not ensuring money paid to scandal-hit football governing body Fifa wasn’t spent on bribes. What about the broadcasters who pay to show Fifa’s games?

“We haven’t thought about [broadcasters] particularly but many of the arguments that are made about responses to Fifa can be made about the broadcasters and can be made about the banks and the accounting firms that audit these organisations. It’s an open question. It’s a question in law, and then it’s a question for the committee as to whether it wanted to pursue that.”

It is only when we get round to music that Norman becomes really animated. He taught himself the trumpet in his 40s and is part of a group of MPs who play together. His belief in music goes well beyond enjoying playing. He talks up its “cognitive, behavioural, emotional and psychotherapeutic” benefits and claims music-making is a “fantastically conservative activity”.

“It’s about discipline, it’s about focus, it’s about understanding the tradition you are in. It’s about working with other people. It’s about understanding a history and tradition and committing yourself to them, and that is a very conservative idea.”

Curriculum vitae

Age 53

Education Eton College, Merton College Oxford

Career 1991 banker, Barclays 1997 lecturer, University College London 2010 MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire 2015 DCMS select committee chair