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Select Committee on Communications

INQUIRY INTO BROADCAST GENERAL ELECTION DEBATES

Written and corrected oral evidence

Contents Memorandum by Dr Nicholas Allen, Dr Judith Bara and Dr John Bartle ...................................... 2 Memorandum by Arqiva ............................................................................................................................ 9 Memorandum by Dr Judith Bara, Dr Nicholas Allen and Dr John Bartle .................................... 15 Memorandum by Dr Stephen Barber ................................................................................................... 16 Memorandum by Dr John Bartle, Dr Nicholas Allen and Dr Judith Bara .................................... 18 Memorandum by the BBC ...................................................................................................................... 19 BBC, BSkyB and ITV – Oral evidence (QQ 1-19) ............................................................................. 36 Memorandum by the BBC Trust ........................................................................................................... 57 BSkyB, BBC and ITV – Oral evidence (QQ 1-19) ............................................................................. 61 Memorandum by Channel 4 ................................................................................................................... 62 Channel 4 – oral evidence (QQ 57-69) ............................................................................................... 68 Professor Stephen Coleman and Tim Gardam – Oral evidence (QQ 86-103) .......................... 82 Commission on Presidential Debates – Oral evidence (QQ 20-31) .......................................... 102 Memorandum by Professor Colin Davis ........................................................................................... 112 Memorandum by the Electoral Commission .................................................................................... 113 Tim Gardam and Professor Stephen Coleman – Oral evidence (QQ 86-103) ........................ 115 Phil Harding and Professor Stewart Purvis – oral evidence (QQ 70-85) .................................. 116 Memorandum by ITV ............................................................................................................................. 133 ITV, BBC and BSkyB – Oral evidence (QQ 1-19) ........................................................................... 143 Memorandum by David Muir ............................................................................................................... 144 Memorandum by Ralph Negrine ......................................................................................................... 150 Memorandum by Ofcom ....................................................................................................................... 153 Memorandum by Plaid Cymru ............................................................................................................. 159 Professor Stewart Purvis and Phil Harding – oral evidence (QQ 70-85) .................................. 161 Memorandum by Professor Alan Schroeder, Northeastern University..................................... 162 Professor Alan Schroeder – Oral evidence (QQ 42-56) .............................................................. 169 Memorandum by Patrick Seyd ............................................................................................................. 180 Memorandum by Sky News ................................................................................................................. 182 Memorandum by UKIP .......................................................................................................................... 189 Professor William Wheatley, Jr – Oral evidence (QQ 32-41) ..................................................... 199

Memorandum by Dr Nicholas Allen, Dr Judith Bara and Dr John Bartle

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Memorandum by Dr Nicholas Allen, Dr Judith Bara and Dr John Bartle Dr Nicholas Allen, Senior Lecturer in Politics, Royal Holloway, University of London Dr Judith Bara, Senior Lecturer in Politics, Queen Mary, University of London Dr John Bartle, Reader in Politics, University of Essex Please note: this submission represents the personal views of the authors. Introduction 1. We welcome the House of Lords Communications Committee’s timely inquiry into this

important topic. The three televised debates between Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Leader of the Opposition David Cameron and Leader of the Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg dominated the conduct and coverage of the 2010 general election campaign. They entirely eclipsed other, more traditional, features of British elections, such as manifesto launches, campaign speeches and party election broadcasts. There were also no fewer than 18 other major broadcast debates in 2010, although their impact on the course of the election campaign was comparatively small.1

2. In this submission we focus primarily on broadcast leaders’ debates. Given their

centrality in 2010, there has been surprisingly little public scrutiny of the way in which the leaders’ debates came to be organised and administered by the broadcasters and political parties. As we have observed elsewhere, ‘the subject of regulating debates could benefit from some kind of public inquiry…. There needs to be public discussion about how future debates can best serve the democratic process.’2

3. Various studies of the 2010 general election have examined how the leaders’ debates

came to be held, how they affected the course of the election and its outcome, how they affected levels of engagement and political mobilisation, and how viewers and listeners responded to the debates.3 Our own contribution to this literature has examined the broader context and, in particular, the content of the three leaders’ debates.4 Our analyses demonstrate that the three leaders focused more on policy than on personality and that most of their utterances were devoted to positive reasons for supporting their parties rather than negative attacks on opponents. Whatever some critics say, debates can inform an electorate and strengthen democracy.

1 See Nicholas Allen, Judith Bara and John Bartle, ‘A Much Debated Campaign’, in Nicholas Allen and John Bartle

(eds), Britain at the Polls 2010 (London: Sage, 2011), pp. 175–202, at p. 181. 2 Judith Bara and Nicholas Allen, ‘If there are to be leaders debates in 2015, they must be arranged in a transparent

manner’, Democratic Audit website, 11 November 2013, http://www.democraticaudit.com/?p=1758. 3 Ric Bailey, Squeezing Out the Oxygen – or Reviving Democracy? The History and Future of TV Election Debates in the UK

(Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2012); Stephen Coleman (ed.), Leaders in the Living Room: The Prime Ministerial Debates of 2010: Evidence, Evaluation and Some Recommendations (Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2011); Charles Pattie and Ron Johnston, ‘A Tale of Sound and Fury, Signifying Something? The Impact of the Leaders’ Debates in the 2010 UK General Election’, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, 21:2 (2011), 147–77; and Mark Shephard and Robert Johns, ‘Face for Radio? How Viewers and Listeners Reacted Differently to the Third Leaders’ Debate in 2010’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 14:1 (2012), 1–18.

4 Allen, Bara and Bartle, ‘A Much Debated Campaign’; Nicholas Allen, Judith Bara and John Bartle, ‘Rules, Strategies and Words: The Content of the 2010 Prime Ministerial Debates’, Political Studies, 61:S1 (2013), 92–113.

http://www.democraticaudit.com/?p=1758


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4. This submission draws on our research to address two key issues in respect of televised leaders’ debates: (1) who should take part; and (2) how such debates should be organised, in particular, how many there should be and who should organise them. We briefly address several other issues in the final section.

Who should take part? 5. The gradual shift in British politics towards some kind of multi-party system creates

many headaches for proponents of televised leaders’ debates. In the 1960s, when television executives and party representatives first met to discuss the introduction of a televised ‘confrontation’ between the party leaders, it was easy to identify which politicians had a strong claim to participate: the Labour and the Conservative leaders.5 In 2010, it was much less easy to identify which politicians should take part. In the event, the broadcasters (BBC, ITV and Sky News) and representatives of the three largest national parties took it upon themselves to decide who would participate: Labour Leader and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Conservative Leader David Cameron and Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg. As a sop to the other parties, some were allowed to participate in one or more of the other 18 broadcast debates held before the election.

6. The question of which parties should be included in any election debate must first

address its purpose. In the context of British democracy, televised leaders’ debates are usually justified as an opportunity to showcase and expose to public scrutiny the policies of the parties and the personal qualities of their leaders. In an era of multi-partyism, there are two potential guiding principles for determining who should participate. The first is that debates should be between prospective heads of government. The second potential guiding principle is that debates should be between leaders of all parties that stand a chance of being in government either by themselves or in coalition with other parties.

7. Although the first principle is more exclusive, it is generally less problematic than the

second in terms of its application. The second principle cannot be used to justify the exclusion of parties from leaders’ debates if they only field candidates in certain parts of the country since regional parties may play a role in government formation. It is also difficult to use the second principle to justify automatically the exclusion of parties that do not currently have MPs, especially in cases where a party lacking parliamentary representation in the House of Commons enjoys significantly higher levels of popular support than a party that has such representation. Moreover, the application of qualifications based on the number of MPs may deny such parties a platform and reinforce allegations that the existing parliamentary parties are acting as a cartel and using their past success to restrict current debate.

8. Attempts to justify who participated in the 2010 leaders’ debates fell between the two

stools of the first and second principles. Brown and Cameron took part because the former was the current prime minister and the latter was the best-placed challenger for that job. Clegg took part, not because his party was ever likely to obtain a majority or a plurality of seats but because the Liberal Democrats could conceivably hold the balance

5 Martin Harrison, ‘Television and Radio’, in D.E. Butler and Anthony King, The British General Election of 1964

(London: Macmillan, 1965), pp. 156–84, at pp. 157–8.


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of power in a hung parliament. In many ways, the decision to include Clegg along with Brown and Cameron in the 2010 debates has established a complicating precedent.

9. If the 2010 leaders’ debates had been solely about pitting prospective heads of

government against each other, in line with the first principle, only Brown and Cameron should have taken part. By any account, Clegg was unlikely to lead the largest party after the election. Anyone who emphasises the ‘bounce’ in Liberal Democrat support that followed the first leaders’ debate on 15 April must recognise that this represents a post hoc justification of Clegg’s presence. And they must also recognise that any relatively unknown leader on such a platform is likely to enjoy a surge in support.6

10. If the 2010 leaders’ debates had been about giving a platform to all parties that might

have formed part of the next government, in line with the second principle, then other parties, notably Plaid Cymru and the SNP, should also have taken part in some way. In a parliamentary democracy such as Britain’s, where government formation depends on the composition of the lower house of parliament, it is quite conceivable for a regional party to play the role of ‘kingmaker’. In other political systems, regional parties very often enter into national coalitions. Their influence will then be felt across the land, even if they do not contest seats nation-wide.

11. Before any future leaders’ debates, it would be desirable for the organisers—whether

broadcasters, political parties or some other body—to specify the rationale behind the debates and to invite parties to take part according to appropriate and consistent criteria. Thus, if a debate is ostensibly meant to showcase potential heads of government, it should be exclusive. Under present circumstances, only the leaders of the two largest parties should participate. If a debate is meant to showcase leaders of all potential parties of government, in line with the second principle, it should be more inclusive than arrangements were in 2010.

12. It should also be noted that being the leader of the junior partner in a coalition

government does not, by itself, constitute a reason for participating in a leaders’ debate on the basis of the first principle, not does it confer a privileged position on the basis of the second principle. All parties that may reasonably be thought to sustain or form part of a government ought to be represented, or none at all.

13. The British 2010 leaders’ debates were far from unique in terms of blurring the two

principles: three-way debates have been held in Ireland, and the number of protagonists in Canadian debates has varied. However, debates in other established parliamentary democracies across Western Europe and the Commonwealth generally included only the leaders of the two main parties, despite the fact that, as in the case of the Netherlands and Germany, minor-party participation in coalition governments is the norm.

14. On balance, we would favour a debate that includes only the leaders of the two main

parties and is ostensibly between de facto prime-minister candidates. The job of prime minister is sufficiently important to warrant such a debate; it would be in keeping with

6 One account of attitude formation suggests that people tend to evaluate unfamiliar objects more favourably as

part of the so-called ‘positivity offset’. See Allyson L. Holbrook, Jon A. Krosnick, Penny S. Visser, Wendi L. Gardner and John T. Cacioppo, ‘Attitudes toward presidential candidates and the political parties: initial optimism, inertial first impressions and a focus on flaws’, American Journal of Political Science, 45:4 (2001), 930–50.


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constitutional and parliamentary practice, which recognises only one Leader of the Opposition; and it would mean that all other parties are treated equally.

15. We hasten to add that our support for an explicit ‘prime-ministerial’ debate does not

mean that we rule out the holding of other election debates, involving a larger number of parties, that focus on specific policy areas or regional concerns. Indeed, such broadcast debates would greatly complement a debate between prospective heads of government.

How many debates, and who should organise them?

16. The successes and weaknesses of the 2010 leaders’ debates were a product of the rules

agreed by the broadcasters and political parties in the months before the election. The decision to structure part of each debate around a designated theme—domestic policy, international affairs and the economy respectively—was, on the face of it, a reasonable attempt to ensure coverage of a wide range of issues. As our research shows, the agreed rules did, on the whole, constrain both the leaders’ statements and the broadcasters’ choice of questions.7 A clear majority of content was devoted to the designated theme in the first and third debates, domestic affairs and the economy respectively. However, in the second debate, just over one-third of the content was focused on international affairs.

17. Because the rules and the broadcasters’ choice of questions were the most important

factors in shaping what the leaders said, the broadcasters had an especially important role in selecting questions that covered the issues that the public wanted to—or perhaps should—know more about. With hindsight it is possible to question whether they got it right in all cases. For example, only one in five questions across all three leaders’ debates in 2010 focused the economy, despite its overwhelming importance.

18. The broadcasters deserve much credit for organising and administering the leaders’

debates in 2010. However, problems may rise if debates follow the same format in future elections. One problem relates to the selection of questions and the coverage of issues. If a series of debates is conceived of as a series, then there probably ought to be a single authority with responsibility for the series as a whole. Moreover, the selection of questions should be co-ordinated as far as possible across all debates. Any model that leaves an individual broadcaster with ultimate responsibility for ‘its’ debate risks making the coordination and coverage of all issues a hit-and-miss affair.

19. A second problem relates to the role of the broadcasters themselves. In 2010 the BBC,

ITV and Sky News acted as a virtual cartel in organising, administering and promoting the leaders’ debates. Indeed, the number of debates was primarily a reflection of the number of broadcasters who wanted to host them. The fact that the debates were organised by broadcasters is important, since broadcasters are regulated by law. If broadcasters organise future debates that privilege certain parties or are seen to be politically partial, they may well be challenged in the courts. (The challenge may not succeed, of course, as happened in 2010 when the Court of Sessions rejected the Scottish National Party’s attempt to ban the broadcast in Scotland of the BBC’s third debate.)

7 Allen, Bara and Bartle, ‘Rules, Strategies and Words’.


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20. A third problem is that broadcasters are always likely to experience a conflict between organisational and public-service motives. If each debate in a series is produced by a single broadcaster, there is a risk that that broadcaster will be concerned as much with showcasing its organisation as about serving the public interest. In 2010 the broadcasters generally did a good job combining good television with serious opportunities for public education, but there is no guarantee that public-service goals will always come first.

21. A fourth problem, as seen in 2010, is that a series of high-profile leaders’ debates can

dominate a campaign, suffocate other forms of electioneering and, in the process, unfairly privilege the three parties taking part. To some extent, the primacy of the debates in 2010 was a product of their novelty, but it was also a product of their timing—taking place in each week of the campaign—and the heavy advertising that preceded them. The broadcasters had an understandable interest in promoting their debate but this was at the expense of downgrading other aspects of the campaign.

22. Insofar as such problems need addressing, one obvious solution would be to jettison the

idea of having a series of leaders’ debates and instead organise a single and explicit ‘prime-minister candidate’ debate at some point during the course of the campaign. A one-off debate of this kind would be less likely to skew the campaign and would greatly simplify the selection of questions and coordination of content. There would also be no need to have themes for different leaders’ debates. An explicitly prime-ministerial debate could be complemented by other debates, involving more parties, which focus on specific issues and give a platform to other senior politicians.

23. We do not think it matters where a one-off televised prime-minister candidate debate is

held. The whole purpose of broadcasting a debate is to make it accessible nation-wide, something that would be facilitated by it being transmitted by multiple broadcasters. What matters is recognising regional concerns in the selection of questions.

24. In terms of the format of leaders’ debates and the relative balance between questions,

statements and open discussion, much depends on the number of debates to be broadcast and the number of participants. More issues can be addressed by fewer participants in a single debate, and more issues can be addressed by any number of participants across a series of debates. We are reluctant to be prescriptive about the precise format used to structure a debate. However, we do think that there is a strong case to be made for allowing leaders a little more time to present closing and especially opening statements—at 90 and 60 seconds respectively, the rules were a little limiting in 2010.

25. Another solution to some of the problems we identify would be for election debates—

perhaps all broadcast debates but especially prime-minister candidate debates—to be organised by an independent body. There would then be no question of this body—it could be a new entity or an existing body, such as the Hansard Society—being driven by commercial or partisan interests. It would need to work with the parties and broadcasters, but it would take the lead and be responsible for any debates that take place.

26. Crucially, any debate organised by such a body would be a public event that all

broadcasters would be entitled to cover; the broadcasters would not have direct


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responsibility for the debate itself. Thus the debate, as an event, would not be bound by the impartiality rules that constrain the public-service broadcasters. The broadcasters would, of course, need to be impartial in their coverage, which they could achieve, for example, by giving other parties the right of reply or by covering other debates in which other parties take part.

Concluding thoughts 27. The advent of televised leaders’ debates in 2010 greatly affected the course, conduct and

coverage of the general election campaign if not the outcome. The novelty of televised debates will almost certainly be less in 2015, which may reduce many of the concerns expressed about the 2010 debates, especially the way in which they skewed the campaign.

28. The experience of the 2010 debates, especially the apparent bounce in support for the

Liberal Democrats after the first leaders’ debate, will almost certainly increase the demand among leaders of other parties to take part in future. If the purpose of a televised leaders’ debate is to provide a platform for prospective heads of government, this demand should be resisted. Indeed, there are good reasons for preferring such a debate to involve only the leaders of the two largest parties in the outgoing House of Commons.

29. If the purpose of a leaders’ debate is to provide a platform for the leaders of all parties

that may play a role in government formation, then more parties should be invited to participate than in 2010. Appropriate criteria—which would serve as a threshold to prevent an unmanageable proliferation in the number of participants—could be based on the number of seats in the outgoing Commons, the vote share in the last general election, the vote share in the most recent local elections or some other yardstick. We note, however, that any criteria could be defended or criticised on the basis of ‘fairness’.

30. It is not just the rules governing the organisation and administration of the debates that

matter. The Committee should also consider how debates are covered by broadcasters, an issue outside of our own expertise. As others’ research has shown, for example, the use of visual continuous response measures, or ‘worms’, to track the real-time responses of undecided voters, may affect viewers’ perceptions of who won a debate.8 Millions of voters’ responses may be intentionally or unintentionally distorted by the views of a small, unrepresentative sample of undecided voters.

31. British democracy cannot resist the general trend towards the personalisation of politics

and election campaigns. All the broadcast election debates in 2010 reflected this trend, just as they reinforced it. However, debates can strengthen democracy in the sense of engaging voters and providing information about the policy choices on offer, as our research confirms.

32. Politicians and policy makers should ensure that future debates do not distort and skew

whole election campaigns, and that all debates should be organised to serve the public interest, not the broadcasters’. To that end we favour the creation of some independent

8 See Colin J. Davis, Jeffery S. Bowers and Amina Memon, ‘Social Influence in Televised Election Debates: A

Potential Distortion of Democracy’, PLoS ONE, 6:3 (2011). Available from: e18154. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018154 [Accessed 31 December 2013].


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body to oversee the organisation and conduct of future debates. We feel that debates administered by such an entity would be more likely to prioritise the public interest over the long term than debates administered by the broadcasters and parties alone.

January 2014

Memorandum by Arqiva

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Memorandum by Arqiva Summary of Key Points and Recommendations:

• Arqiva welcomes the opportunity to respond to the House of Lords Communications Committee’s new Inquiry into Broadcast General Election Debates in the UK.

• The debates in 2010 were undeniably ‘event television’ – delivering large audiences. We hope they become a permanent feature of British elections and our democracy – benefitting viewers and voters alike. Arqiva has no fixed view on the appropriate mechanism to determine their administration but believes a vital condition for the selection of the host broadcasters is that any future debates should be universally-available and free-to-view.

• The Leadership Debates broadcast during a UK General Election campaign are of

such significance to our public and civic life, that they should be treated as ‘national events’ which should also be protected with the same principle as sporting ‘listed events’.

• A distinguishing characteristic of public service broadcasting is ‘universality of access.’ In 2010, the inclusion of Sky News during the selection of the three host broadcasters was not based on channel ‘reach’ nor official ‘public service broadcaster’ status. Looking to 2015, whether the debates are again produced and broadcast by BBC, ITV and Sky News or the roster is widened to include Channel 4, future debates should be accessible to everyone – on all platforms and free at the point of consumption. It is essential that the broadcasters chosen to host the debates must all be available on the Freeview platform.

• In future election debates, emerging broadcasting and distribution technologies - including red button, HD, IPTV, and mobile could also provide added benefits to the audience. Similarly, harnessing new technology for the election debate programming to improve our political engagement, civic and democratic understanding could be for the benefit of audiences and citizens alike.


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About Arqiva Arqiva is a media infrastructure and technology company operating at the heart of the broadcast and mobile communications industry and at the forefront of network solutions and services in an increasingly digital world. Arqiva provides much of the infrastructure behind television, radio and wireless communications in the UK and has a growing presence in Ireland, mainland Europe and the USA. Arqiva was responsible for UK Digital ‘Switch-Over’ – engineering from analogue television to Freeview – a huge logistical exercise which touched every Parliamentary constituency, requiring an investment by Arqiva of some £630m and was successfully delivered to time and budget. Arqiva is also a founder member and shareholder of Freeview (Arqiva broadcasts all six Freeview multiplexes and is the licensed operator of two of them) and was a key launch technology partner for Freesat. Arqiva is also the licensed operator of the Digital One national commercial DAB digital radio multiplex. Arqiva operates five international satellite teleports, over 70 other staffed locations, and thousands of shared radio sites throughout the UK and Ireland including masts, towers and rooftops from under 30 to over 300 metres tall. In addition for broadcasters, media companies and corporate enterprises Arqiva provides end-to-end capability ranging from –

• satellite newsgathering (30 international broadcast trucks); • 10 TV studios (co-located with post-production suites) • spectrum for Programme-Making & Special Events (PMSE)9; • playout (capacity to play out over 70 channels including HD); to • satellite distribution (over 1200 services delivered). • Connect TV - who launched the first live streaming channel on Freeview.

Arqiva’s WiFi network includes almost every UK airport – and reaches cross the hospitality and leisure sector, providing WiFi to 85,000 rooms in leading hotel chains, and many restaurants, retail chains and shopping centres and local high streets. Elsewhere in the communications sector, the company supports cellular, wireless broadband, video, voice and data solutions for the mobile phone, public safety, public sector, public space and transport markets. Arqiva’s major customers include the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Five, BSkyB, Classic FM, the four UK mobile operators, Metropolitan Police and the RNLI.

9 Such as the wireless cameras operated by the BBC and Sky News, and the radio microphones used in virtually all

television production and many West End shows.


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Introduction:

1. Arqiva welcomes the opportunity to respond to the House of Lords Communications Committee’s new Inquiry into Broadcast General Election Debates in the UK. As the 2015 General Election approaches, we note that there has been increasing chatter and speculation about the administration of potential future debates. Much of this has been preoccupied with which politicians should take part, and on what basis, (on which Arqiva has no opinion). However, the 2010 debates were undeniably ‘event television’; delivering large audiences. We hope they become a permanent feature of British elections and our democracy – benefitting viewers and voters alike. Arqiva has no fixed view on the appropriate mechanism to determine their administration10 but believes a vital condition for the selection of the host broadcasters is that any future debates should be universally-available and free-to-view.

The Importance of Universality:

2. When the House of Lords Communications Committee examined the criteria of Public Service Broadcasting in 2009, a number of witnesses noted a distinguishing characteristic of public service broadcasting was universality of access.11 Arqiva strongly agrees with this principle. Looking to 2015, whether the debates are again produced and broadcast by BBC, ITV and Sky News - or the roster is widened to include Channel 4 or others… any debates should be accessible to everyone – on all platforms and free at the point of consumption.

3. A clear precedent for a ‘free-to-view’ principle is the treatment of national sport events. The Broadcasting Act 1996 gives the Secretary of State of Culture, Media & Sport the power to designate key sporting and other events as ‘listed events’. The purpose of the list is to ensure that such events are made available to all television viewers, particularly those who do not have subscription television. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) explains that a ’listed event’ is “one which is generally felt to have special national resonance” and which contains “an element which serves to unite the nation, a shared point on the national calendar”12. For this reason, such events are protected by law to ensure that they are available to as many viewers as possible, particularly those who cannot afford the extra cost of subscription television. Arqiva believes, the Leadership Debates broadcast during a UK General Election campaign are of such significance to our public and civic life, that they should be treated as ‘national events’ which should also be protected with the same principle as ‘listed events’.

Looking back:

10 The process of debate negotiation was colourfully described by Ric Bailey as “a fragile and painstaking business,

vulnerable to the storms and vagueries of political evolution, accident and determined self-interest” - Ric Bailey, “Squeezing Out the Oxygen – or Reviving Democracy: The history and future of TV election debates in the UK” Reuters, February 2012 –p57

11 Lords Communications Committee Report: “Public service broadcasting: short-term crisis, long-term future?” (March 2009)

12 p4, DCMS leaflet, Coverage of sport on television, [accessed December 2012]


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4. In 2010, for the first time in British politics, the leaders of each of the three main parties took part in Prime Ministerial Debates during the general election campaign. Each debate ran for ninety minutes, and was broadcast weekly by ITV, BSkyB and the BBC over three successive Thursday evenings, starting on 15 April. The first half of each debate focused on a particular topic - domestic affairs, foreign affairs and the economy respectively - with the second half allowing for a discussion of general issues, with questions picked from the audience. They took place in various locations across the UK– the first in Manchester, the second Bristol and the final debate was in Leicester. Whether owing to their uniqueness, there was considerable advance-publicity, post-event analysis and comment on both national and social media. They impacted on the public consciousness13 – and changed the course of the campaign, even if their actual impact on the election result remains debatable. They were ‘event television’ and delivered the broadcasters large viewing figures.

5. The first debate was the most popular, with a peak audience of 9.9 million viewers, as

opposed to 4.6 million for the second and 8.3 million for the final debate.14 The average viewing figures across all the stations they were broadcast on were 9.4 million, 4 million and 8.1million for each debate respectively. It’s worth noting that the second debate on Sky had significantly fewer than the other two. As Stephen Coleman et al note“…this is not surprising considering the odd decision to air it live on non-terrestrial channels only”15 Indeed, the viewing figures produced by BARB showed that the viewing figures for the debate were only 2,212,000 viewers watching it on Sky News, 584,000 on Sky3 and 1,388,000 watching on the BBC News Channel and/or the later repeat shown on BBC Two at 23:3016. It was also simulcast on BBC Radio 4.

6. In addition, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland had their own television debates,

between the main party leaders from each country. Scotland and Wales each held three debates, whilst Northern Ireland staged two. Channel 4 staged and broadcast a ‘Chancellors debate’ to discuss the economy on Monday 29 March at 8pm in front of an invited audience of 200.

7. It is important to remember that, at the time of the last election not everyone had

access to Digital TV. Only four out of 14 television regions had actually completed TV switchover – Border, West Country, Wales and Granada, which only amounted to 21% of the UK population. Despite 23 million UK households already having digital TV on their main set by April 2010 a significant 10.5% of households still lacked access to Digital – and were deprived of the opportunity to watch the second debate broadcast ‘live’ on Sky News. This group included a disproportionate number of senior citizens who relied on analogue TV news and radio, rather than the Internet, as the main source of news.

Looking forward:

13 Ed. Stephen Coleman, “Leaders in the living room: The Prime Ministerial Debates of 2010: evidence, evaluation

and some recommendations,” 2011, Reuters Institute 14 Source: General Election 2010 - Commons Library Research Paper RP10/36 15 Stephen Coleman, Fabrio Steibel and Jay G Blumler, “Leaders in the Living Room” p17 16 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8639485.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8639485.stm


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8. Of course, any potential debates held in 2015 would be post-TV Switchover. As the transmission contractor for all UK terrestrial television services, Arqiva had the responsibility for implementing the switchover at all 1154 transmitter sites across the UK. All households have now gone digital. Importantly the three largest news organisations BBC, ITN (who provide news for ITV and Channel 4) and Sky News – are all currently available on Freeview - the UK’s most popular TV platform, watched in almost 20 million homes (75% of all TV homes) and the sole television platform in almost 11 million homes.17 Terrestrial television will continue to grow:- The DTT platform (Freeview and YouView combined) is set to account for 40% of the country’s primary TV homes in 2020 (12 million)18. DTT broadcasts 95% of the country’s most watched programmes19 subscription-free. Indeed, DTT delivers bigger audiences for public service channels than any other platform – accounting for 61% of viewing among terrestrial viewers (44% in cable satellite homes). DTT is highly valued by UK consumers and looks set to remain so by 2020 and beyond. It is essential that the broadcasters chosen to host the debates must all be available on the Freeview platform.

9. In 2010, the inclusion of Sky News in the self-selection of the three host

broadcasters was not based on ‘reach’ nor official ‘public service broadcasting’ status.20 There are certainly arguments for greater transparency on the selection criteria for 2015. For example, Channel 4 News is a public service terrestrial broadcaster with a strong reputation among younger viewers who could play an important role in engaging viewers and first time voters in a televised debate21. Channel 4 is also available to 98.5% of the population on Freeview, whereas Sky News (carried on a commercial multiplex) is only available to around 90% of the population.22 Whether the debates are again produced and broadcast by BBC, ITV and Sky News - or the roster is widened to include Channel 4 or others – future debates should be accessible to everyone – on all platforms and free at the point of consumption.

10. In future election debates, emerging broadcasting and distribution technologies -

including red button, HD, IPTV, and mobile could also provide added benefits to the audience. Certainly, Arqiva is proud to collaborate with the BBC and others in the industry, to continue to deliver improvements to the UK-wide distribution of public service content. For example, five new subscription-free BBC HD channels, - including BBC News HD - launched by Christmas 2013 and are offered to all digital television platforms that carry HD channels.23.

11. There is no doubt that, in recent years the UK’s broadcasters have provided engaging digital content and services available on a wide range of digital platforms and devices,

17 BARB Establishment Survey, Q1 2013 18 3 Reasons LLP, Spring 2013 Market Model 19 BARB viewing figures, Jan-Mar 2013 20 Tim Montgomerie sourced to one of David Cameron’s ‘closest advisers’, claims ‘the most credible explanation’

for Tory high commend agreeing to the debates with Sky enjoying equal status to the BBC and ITV was “as part of a general desire to keep News International happy’’ , http://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2011/07/the-cameron-murdoch-relationship-didnt-win-the-last-election-for-the-tories-it-helped-lose-it.html

21 Broadcast: C4 lobbies for election voice, 17 January 2013 22 Ofcom Infrastructure Report 2013 p69- http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/telecoms-

research/infrastructure-report/IRU_2013.pdf 23 Ofcom Press Release - New HD channels on terrestrial TV – 16 July 2013

http://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2011/07/the-cameron-murdoch-relationship-didnt-win-the-last-election-for-the-tories-it-helped-lose-it.html

http://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2011/07/the-cameron-murdoch-relationship-didnt-win-the-last-election-for-the-tories-it-helped-lose-it.html

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/telecoms-research/infrastructure-report/IRU_2013.pdf

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/telecoms-research/infrastructure-report/IRU_2013.pdf


14

such as digital television, digital radio, mobile devices and the internet. The BBC’s cross-platform innovative reporting and broadcasting of the 2012 Olympics is testament to this. For example, up to 24 simultaneous live events were available to satellite and cable homes via Red Button, with Freeview homes getting up to two extra channels in Standard Definition, and one in High Definition. Over twenty four million people (42% of the UK population) watched at least 15 minutes of coverage on the BBC Red Button.24 Similarly, harnessing new technology for the election debate programming to improve our political engagement, civic and democratic understanding could be for the benefit of audiences and citizens alike.

January 2014

24 BBC Blogs - Olympics: Red Button - Tuesday 14 August 2012

Memorandum by Dr Judith Bara, Dr Nicholas Allen and Dr John Bartle

15

Memorandum by Dr Judith Bara, Dr Nicholas Allen and Dr John Bartle Evidence to be found under Dr Nicholas Allen

Memorandum by Dr Stephen Barber

16


1. Confounding some sceptics who saw this as another shift towards presidential politics in Britain, the leadership debates during the 2010 general election campaign can be broadly assessed as a success. Attracting significant audiences (a peak of more than 10 million viewers for the first debate), the innovation allowed the main party leaders to address voters directly, for a sustained period and without the intermediary of print or broadcast journalists to interpret their words. While voters were subsequently exposed to journalistic analysis and party campaigning, the debates diluted the traditional influence of the press, for at least some portions of the campaign. While far from perfect and emphasising presentation skills, the debates also allowed for a fairly open discussion of policy and in place of the negative campaigning which has become a feature of British general elections, opened up space for party leaders to identify commonalities.

2. The electoral conditions of 2015, where no party can be sure of securing a majority,

are perhaps not too far removed from the conditions of 2010 which paved the way for the first televised leaders’ debate after many failed attempts previously. It is ever more likely, therefore, that the public will expect a debate at the centre of future general election campaigns. Just as in the United States, however, where there is an established Commission on Presidential Debates, there is no certainty that future leaders will want to take part. Remember there was a 16 year gap between Kennedy-Nixon in 1960 and Ford-Carter in 1976. There is a disproportionate risk taken by a secure incumbent (such as Thatcher in 1987) sharing an equal platform with an opponent or an opposition leader with considerable momentum behind him or her (take Blair in 1997) risking a beating from an adversary with little to lose. A party does not have to refuse to take part; they simply fail to agree terms.

Negotiations to Represent Voters and Democracy

3. If this innovation is to become a permanent fixture of British general elections, it would be desirable for some mechanisms to be established to facilitate negotiations, ensure some continuity and support fairness and balance. The case made by this brief submission is that such a mechanism should recognise that parties and broadcasters are not the only stakeholders and to promote the interests of voters and democracy.

4. The principal negotiations are between the political parties on the one hand and the

broadcasters on the other. In the absence of any inside track here it is reasonable to assume that parties want to use the debates to maximise votes while the broadcasters wish to maximise viewing figures. The viewing electorate is, consequently, left as a passive stakeholder albeit one able to exercise a vote subsequently.

5. There is an opportunity in operationalizing the negotiation process to ensure the

interests (at least) of the electorate can be represented so as to open the discussion into one of three active stakeholder sets. In doing so, the wider democratic interests


17

might be represented in the negotiations and the subsequent format of the debates. Increased use of social media might also enhance voter participation.

Explicit and Tacit Interests of Voters and Democracy

6. Democratic and voter interests might be considered as both explicit and tacit. That is explicit interests might reflect voters’ concerns and questions as one might ordinarily expect: jobs, public services, crime, etc. But if the mechanisms are to enhance democracy, tacit interests must also be considered. That is, voters might be better informed about the complexities of political decisions, and better understand the trade-offs required, as a result of these debates.

7. Were it possible to build such tacit interests into the debates, unfiltered by other

media and campaign materials, there would be a real (if modest) potential to enhance democratic discourse and understanding. It might contribute to addressing electoral scepticism and apathy.

Mechanism and Regulations

8. Some independent body, whether it is a ‘Debates Commission’ or some more modest Office, could support and facilitate these negotiations and be answerable to Parliament itself rather than party leaders or broadcasters. The negotiators in 2010 were only 13 in number (two from each party and broadcaster plus an extra Liberal Democrat) so the addition of another body (who might also act as Chair) would not disconcert or require a large secretariat. Its terms of reference, however, should reflect the need to represent the interests of voters and the democratic process – including tacit interests.

9. Such a body should be appointed by and answerable to Parliament, perhaps

employing the Speaker’s office and appropriate Select Committees.

10. Existing broadcast regulation in respect of impartiality must be maintained as a central tenant of these broadcast debates. Inclusion of all three major party leaders in the debate, as well as representation of other smaller parties (those not in national contention to form the government) elsewhere on broadcast networks, avoided judicial review in 2010 and such a continued approach would seem sensible.

11. There is now the advantage of fixed term parliaments and, therefore, some certainty

about the date of the next election. It is important that a lead time is built in for negotiations in the run up to the campaign and giving plenty of time. While some privacy can be afforded for the sake of reaching agreement, British people have come to expect openness in public life and there should be as much formal openness as possible in this case. It would also be instructive for the proposed independent body to publish an assessment of the process and outcome, after the election.

12. Rules and guidance would emerge from the experience of negotiations over time,

openness and the authority of Parliament in the body’s appointment should ensure parties would participate.

January 2014

Memorandum by Dr John Bartle, Dr Nicholas Allen and Dr Judith Bara

18

Memorandum by Dr John Bartle, Dr Nicholas Allen and Dr Judith Bara Evidence to be found under Dr Nicholas Allen

Memorandum by the BBC

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Memorandum by the BBC The BBC’s view is that the broadcast election debates in 2010 were a resounding success and we want them to be repeated at future elections. Among other reasons, they engage difficult-to-reach parts of the electorate, are an effective way of holding those in power to account, invigorate interest in general election campaigning and fulfil a prime focus of the BBC, citizenship. Institutional Arrangements The 2010 general election debate programmes were subject to the same regulatory and legal framework in which each of the broadcasters operates during election periods with impartiality, independence and public interest central to the way they were organised. If there were to be different arrangements made e.g. setting up a separate body, the broadcasters would still need to comply with this framework. The BBC could not delegate to other bodies responsibility for the judgements it takes about election coverage. A key lesson from the 2010 broadcasts was to keep the arrangements as simple as possible to reduce potential for disagreement and failure. Separating the organisation of the debates from those who have responsibility to broadcast them with due diligence would be – in the BBC’s view – an unnecessary complication. Public Interest as a Primary Concern Making judgements in the public interest and serving licence-fee payers is central to the BBC’s mission. Research conducted jointly with ITV and Sky found half of viewers said the debates had improved their understanding of key issues (on average, across all three). The coverage had a greater impact on younger audiences (18-34s) with 25% saying it helped them decide whether to vote (v 21% adults) and 45% said it helped them decide who to vote for (v 37% adults).

• BBC, ITV and Sky pooled their resources and weight to ensure the debates happened in 2010. Given this success the BBC would favour a similar approach to future elections, but take a pragmatic view in seeking a successful outcome.

• The BBC notes the complexity of reaching agreement on the debates and that having

a public commentary on conducting the arrangements may not be conducive to success. The broadcasters involved in the 2010 debates have been open and transparent about the process leading to them being set up and have published the relevant material.

‘Debates Commission’ Whilst acknowledging the work carried out by the US Commission on Presidential Debates in encouraging public interest, the BBC does not regard it as a useful or necessary model for the UK. It notes that it is co-chaired by representatives of the two biggest political parties and is widely regarded as ‘bi-partisan’, rather than “independent”. The parties’ objective is to seek a low risk environment and maximum electoral advantage, not the public interest.


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Among the considerations regarding the establishment of such a body are: whether other political parties would accept such parameters for who takes part in the debates; its impact on the editorial independence of the broadcasters; how it would be funded; what the role of a commission would be in organising complementary debates in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. A commission can provide a forum for discussion about the debates, as the broadcasters did in 2010, but it cannot force participation. If debates were conducted in a way that primarily suits the main political parties, excluding other forms of scrutiny, this may be too high a price. BBC Submission Introduction The BBC’s view is that the Prime Ministerial TV election debates in 2010 were a resounding success and would want them to be repeated at future elections:

• They attracted large and appreciative audiences – over 22 million saw at least one debate, more than two-thirds of those who subsequently voted.

• They engaged some of the most difficult-to-reach parts of the electorate, in particular young/first-time voters as well as others who were unlikely to access other election broadcasting or any other form of election communication. Half those who viewed the debates said their understanding of the key issues had been improved.

• Research suggests they contributed significantly to the disproportionately higher increase in turn-out among 18-24 year olds – more than 90% of younger viewers talked about the debates with others.

• They fulfilled a prime purpose of the BBC – to promote citizenship. • They provided a new and effective way of holding to account and scrutinising those in

power and those who aspire to power. • They reinvigorated interest in general election campaigning. • Many more people than in previous elections had the opportunity to hear about the

policies of the parties, to talk about them with others and to use what they had heard to help them decide how to vote. 70% felt they knew more about the policies of the parties as a result of the debates.

“Institutional arrangements” In the run-up to the 2010 general election the three main broadcasters came together and put up a joint proposal to the three largest political parties in the UK for three television programmes during the election campaign. The parties agreed in principle and there were then discussions on how the programmes would work in practice. Each of the broadcasters then made the arrangements – some together, some separately – and paid for the programmes and broadcast them. Although it was not, of course, quite so simple; in principle the debates were no different to the many other TV election programmes which broadcasters produce. They were subject to the normal regulatory and legal framework in the context of which each of the broadcasters


21

operates during election periods. Impartiality, independence and public interest were central to the way the debates were organised. In the BBC’s case, this was tested both through our own complaints system, up to and including the BBC Trust, as well as in the High Court in Edinburgh. The arrangements proved robust. The only really unusual aspect was that the three broadcasters chose to voluntarily “pool” some of their editorial judgement – but only in a limited and controlled way which did not compromise their editorial independence. The debates were a success – and, above all, they finally took place. Fifty years after the first US presidential TV debate, institutional arrangements were devised by the three main broadcasters which finally secured TV election debates in the UK. The BBC’s view is that the arrangements for 2010 worked and that they remain the most appropriate way of making them happen again. If there were to be different “institutional arrangements” – for example debates which were set up by a body separate to the broadcasters – they would still need to comply with the legal and regulatory framework of an election period. In those circumstances, each broadcaster – separately – would still have to make its own judgements on issues such as impartiality, of how and when the debates were presented, of scheduling – even deciding if the proposals of such a body were sufficiently compliant for them to be able to broadcast the events. The relevant regulatory structure for each broadcaster is different and each of them transmit to different geographical areas, meaning that the impartiality questions for each are also different. The BBC could not delegate to other bodies responsibility for the judgements it takes about election coverage. For instance, part of the BBC’s overall strategy for ensuring impartiality in 2010 was not only to organise complementary debates in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but also to make specific arrangements for other smaller parties to receive appropriate coverage in relation to the debates. A key lesson for the broadcasters from 2010 was to keep the arrangements as simple as possible: the more complications, the more potential for disagreement and failure. Separating the organisation of the debates from those who have responsibility to broadcast them with due diligence would be – in the BBC’s view – an unnecessary complication. The BBC’s response to the questions the committee asks about the management and operation of the debates is as follows: For television debates, there is an existing, established framework within which to make decisions about:

- who takes part and on what basis - how many debates there should be - where and when they should be held - their format and style

In the 2010 TV debates, these difficult issues (many of which had contributed to debates not happening before) were part and parcel of the way they were set up by the broadcasters, within the established regulatory system. In short, the 2010 arrangements work.


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• More broadly, how can we ensure that the public interest is the primary concern in determining any administrative matters…..

The broadcasters already have precisely that responsibility. As well as a duty to ensure impartiality and independence, the BBC has a direct obligation for public service and to take account of the public interest in the production of its output. The BBC has a specific public purpose in citizenship. Making judgements in the public interest and serving licence-fee payers is central to the BBC’s mission. This is distinct from simply attracting high audience figures – in relation to election periods, we regard the public interest as being to engage different audiences in the campaign, to provide information and understanding which equips voters as citizens and to make a particular effort to reach those sections of the public which may otherwise be less engaged in the electoral process. The priority we give to public interest is evident from the research carried out jointly with ITV and Sky and analysed in 2010 by BBC Audiences as follows: • Crucially, the debates helped further viewers understanding (which was a key objective of the BBC’s election coverage). An average of 43% claimed to have learned a lot from the debates across all 3, with the same amount saying the programmes had encouraged them to find out more information about the parties/issues. Overall, half of viewers said that the debates had improved their understanding of the key issues (on average, across all three). • The debates had a bigger impact on young audiences. Amongst the 18-34s who watched any of the debates, on average across all three, 25% said it helped the debate decide whether to vote (vs. 21% of all adults), and 45% said it helped them decide who to vote for (37% of all adults). (See Appendix 1) A relatively new phenomenon in 2010, noticed in relation to the debates, was the practice among younger viewers of engaging with two screens – that is, they watched the debates on television but communicated simultaneously with friends through social media, sharing comments, information and humour. What was noticeable was that the engagement was more active than passive, as evidenced by the very high proportion (nearly 90%) of those people seeing the debates who also had conversations about them with others afterwards. Given the relatively short notice for the arrangements last time, the BBC sees potential for much more use of social media around the debates next time, to build on their success as a vehicle for engaging harder-to-reach audiences in the electoral process. o Which broadcasters should take part? The BBC, ITV and Sky chose to pool their combined resources and weight in order to make the debates happen in 2010. Given the success of that enterprise, the BBC would be in favour of a similar approach in future elections, but is pragmatic about which other broadcasters should be involved – the key criteria are whatever makes debates most likely to happen and to reach and engage with the widest possible audience in the UK.


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• In what ways does the interaction between existing broadcast regulation, case law, and the potential for judicial review set the parameters for decisions relating to each of these topics?

The parameters are set in exactly the same way as they would be for any other broadcasting during election periods. These are decisions which the broadcasters have to make at all elections in many different circumstances. If Prime Ministerial Debates are to be broadcast at all, they will have to sit within these parameters. • What is the appropriate level of openness and transparency in which these

questions should be addressed? At a level appropriate to giving debates the best chance of taking place. For the BBC, there is no difficulty in conducting arrangements for debates in an open and transparent way. But given the complexity of reaching agreement on debates, having a public blow-by-blow commentary is not necessarily conducive to success. In particular, a party political negotiator whose position is public inevitably finds compromise more difficult. The broadcasters who produced the 2010 debates have been open and transparent about the process which led to them being set up and have published the relevant material, which is attached to this document. (see Appendices 2 & 3) • Are such matters best left to the broadcasters and political parties to

determine? o If so, how can it be guaranteed that the public interest plays a decisive role in their negotiations? It is important to emphasise the nature of the negotiations in 2010. They were framed by an initial invitation from the broadcasters, accepted by the politicians. The framework was drawn up by the broadcasters in a way that was consistent with their obligations to be impartial, independent and in the tradition of public service broadcasting. The details of how that would happen were then negotiated with the contributors – the political parties – as would be the case with any programme contributor. It is in setting out the principles that the broadcasters deploy their general and existing duty – and their central culture - to do so in the public interest. A greater engagement of the electorate – not just high audience figures – was achieved in 2010 and is a fundamental objective for the BBC. Some have argued for the establishment of a new ‘debates commission’ which can address these questions openly and independently. • Would such a body represent the best way of ensuring the public interest is

paramount in such matters? What would be the arguments for the establishment of such a body? o What would be the arguments against the establishment of such a body? In the United States, over a number of years, the Commission on Presidential Debates has become an established institution, which has undoubtedly done much good work in


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promoting debates and other activity around public engagement in the electoral process. In its central task, however, of organising presidential TV debates, it is construed in a way which the BBC believes would be inappropriate in the UK. Many who argue for a Commission on such lines in the UK refer to the CPD as “independent”. Others, however, suggest the term “bi-partisan” is more apt. It is co-chaired by representatives of the two big political parties and arrangements for debates are agreed between the two parties, through the Commission. The broadcasters – and other political parties – are, in effect, presented with a fait accompli. The participation of other candidates in debates (which has only happened on one occasion) remains, in our view, more in the hands of the two large parties than would be acceptable in the UK. The primary concern – not surprisingly - for each of the two main US parties, is to provide as low risk an environment as possible for their candidate and maximum electoral advantage. Quite reasonably from their perspective, those are the main objectives of the negotiators – not the public interest. The relative strength of the broadcasters in the UK provides a more robust and independent voice for the public interest. In considering the setting up of a UK version of the CPD, the committee may want to address a number of consequent questions:

- whether a structure which is designed, essentially, for a two-party system could cater effectively for the UK’s less symmetrical political make-up – and whether such a structure would be acceptable to other political parties around the UK.

- whether UK television viewers would now accept the US-style “debates” - often characterised as “joint press-conferences,” so limited is the interaction between the candidates - compared to the high level of engagement between the party leaders in the successful 2010 UK debates.

- who would pay for the new body and its permanent administration: in the USA large corporate bodies and foundations offer sponsorship.

- that any system giving the political parties the ability to dictate format and editorial parameters (such as the right to veto which journalists ask the questions) would be unlikely to win the support either of UK broadcasters or the UK public.

- what the role of the Commission would be in organising complementary debates in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (and how all the above questions would apply in each of those cases).

• How should a new independent body be established The BBC does not believe such a body is now necessary in the UK - it is not immediately obvious which problems it would be seeking to solve. The system of broadcasting regulation in the UK means that independence is already sufficiently core to the production of the debates as evidenced by the experience of 2010. The risk of a non-broadcasting body (or a body in which the broadcasters are invited to take part, but without having a decisive say) being responsible for setting the parameters is that the existing independence from political influence would be lost, not enhanced. Such an arrangement makes it less likely that the public interest would be paramount and more likely that the larger political parties hold sway.


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The conundrum facing those who believe a Debates Commission is the way forward is that it will only have the power to establish debates if Parliament – the politicians – give it that authority; it will then only have sufficient independence to set the terms of those debates if it can stand up to the influence of the political parties. Contradictory and challenging as that may sound, there is already such an organisation: the BBC. The difference is that, along with the other broadcasters, it draws its authority not from the politicians, but from a strong relationship with its audience. • How could it ensure that the relevant broadcasters and political parties

would participate and to do so according to its rules and guidance? Unless established by statute, it could not ensure participation. As senior BBC executives put it in 1997, following the failure to secure debates: “in this game, the politicians hold all the aces”….in other words, if a political party believes it is not in its own electoral interests to take part in a debate, no system, including the one in the US, can force it to participate. No political party will sign up to rules which it believes might harm its chances of winning the election. A Commission may provide a forum for discussions about debates, just as the broadcasters did in 2010, but it cannot – any more than the broadcasters - guarantee they will happen. If debates do only happen because they are conducted in a way that primarily suits the main political parties – and they also crowd out other forms of scrutiny at election time – then that may be too high a price. • What principles should guide the body responsible for this system in

determining its view on some of the thorny questions it would face e.g. which political parties should participate?

Precisely the same legal and regulatory framework in which the broadcasters currently operate. What relationship should the new body have, if any, with the Electoral Commission? This is not a matter for the BBC. • On any one of these questions, what lessons can the UK learn from other

democracies with an established tradition of election debates, eg. Australia, Canada, Sweden, Norway, USA etc.)?

We have set out above a more detailed comparison with the US system, which is most often cited. The political context in each country, however, is very different – even a study of those Commonwealth countries which have a Westminster-style structure does not necessarily provide useful lessons for the UK. The committee may, though, find it helpful to take evidence regarding the recent Australian experience of attempting – and failing – to establish a debates commission.


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Appendix 1

The PM Debates

Key findings from the debates and audience insights for future coverage


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Key debate facts

• 22.5m (39%) UK individuals 4+ watched at least one of the debates (3+ min reach) but

just 2.5m – 11% of them – watched all three25

• Average audiences to the three debates were as follows:

• ITV – 9.4m, Sky – 4.4m, BBC – 8.4m26

• The third PM Debate had a combined average audience of 8.4m across all channels

(inc Sky News) – down on the ITV debate (9.4m), but a significant increase on the

slot averages of the relevant channels. The total reach across all channels was 13.8m/

24.1%. The audience on BBC One was 7.3m, 58%, with 617k watching on BBC News

Channel (+592%), 213k on BBC HD (+205%), taking the BBC total to 8.1m/ 31.2%

share and 13.3m reach. 329k watched on Sky News (+740% on its slot average).

• One reason for lower audiences to the Sky debate was slightly lower awareness.

Whilst 91% of the population claimed to be aware of the debates on ITV and the

BBC, 84% knew about Sky’s27

• Viewing to all debates was also influenced by scheduling of other programming.

Whilst the audience to ITV’s debate was consistent throughout the whole

programme, Sky’s built for the first hour before levelling off and the BBC’s grew

significantly after the first half an hour (after Corrie had finished and it was half-time in

the football)

25 Based on All Individuals 3+min reach (BARB) 26 Based on All Individuals on all channels showing the debates (BARB) 27 Based on results of three surveys with a nationally representative sample of UK adults (YouGov for

the BBC, Sky and ITV (joint survey), April-May 2010)


28

• Interest in the debates seems to have been at its highest after the first debate – with

76% of the audience saying they’d seen or heard further analysis of the debate

afterwards, dropping to 60% for the latter two28

• Crucially, the debates helped further viewers understanding (which was a key

objective of the BBC’s election coverage). An average of 43% claimed to have learned

a lot from the debates across all 3, with the same amount saying the programmes had

encourage them to find out more information about the parties/issues. Overall, half

of viewers said that the debates had improved their understanding of the key issues

(on average, across all three).29

• The debates had a bigger impact on young audiences. Amongst the 18-34s who

watched any of the debates, on average across all three, 25% said it helped the

debate decide whether to vote (vs. 21% of all adults), and 45% said it helped them

decide who to vote for (37% of all adults). 30

28 ibid. 29 ibid. 30 ibid.


29

Data

Source for quality and impact: YouGov for the BBC, Sky and ITV (joint survey), April-May 2010.

Scores amongst adults who had watched each debate. All who agree with each statement.


30

Appendix 2 Prime Ministerial Debates – key principles, agreed December 21st 2009 The following principles to be the basis of holding a series of Prime Ministerial debates:

1. There will be three live TV debates during the forthcoming general election campaign.

2. There will be one debate in each full week of the campaign assuming the election is called at least four weeks before polling day.

3. If there are less than four weeks between the election being called and polling day, it may be necessary to schedule two debates in one week. The first debate will not be held before the fourth day after the start of the campaign.

4. Each of the three broadcasters, the BBC, ITV and BSkyB will be responsible for producing their own individual debate programme in three separate locations in England.

5. ITV will produce the first debate in the North West. Sky will produce the second debate in the South/South West. The BBC will produce the third debate in the Midlands.

6. The three party leaders of the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties will appear in each debate programme.

7. Each party leader will have equal treatment in each programme. The broadcasters will each nominate one person who will monitor the debate and be contactable by a nominated representative of each of the parties during the debate. The broadcaster’s nominated person will advise and liaise with the executive producer who will have responsibility for ensuring equal treatment.

8. Each debate will be between 85 and 90 minutes in duration, transmitted live by the originating broadcaster in peak time.

9. There will be no advertising within the programme. 10. The format of the debate will be the same for all broadcasters. 11. Around half of each debate will be themed. 12. There will be a live audience, transparently selected mainly from the surrounding

region by an agreed and reputable polling company. 13. Each audience will be broadly representative of the country as a whole subject to

detailed discussions with ICM and agreement with the parties. 14. Each broadcaster will have a named editorial panel of their own to select the

questions submitted by the public. Each will set out the criteria by which questions may be selected.

15. Each debate will be hosted by a single presenter provided by the host broadcaster. Alastair Stewart, ITV; Adam Boulton, Sky; David Dimbleby, BBC.

16. BSkyB and the BBC will make their programmes available to other broadcasters simultaneously. ITV will make their programme available to other television broadcasters immediately after transmission and available simultaneously to online and radio.

17. This proposal is subject to each broadcaster complying with its duties on due impartiality and election coverage across the nations of the UK.


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Appendix 3 Prime Ministerial Debates - Programme Format - agreed by all parties 1st March 2010 Audience selection

1. The objective is to select an audience which is broadly a demographic cross section of the country.

2. the audience to be made up of roughly 200 people, subject to venue capacity. 3. ICM has been appointed as an external recruitment agency and the methods of

recruitment are based on their expert advice. In broad terms, we will aim to: 4. recruit within a 30 mile radius of the host city, mindful of administrative borders on

either side of that radius based on the revised ICM list of constituencies. 5. recruit according to gender, age, ethnicity and social class to best reflect the broader

voting-age population. The recruitment procedure will be transparent, and its methodology will be available to the parties for comment.

6. ensure around 80% of the audience is made up of voters who express a voting intention at the time of recruitment.

7. These will be subdivided into ratios which reflect a ratio of 7 Labour, 7 Conservative, 5 LibDem .The political ratios will take precedence over the demographic in the final selection of the audience by ICM.

8. within the 80% (see point 6) the broadcasters retain the right to recruit some audience members who express an intention to vote for smaller parties.

9. ensure that around 20% of the audience will be undecided but will be politically engaged. ICM’s definition of undecided voters to be the basis of this selection.

10. reserve a small number of seats for participants from outside the ICM selected audience, whose questions have been pre-submitted and selected by the broadcaster’s editorial panel. The broadcasters may use a variety of methods to encourage the submission of such questions from across the UK in the build up to the debates.

11. the number of questions from outside the ICM selected audience will be a maximum of four per debate.

12. over-recruit by a small margin to accommodate “drop outs” or “no shows” 13. issue audience members with a protocol of rules, including security procedures for

entry and conduct during the debates. The protocol will be agreed by the parties. Audience role

14. The objective is to ensure maximum debate between the party leaders - the distinctive characteristic of these programmes - whilst allowing the audience’s voices to be heard directly posing questions.

15. Each broadcaster will nominate a panel to choose the questions for its debate. The panel's membership will be public, but they will meet in private.

16. Each selection panel will include a member to oversee compliance. List of names of panel members attached

17. The objective of each panel shall be to ensure fair question selection in order to frame a balanced debate within the rules of our agreements.


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18. The panel will meet confidentially in the weeks running up to their debate. 19. All questions submitted by the ICM selected audience will be seen by a member of

the panel. Email questions will be sifted and a selection given to the panel. 20. Initially, each panel will sift through a selection of questions drawn from those

submitted by members of the public. 21. They will narrow down their selections in a series of meetings up to and including

the day of the debate. 22. Each panel will have five to seven members, including a designated chair who would

have a casting vote if necessary. 23. The panel cannot be quorate with fewer than three of its members present. 24. In selecting its questions, the panel will take full account of the following: 25. each question will be relevant to all three party leaders. 26. no question shall focus on one party or one leader. 27. all questions will be based on election issues 28. audience members will be made aware of these rules before submitting their final

questions. 29. half the programme will be based on the agreed theme. Within that portion of the

programme, a maximum of three questions will be selected on a single sub-theme (as listed in point 65 of this document).

30. half the programme will be unthemed. In this portion of the programme, a maximum of two questions will be selected on a single subject.

31. the range of questions chosen will reflect the broadcasters' legal and compliance responsibilities for due impartiality and fairness.

32. the panel will use its editorial judgement to select questions and will take into account factors such as the prominence of certain issues in the campaign, the distinctiveness of the different parties’ policies on election issues, voters’ interest and issues relevant to the role of the Prime Minister.

33. Within these rules, the editorial independence of the panel shall be paramount, because each broadcaster is answerable to its regulator for its programme content.

34. Questions may be selected by the editorial selection panel up to the start of the debate.

35. The selected questions will not be shown to anyone outside the editorial team in advance of the programmes.

36. Members of the audience will ask their questions. The moderator will ask the leaders to respond. The moderator may read email questions.

37. All questions will be addressed to and answered by all three leaders. 38. The audience members will be restricted to asking the selected questions. 39. There will be an option of viewer involvement via emails read by the moderator. 40. In order to maximise the time available for viewers to hear the leaders discussing

election issues with each other, the studio audience will be asked not to applaud during the debate. There will be opportunities to do so both at the beginning and at the end of each programme.

Structure of programme

41. the programme will start with all three leaders on set and standing at their podiums. 42. The moderator will have a podium/desk and will move within a small area to allow

eyeline with the audience and the leaders. 43. The moderator will introduce the leaders,


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44. The first half of the programme will be on the agreed theme but with the agreement of all the parties, in case of a major national or international event not included in the theme of the debate, the moderator will ask the leaders for their reaction to the development at the start of the programme before moving on to the theme.

45. The time taken for the reaction to such an event will be added to the time available for the themed part of the debate, unless the event is clearly part of the theme of the debate, in which case the reaction will be counted as part of the time allotted to the theme.

46. Each leader will make an opening statement on the theme of the debate lasting for 1 minute. After the three opening statements the moderator will take the first question on the agreed theme. There will be closing statements of 1 minute 30 seconds from all three leaders at the end of the 90 minutes.

47. Each leader will have 1 minute to answer the question. 48. Each leader will then have 1 minute to respond to the answers. 49. The moderator may then open the discussion to free debate between the leaders for

up to 4 minutes on merit. 50. The length of the debate on each question will be decided by the programme editor. 51. The programme editor will use their best endeavours to keep to the 4 minute time

allowance but it may need to be extended in the interest of equality of treatment. 52. Questions will be taken on the theme until around half way through the programme,

depending on timing and ensuring fair treatment of all three leaders. 53. At the end of the themed period, the moderator will open the debate to general

questions selected by the broadcaster’s panel from the audience or via email. 54. The same timing format will apply to the general questions i.e. each leader will have 1

minute to answer the question. Each leader will then have 1 minute to respond. The moderator will then open the discussion to free debate between the leaders for up to 4 minutes on merit

55. There will be a clock indicating the time remaining for statements, answers to questions and responses. This will be visible to the candidates and moderator but not to the audience in the debate or on screen.

56. The order of speakers, based on an agreed grid, has been determined by the parties drawing lots.

57. At the end of the programme the three leaders will shake hands. Role of the moderator

58. To moderate the programme 59. To keep the leaders to the agreed time limits 60. To ensure free-flowing debate being fair to all candidates over the course of the

programme. 61. To ensure fairness on the direction of the programme editor 62. To seek factual clarification where necessary 63. It is not the moderator’s role to criticise or comment on the leaders’ answers. 64. The candidates accept the authority of the moderator to referee the rules on stage

and ensure a free flowing, fair debate conducted within the agreed rules


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Themes

65. Order of themed debates. The order of the themes for the first half of each programme was determined by the broadcasters drawing lots. The order is as follows:

1. Domestic affairs including but not exclusively: NHS; Education; Immigration;

Law and Order; Family; Constitution; Trust in politics; Political reform; 2. International affairs including but not exclusively; International relations;

Afghanistan; Iraq; Iran; Middle East; UK defence; International terrorism; Europe; Climate change; China; International Development

3. Economic affairs including but not exclusively: financing of public services; Taxation; Debt; Deficit; Public finances; Recession; Recovery; Banking and finance; Business; Pensions; Jobs;

Set

66. The leaders will stand at podiums throughout the debate. The positions of the three leaders during the debates are to be determined by agreement with all parties.

67. The moderator will have a podium/desk and will move within a small area to allow eyeline with the audience and the leaders.

68. Each broadcaster responsible for their own titles, music, branding etc. Audience cutaways

69. The purpose of the programmes are for the viewers to see and hear the party leaders engaging in debate with each other and answering questions from the audience. The audience is a key element of the programmes and has to be seen by the viewers but there will not be undue concentration of the reactions of individual audience members.

70. There will be a close up of the questioner while he/she is asking a question. 71. There will be no close-up cutaways of a single individual audience member while the

leaders are speaking. 72. However if one of the leaders directly addresses an individual audience member, a

close-up shot of that individual can be shown e.g. if a leader answers a question by directly addressing the questioner.

73. There may be group shots and wide shots of the audience during the programme. 74. The programme will be confined to events inside the debate studio. 75. Breaking News straps will not be put over live coverage of the debate. On news

channels (Sky News, BBC News channel), the scrolling news tickers will offer other news but will not cover breaking news lines from the debates while the debates are taking place.

76. Each party will have the right to recall the negotiating panel made up of representatives from the broadcasters and the parties, during the campaign to discuss issues arising from the debates.


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Details of selection panels ITV Selection panel: Michael Jermey, Director of News, Current Affairs and Sport (Chair) Sameena Ali-Khan, ITV Central regional news presenter Alex Gardiner, Debate Programme Editor Lucy Meacock, ITV Granada regional news presenter Jonathan Munro, Deputy Editor, ITV News Alastair Stewart, Debate Moderator Chris Wissun, Director of Programme Compliance Sky Selection panel Chris Birkett, Executive Editor, Sky News (chair) Adam Boulton, Political Editor and Debate Moderator Jonathan Levy, Executive Producer, Politics John McAndrew, Executive Producer, Debate Programme Penny Chrimes, Executive Producer, The Boulton Factor Hannah Thomas-Peter, Politics Producer & RTS Young Journalist of the Year 2009 Daniel Austin, BSkyB Legal Department BBC Selection panel Sue Inglish Head of Political Programmes BBC News (chair) Ric Bailey Chief Adviser, Politics, Editorial Policy David Dimbleby, Moderator Daniel Pearl, Programme Editor Jeremy Hillman, Editor Business and Economics January 2014

BBC, BSkyB and ITV – Oral evidence (QQ 1-19)

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Evidence Session No. 1 Heard in Public Questions 1 – 19

TUESDAY 11 FEBRUARY 2014

Members present

Lord Inglewood (Chairman) Baroness Deech Lord Dubs Baroness Fookes Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill Bishop of Norwich Lord Razzall Lord Skelmersdale Lord St John of Bletso ________________

Examination of Witnesses

Ric Bailey, Chief Adviser, Politics, BBC, Michael Jermey, Director of News and Current Affairs, ITV, and John Ryley, Head of News, BSkyB

Q1 The Chairman: I welcome everybody to this session of the Communications Committee taking evidence in the inquiry on the leaders’ debates at general elections. Before we get going, it is important for Members of the Committee to declare any interests they may have. We discussed this among ourselves and we recognise that some but not all Members of this Committee are actually members of political parties and so would seem to have an interest in this. It is not absolutely clear whether this, in fact, constitutes an interest for the purposes of the House of Lords rules of procedure and we are going to take further instructions from the clerks to see whether we ought individually to register this. Nevertheless, I want to put on record that we recognise there is if not an actual conflict of interest a perceived conflict between some of the Members of the Committee and the subject matter of the debate. I hope that clarifies the position for everybody concerned.

What I would then like to do is to welcome our three witnesses who are, first of all in the order they are on my piece of paper, Ric Bailey, who is Chief Adviser, Politics, at the BBC; second, there is Michael Jermey, Director of News, Current Affairs at ITV; and third, John Ryley, Head of News at BSkyB. You have kindly provided us with brief descriptions of your careers and so on, which has been very helpful, so what I would like to do is to embark on the evidence session proper. What I sometimes do is ask people to make an introductory statement, but in the context of this particular inquiry the way we have formulated our questions will obviate the need for that. I hope that is all right from your collective perspective. There is no need for everybody to answer every question if you think the points have been covered. On the other hand, if there are points that matter to you, then please feel free to make them. In general, we will address the questions to the three of you collectively and you can decide among yourselves how you wish to answer.


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If I might begin to set the scene, I will ask each of you in turn whether you would very succinctly tell us whether and why you think the debates last time were in general terms a success, which I think is what you feel from your written evidence. What evidence is there, polling or otherwise, for the claim—which I think you all probably support but it was made explicit by ITV—that there is public expectation that they should happen again? Perhaps since ITV made that explicit in its written evidence I could ask Michael Jermey if he would like to start.

Michael Jermey: Yes, let me answer both questions. I think the debates of 2010 were a great success. You saw for 90 minutes at a time the leaders of the three major UK parties debating directly with each other. Over the course of the three debates you saw 24 questions addressed, with real discussion about serious policy issues, in which tens of millions of viewers engaged. Nearly 10 million people saw the first debate. The reach of the debates overall was above 15 million. The total of the three audiences was above 22 million. All the polling data at the time suggested that people had found the debates useful and that they had enjoyed them. Among young people in particular there was a sense that they understood more about the election than previously. It is interesting to note that among young voters, turnout at the election itself went up differentially compared with other groups.

In answer to your question about supporting evidence for the claim that there is a public expectation that the debates should happen in future, there have been a number of polls in this area. The most recent was conducted this month, February 2014, by YouGov, and shows that 57% of adults in the UK agreed with the proposition that live debates should happen before the next election. This increased to 63% among 16 to 24 year-olds, and only 8% of adults disagreed with the proposition.

The Chairman: That is a very helpful and useful starting point. Who would like to continue?

Ric Bailey: For public service broadcasters covering an election, it is quite easy to make people who are already interested in politics interested in an election. We have all set out some of the facts and figures around how successful we thought it was, but the real success and what we are all jointly proud of is that the debates reached people who would not normally perhaps have become engaged in the election. Obviously, there were some facts and figures around young people, and one of the most interesting, I thought, was that of the young people who saw the debates, more than 90% talked to other people about them afterwards, which I thought was an extraordinary statistic. That alone is a reason for us to want to do them again and to think that they were a good thing for democracy and that the way they were done was very much in the public interest, which is at the heart of what we are trying to do in election periods. It is the holy grail for political broadcasters in the circumstances of an election to reach people who might not otherwise become engaged. My sense over a series of elections was that public engagement was getting lower and lower, and you certainly could not say that about 2010. There was a real sense of excitement and we felt very proud of that.

John Ryley: I think they were a success because they achieved their objective, which was to regenerate and reinvigorate the relationship between the electorate and those seeking office. If you remember, the debates happened on the back of the expenses scandal, and I felt very strongly at the time that politics had been denigrated and that there was a need for the debates. I think the debates really nailed that. What you had, as Michael suggested, was millions of people in prime-time TV, four and a half hours of it, devoted to election issues: domestic policy, international policy and economic policy, at a time of economic uncertainty.


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The audiences were able to see simultaneously and compare and contrast the answers of the three leaders.

As Michael said as well, turnout was up. Michael Thrasher, the psephologist at Plymouth University, estimates that turnout was up about 5%. I have one big memory from the night in Bristol when I was walking around the harbour where we did the debate. There was a very big screen and sitting down watching the screen outside were about 200 youngsters, teenagers, watching it. That bore out the statistics afterwards that the debates really secured the interest of young people. I think that is very important; we did public good.

Then a point about why we think they are going to happen again; it is for two reasons. Sky News carried out back in August some polling with YouGov. About 1,700 people were polled online; 69% of those polled said they hoped the debates would happen in future; 15% said they did not really know; and 16% said they did not want them to happen. But 69%, nearly seven out of 10 people, wanted those debates to happen again.

The other thing where there is public expectation is David Cameron, the Prime Minister, Ed Miliband, the Leader of the Opposition, and Nick Clegg, Leader of the Liberal Democrats, have committed on camera, saying that in principle they want the debates to happen. You marry those two things together and I think there is a public expectation.

Q2 Lord Razzall: If we can drill down a little from your obvious welcome of the debates and the wish that they should happen again—and we will hopefully look in a minute at where they could be improved—perhaps you could articulate what the important aspects of last time are that need to be repeated, both in the organisation and management of the debates. What are the essential components that should be built on and continued?

Michael Jermey: The essential elements are in a sense perhaps slightly obvious. It was a programme structure where you saw the three party leaders able to engage absolutely directly with each other without excessive mediation on serious policy issues and at some length; a programme structure that allowed exploration across the wide range of issues that the electorate were interested in; and also something that, being in prime-time television, created a sense of occasion, that the electorate wanted to watch, and wanted to see what the leaders who were aspiring to be Prime Minister had to say on those major issues. In a sense, after 50 years of waiting for the debates to happen, I think all of us experienced a feeling of some excitement when that occurred. So many things that have happened over recent years in election campaigns I would not say the electorate was excited about. This really managed to engage the electorate and it is key that the format and the structure and the staging, if you like, of the debates next time around should capture that same sense of importance and significance that this is the nation coming together to consider its future.

Lord Razzall: You do not think you should move to a more “Question Time” format with bigger audience participation?

Michael Jermey: No, I did not say that. Greater involvement of the studio audience and of the electorate is probably a desirable thing. I do not think it is necessarily an essential thing and you would not want that if it was at the expense of the exchange between the party leaders. But as an addition, as a development, I think it would be a welcome one.

Lord Dubs: When you say how well it worked last time and how there was more interest and more public involvement, to what extent, though, was that due to the fact that the election was a much closer thing? It was not a foregone conclusion. Would what you say now have applied if we had had a broadcast in 2001 or 2005? Possibly not. What do you think?


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John Ryley: I think there would have been similar excitement whether the election had been close or not close. The debates were a new political event. A lot of people were interested in them and they delivered the audiences.

Ric Bailey: It is worth saying that we had to work very hard to make them happen. There is a slight sense that now they have happened, we can take it for granted that they will happen. I have looked back at a lot of the previous elections when they did not happen, as perhaps you may have read and remembered. A lot of the factors that stopped them happening have not gone away. That sense of having to work very hard at making sure that you paid the sort of attention to detail and planning that we had to do to make them happen, and the format in terms of talking to parties, doing things in the right order—there are some very important things around editorial independence and about how they were set up that we had to be very careful about, which has perhaps not got into the public debates too much. It is quite important, certainly from the BBC point of view, to preserve that way of doing it, so that we are not in some way handing over editorial responsibility.

To a certain extent, these are like normal election programmes. They are subject to the same rules. We are setting up in the same way. Of course, they had a much higher profile, but they have to fit into the general context of how we are making judgments about election coverage all the time. Not just high-profile BBC1, ITV and so on but across all of our output we are making these judgments about how to make election coverage interesting, who to include—all those difficult issues—and this fits very much into that.

Q3 Baroness Deech: What we have heard from you so far, of course, is very much, understandably, in favour of having the debates and it sounds as if you think the previous formula was good. I just wondered if there were, say, three elements of the way that they went last time that you would change this time around. Somebody mentioned audience participation. I have the impression just from watching “Question Time” that audiences have got much, much rowdier in the last few years. I personally would not want more audience participation because I think people would just seize their chance to heckle and grab the nation’s attention. Are there other things that you think ought to be looked at and maybe changed?

John Ryley: Audience participation is a wide phrase. If you acknowledge that the aim of the debates is for those in the studio and the wider public to hear the political leaders put their point of view on different policy aspects, you want to encourage a bit more discourse. While I agree with you that you would not want a rowdy crowd, I would like perhaps to see a bit more free-form discussion between the party leaders and possibly the opportunity for the audience member who has put their question to come up with a secondary question. I felt the format was a great starting point and it was put together at high speed by the likes of Mr Jermey and Mr Bailey on the negotiating group, but when we come to look at it again, maybe there should be a little bit more free-flow discussion.

Michael Jermey: I think it is possible, for instance, to look at the town-hall style debates in the States where there is more audience participation but which you could never call rowdy or in any sense heckling. It is a chance for leaders and the electorate to have a proper, intelligent exchange around the issues. There is nothing about the format of 2010 that I think we would want to lock in aspic and say that is the only way you can do it. There are numerous ways you could have debates. I equally do not think that we should in any way be apologetic about the format of 2010. It gave a forum for proper, intelligent debate on the major issues of the day and clearly connected with the audience and the electorate and delivered very good value. While I would be in favour of exploring whether we could


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innovate in 2015 and perhaps even have a different style of debate in each debate, as a fallback position I think it would be great if the political parties and the broadcasters would acknowledge that 2010 was a success and as a minimal position that we at least achieve that again in 2015.

As Ric Bailey says, I do not think anybody should absolutely assume the debates will happen. There are lots of positive signs. All three party leaders have accepted the principle. The broadcasters are working closely together again. There is absolutely no reason why they should not be delivered in 2015, but we should remember, for instance, that there was a 16-year gap between 1960 and the Kennedy/Nixon debate and the next debate in the United States.

There will always be things that could derail a debate. Lord Dubs talked about a close election. It is perhaps no coincidence that the first debate in UK history was in a close election when all three party leaders felt that it was a sensible thing to take part in, as in the United States the close election of 1960 had prompted the debates. There is absolutely no reason that the debates should not happen next time, but there are plenty of things that could derail them. Having broadcasters working together with the support of the wider public increases the chances of us seeing the sort of intelligent engagement we had in 2010.

Baroness Deech: Mr Bailey, anything that you would change or revisit?

Ric Bailey: I pretty well agree with all of that. One of the reasons, for instance, the format was identical across the three debates pretty well—and that was quite hard for three different, normally competitive broadcasters to agree to—was it was one of the things that we felt was necessary to simplify what was happening and to make sure that they happened. I do not think any of us are wedded to that as having to be the way that we do it in the future. Similarly, I have some sympathy. I used to run “Question Time” and I know very well how the dynamic works. One of the good things about what we saw in the last election was that we saw different ways of scrutinising the parties, not just the party leaders but the parties generally. One way to do it is, of course, having a debate between them, but for the public to be served properly they need to hear other ways of the party policies being scrutinised. Some of that is by in-depth tough interviews on the “Today” programme or “Newsnight” or on Adam Boulton and so on, and some of it is by audience programmes. It is quite right that there is some interaction. From my point of view, I would rather have a range of different sorts of programmes, of which the debates are one, but I certainly think there is some scope for increased audience participation because that comes a bit more naturally to us now and I think audiences expect that.

Lord Skelmersdale: Nonetheless, these debates do eat into, do they not, the time that you can allow for normal election broadcasting?

Ric Bailey: No.

John Ryley: For our news channel, I would not agree with that, with respect. We have 24-hour broadcasting seven days a week through the campaign, so we would probably be devoting the airtime we give to the debates to other election reporting. In our case, I do not think they do eat into the programming.

Q4 Lord Skelmersdale: Can I move on to another specific question? It is easy to see who the political parties are because they all announce themselves. It is easy to see who their leaders are. You have your own judgment. You have Ofcom recommendation. You have the BBC Trust’s recommendation. How does this sort of mix come to a concrete setting, if you like?


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Ric Bailey: To start with, I think it is important to say that although we, as three broadcasters, came together in the organisation of the debates, one thing we were very clear of from the beginning was that each of us separately and independently had to make sure we were doing them in a way that was properly regulated and according to our normal impartial guidelines, and to that extent that was separate—and we had to accommodate that separately. We do those things slightly differently.

From the BBC point of view, we have a set of election guidelines that we work to during elections, which we produce for each set of elections. Part of that sets out how we will achieve due impartiality in an election campaign. All of our election coverage, including the debates, has to be consistent with that. That is challengeable if we do not get it right, as indeed it was on this occasion, and can be appealed to the BBC Trust and then, of course, ultimately to the courts if necessary. What we do during election periods is absolutely subject to that and is obviously parallel to what is happening to those broadcasters that are regulated by Ofcom, but is different.

Michael Jermey: I would say that in 2010 in the run-up to the debates we at ITV conducted a transparent process. Along with the other broadcasters, we published in the week before Christmas of December 2009 the principles under which we were operating. We then continued discussions with the parties and published a very clear codification of what the structure of the programmes was going to be in what became known as the 76 rules—although only a handful of them were rules; more of them were a description of programme. We did so in the context of the Ofcom code, which again is a public document and is clear to see. When challenged about some of our decisions, we published our explanation for them. Ofcom’s special election committee considered those complaints ahead of the election and published its findings. In the run-up to the debate itself, we published the list of names of the people who were selecting the questions and the criteria for selecting the questions. In comparison with all sorts of other public processes it was, in fact, a very transparent process.

John Ryley: To use your analogy of concrete, I think it is a very good mix. Sky News had its own editorial guidelines. We cherish very much our editorial independence, but on top of that we have the rules set out by Ofcom, our regulator. There is a very particular bit of the Ofcom guidelines that refers to election debates. It is very specific in the code and that mix works very well.

Q5 Lord Skelmersdale: In the back of my mind, obviously, is the purported rise—because we have as yet had no proof—of UKIP and Nigel Farage as its current leader. What would be your thinking on incorporating him?

Ric Bailey: Well, the process that we have when we are deciding all of our election coverage is to make a judgment about who to include and who not to include. That is on a whole range of coverage, not just debates. When we are considering that, we have, as I say, our election guidelines. We have specific guidance to programme makers, and what that sets out is the context in which you make those judgments. That would be the case with debates.

Initially, you might take as a starting point the last equivalent election because we take the view that the best way to make a judgment about these things is to look at how real people vote in real elections. Our starting point would be the last general election, but we would also look at subsequent elections. We would also look at any other evidence that might be relevant to setting out the political context. That might include a consistent, robust trend in opinion polling. All of those things we will take into account and, just as we do with any other election and any other coverage, we would make an editorial judgment based on that.


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That is something that we do at each and every election. Here we are in February; we will be making that judgment about the European elections in May. At each election we are making that judgment based on consistent, objective evidence.

Michael Jermey: A similar process happens in ITV. We will look at the evidence of what we think are the relevant elections. We will make an editorial judgment. In 2010, we were seeking to create a programme in which you heard from the three party leaders who were most likely to have an influence on forming the Government. We would make a similar judgment at each election. We would take cognisance of Sections 5 and 6 of the Ofcom code that sets out the appropriate weight and due impartiality that we are under an obligation to follow through, and we would make that decision at a timely moment. You refer to one particular political party. We will make a judgment about inclusion of parties when we come to consider the debate shortly before the election rather than more than a year out.

Lord Skelmersdale: Do the other political leaders have a veto on this or not?

Michael Jermey: Which political leaders are you referring to?

Lord Skelmersdale: For example, it may be that Mr Clegg does not want to have Mr Farage included, or a member of the Green Party or whoever.

Michael Jermey: In a sense, any political programme is a voluntary activity when it comes to whether you are going to take part in it or not—any programme at all. We follow our own editorial judgment but we cannot compel people to take part in a programme. It is possible that the actions of a particular party make it quite difficult for us to conform with the letter of the code if people are not willing to take part. There is a discussion and a negotiation about participation in all forms of programming. I am not sure I would describe that as a veto but broadcasters are not in a simple place to click their fingers and make politicians or any other participant appear in programmes. If they had been, I suspect debates would have happened 50 years earlier than 2010.

John Ryley: Mr Jermey makes a very good point. The election debate programme is no different from other current affairs programme where the same editorial decisions have to be taken that abide by the Ofcom code. In that sense, the election debate in 2010 was no different to other current affairs programming that has happened since.

Q6 The Chairman: That is helpful. One thing that we have not touched on in this questioning is that Ofcom and the BBC respectively refer to “major-party status”—or, in the case of the BBC, the Trust designation is “leading-party status”. Is that a crucial signpost for you? Do you make your decisions based on that or do you make your decisions in parallel to that? Is there in practice collusion so that you all end up at the same place?

Ric Bailey: Sorry, Ofcom designates major parties; the BBC does not designate. So the parallel between leading and major does not exist. We do not have a group of parties—

The Chairman: But there is a set of rules?

Ric Bailey: There is a set of rules but that is different.

The Chairman: They do not apply the rules to the evidence in the way that Ofcom does, is that right? It is up to you to apply the rules to the evidence.

Ric Bailey: We do it the other way round, if you like. Each and every election we look at the evidence and make a judgment on relative levels of coverage of parties. We do not have


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a designation that then says, “This is a group of parties that will be treated in a different way”.

The Chairman: But the leading party concept is one that derives from the Trust, does it not, or not? It derives from the editorial.

Ric Bailey: The word “leading” is simply descriptive.

The Chairman: It is not a qualitative thing, it is merely a descriptor?

Ric Bailey: It describes a party that has won an election or that has done well in an election. It reflects who has done well in an election. That is the only sense in which it is used. It is not used in the same sense as Ofcom uses the word “major” at all.

The Chairman: Major, no. It is a special group.

Michael Jermey: Let me answer for ITV. We make an editorial judgment in the way that I described earlier. We apply to that, if we are talking about a debate and including the major parties, a set of criteria and judgments that are very similar to those that Ofcom apply when determining a major party. It is not determinative, what Ofcom has said, in a mechanistic way, a straight read-across. I suppose I would be surprised to find circumstances in which our decision about who to include was very different from Ofcom’s definition of a major party, but it is not a simple cause and effect.

The Chairman: No, it is not them doing it on your behalf, no.

Michael Jermey: No, exactly, and at least in a theoretical world I could think of circumstances and ways in which you could broadcast—compliant with the code and compliant with the law—debates that did not absolutely mirror Ofcom’s major party rules, although I cannot think of circumstances that have occurred in the past 20 years where that would have been the case. I think it is likely to be a rare exception.

John Ryley: Very similar. Sky as a broadcaster will make the final decision about who would take part in a debate, but we would be guided by the guidance from Ofcom. It is unlikely, I think, that we would disagree.

Baroness Deech: I cannot get my head round who has the last word or who the authority is on all of this. I know the BBC have their impartiality rules.

John Ryley: We as the broadcaster do.

Baroness Deech: Each of you separately?

John Ryley: Yes.

Baroness Deech: Is that not rather messy?

Michael Jermey: Our view is that we are ultimately responsible for our own programmes. We had conversations about what we were doing but we make our own decisions. They are then open to challenge. In the first instance, they are open to challenge to the broadcaster, and two parties complained at the last election. We considered their complaints and decided what we thought we were doing was right. There was then a complaint to Ofcom. Ofcom supported our view. In theory, Ofcom’s views could probably be challenged under judicial review. What we do and Ofcom’s code obviously ultimately are rooted in primary legislation passed in Parliament.

Ric Bailey: We are looking to find due impartiality and, although we have different routes to it, in the end we are looking at the same sort of evidence to make those judgments, so it is


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not surprising that we will come to a similar conclusion. It is not about collusion. It is about looking at the same sort of evidence.

The Chairman: I am going to move on to Lord Dubs in a moment, but when I say “collusion” I am not using this in any bad sense. Do you sound off between each other during this process or are you just making these decisions internally?

Michael Jermey: We are making the decisions internally, but I would feel very open to talking to colleagues about what we were deciding and what our thought process was. We are a fairly open organisation. I would probably have those discussions with anybody who wanted to listen.

John Ryley: Just as we would on other sensitive stories or coverage, the debate in that sense is no different. We have to exercise our own editorial judgment as a broadcaster on all sorts of things, 365 days of the year. It just happens to be the leaders’ debate that we are talking about.

The Chairman: This just happens to be the one for those particular three days in the calendar, but you have other things where you have similar exercises to carry out?

John Ryley: Yes, we make the final call.

The Chairman: No, I appreciate that.

John Ryley: The buck stops with Sky in our case, yes.

Lord Dubs: The buck stops with Sky or ITV or the BBC. It is, therefore, theoretically possible that one of you could decide to have the four party leaders and the others would have three party leaders?

Ric Bailey: It is theoretically possible but, as I say, we are all looking at the same evidence and we all have a similar goal of due impartiality. But it is theoretically possible.

The Chairman: Presumably, to go back to where we started, namely the agreement and the 76 rules, it is difficult to see, is it not, how you could have a framework of rules that enabled this particular form of discrepancy to take place?

Michael Jermey: It is, and by the time we had signed off, if you like, on the 76 rules, which was around 1 or 2 March 2010, we had each made an independent judgment that the appropriate parties to include in the debates were the three that we call the major UK parties.

Q7 Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: I think you have covered a lot of this ground, but if you could not agree, what would be the consequences of a diverging regulatory judgment of this nature in the context of election debates? Further, what would be the consequences if you as the broadcasters were to include candidates in the debates who have not been given major-party or leading-party status by your regulators or vice versa and you want to exclude candidates who have been given that status? You could not empty-chair a debate, could you, if another party said if you had them they were not going to take part? I am just wondering if you have thought about all these difficult implications. Will it derail the whole process?

Michael Jermey: There are difficult decisions to make in every scenario. As we know, people have tried to have debates before and have hit some of these barriers along the way. I do not think that a difference in view between the broadcasters need necessarily lead to the debates not happening. We each individually will have to make a judgment at each election as to what we think is compliant with the code and the law and the way we are


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regulated and our editorial judgments of what is right for our programmes and for our viewers.

Ric Bailey: If I may say so, in terms of making the debates happen, that is the least of our problems.

Q8 Lord Dubs: Can I turn to impartiality and the role of the devolved nations? What role do the devolved nation debates and, indeed, the more general election coverage play in ensuring that even if you exclude one particular party from the Westminster election debates you give them due weight to compensate in other programmes?

Ric Bailey: This was very important to us and was, indeed, tested in court. The starting point is that the UK political system is not symmetrical and, therefore, there is no mathematical answer to how you achieve impartiality. We are making the best judgments we can. As Michael said at the beginning, we were taking a judgment initially on who were the candidates to be Prime Minister of the Westminster Parliament in a Westminster election. Of course, people in different parts of the UK are voting about different things in a general election. You could say that people in Scotland have a vote on something different but, of course, the geography of politics is that it is quite right for people in Scotland to recognise that there are four big parties there who are competing against each other in a Scottish context.

We link very directly. The BBC UK-wide debate was on the Thursday night. We trailed specifically to debates in each of the nations in the following week and made it clear that part of the package we were offering to viewers across the UK was the opportunity to hear these different voices in different debates. We also trailed to other programming as well around the debates. In the following news bulletin, in “Newsnight”, in the “Today” programme the next day, we very explicitly linked our debate to different sorts of coverage to make sure that other parties that were not involved directly in the debate were given a voice and that the electorate did have the opportunity to hear from them in a way that was linked specifically to the debate.

John Ryley: During the course of the election campaign in April 2010, Sky held three debates in Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh on successive Sundays where the key parties in those areas were given 90 minutes to discuss the issues that were relevant to those parts of the UK. They were trailed very heavily across our output in the preceding days.

Michael Jermey: We took a similar position to that described by Sky and the BBC. On the night of 15 April 2010, after the hour and a half debate, we had another hour and a half of broadcasting both the news and a programme presented by Jonathan Dimbleby in which we heard from a range of other parties. We flagged the fact that there was a debate in Wales that ITV Wales was hosting, and likewise that STV was hosting a debate in Scotland. We also in our debate made it clear which policy areas were affected by the UK Parliament covering England and which issues were devolved. We were very conscious of the issue of the nations.

The Chairman: Presumably, the key to all this is the exact configuration of the electoral landscape at any one particular time. We have been in a period when we have had two big national parties, using the word “nation” to mean the UK, with a third party, which was a smaller party, that might have held the balance of power, together with various regional manifestations. That may not be the future and, if that is not the case in future, presumably the way in which you resolve these difficulties would change accordingly.


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Michael Jermey: Yes, you address the facts as they approach you at the time. In some sense, it is easier to look back historically. I said earlier that I think the same conclusions would have been reached for the past 20 years. What you would have done in 1951 I really do not know, but it might have been a different judgment. What you might do in 2015 or 2020 or 2025 may be different and it will be based on the facts.

Lord Dubs: Could I pursue the question, Chair? There are two other sub-questions. One is: now that we are going to have fixed election dates, does that enable you to plan impartiality better because you know against which date you are setting impartiality? Secondly, you do not all cover the country similarly, the three of you. Does that affect how you handle these issues?

Michael Jermey: On the first question, the fixed election date makes planning generally a little easier. On the day that the fixed date was announced I went into my BlackBerry and put the date in and found a recurring meeting already there, so it does give you some certainty.

In terms of impartiality, I am not sure it makes an enormous difference in that the special rules that apply to elections get triggered from the date of the dissolution of Parliament, which presents the same issues that we have always had. Us behaving the same or differently goes back to the issue of us making our own editorial judgments.

Q9 Baroness Fookes: You have indicated in evidence that it was essential that there should be confidentiality while you were negotiating among yourselves, if I may put it that way. Is it, therefore, possible to have greater transparency for the public to understand how you have come to these decisions?

Ric Bailey: We tried to be as transparent as possible in the sense that we published what we could as we went along. I think everything was put into the public domain. We published the principles on which we were negotiating at a fairly early stage and then we published the so-called 76 rules or clauses in the March ahead of it. We were pretty up-front in terms of trying to set out for the public how we were going about it. The other side of that is that, of course, the nature of any negotiations, when people are being asked to make compromises and come to agreements, is that you need a measure of trust and confidentiality around that to make it happen, but I do not think that means that what happens in the long run is not perfectly transparent.

John Ryley: I suppose I would argue that the confidentiality was vital to building up trust; this was the first time that this event had happened. But I agree with you that perhaps next time around—and I very sincerely hope there is a next time around—we should look at trying to make it a little more transparent. Remember, these debates were put together at high speed and were a big success, and things improve through doing them more than once.

Baroness Fookes: Is there any way in which you could help to educate the public on another occasion in all these matters?

Ric Bailey: Yes, absolutely. Part of the nature of it was, as John said, that they happened quite late. We did not know until quite late in February that they were going to happen. They could easily not have happened even at that stage. Do not forget that it was not a fixed Parliament. The election could have come at any moment and only one of the people around the table had any power over that. Next time, of course, I think we would want to use them as a way of building more ways of informing the public and giving more information. Because they were such a focus, that is a tremendous platform that you could make greater use of, and I am sure we would want to, yes.


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Baroness Fookes: I gather that you have made sufficiently firm foundations already after that first set to be able to build on those more easily if, as we assume, there will be further debates?

Michael Jermey: I think that is a fair observation. The first thing that needed to happen in 2009 was for the first time to get the parties and the broadcasters around the table. I am not sure in any of the previous attempts we had even got that far. We have ensured that since 2010 there have been continuing conversations and the framework for the discussion of the debates has been established. That will make it easier—not inevitable but easier—to achieve success in 2015.

Q10 The Chairman: One thing arising out of all this was that you said, in my judgment rightly, that, of course, these debates are only part of the wider general election coverage. Do you think the public—and perhaps particularly the public who were re-engaged, if I can put it that way, with the political process through the debates—see them as part of something bigger? Or do you think they are perceived by quite a lot of viewers as being a stand-alone phenomenon?

John Ryley: I think they see them as part of the narrative of the whole campaign. There were three debates. They happened at one-week intervals. They were an integral part of the campaign. I do not think people saw them as separate events.

The Chairman: Certainly, the informed and educated—and when I say “educated” I am not using it in a strict sense—people did, but there is this group that you think were re-engaged to vote. Do you think they saw them that way or do you think they just saw them as a one-off rocket going up into the sky, for want of a better way of putting it?

John Ryley: My own view is that the debates were part of the narrative of the month-long campaign.

The Chairman: So the point of the debate was in a sense that it drew people back into engaging with the wider narrative?

John Ryley: Remember, turnout at the election was up.

The Chairman: Yes, absolutely.

Michael Jermey: None of us should forget that there is individual choice in this. We scheduled other programmes about politics and about the election in peak time that people did not come to in such large numbers.

The Chairman: Do you know whether it was the same people?

Michael Jermey: There was an overlap but there is no doubt that the debates reached some viewers that were not reached in other ways. It was not the broadcasters saying that this is the only thing you must watch, it was the viewers coming to it probably in bigger numbers than most people would have predicted.

Baroness Deech: The thing that worries me slightly is that we live in a society now where you expect to turn on your television and vote for somebody or other, whether it is dancing or whatever it might be—well, I do not, but everybody else does, I suppose. We are getting into that kind of situation.

John Ryley: We are not asking people to vote on an instant take on what they have seen and heard from the party leaders on that night of the debate. In the case of the first debate, the actual polling day was three weeks later.


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Ric Bailey: One of the striking things, and I alluded to it before, was the number of people who talked about it afterwards with their friends and families, but there was also this phenomenon of two-screen engagement, which is very different from the passive sense of television where you just sit there and absorb it. Obviously, this was more something among young people, but it really did take off, this idea that you are watching the debate on television because that is the right place to watch it but you are talking to your friends with your other screen. You are exchanging information. You are challenging what is being said. You might be making jokes about it, but it is an engagement that in 2010 was quite a new phenomenon for us. You see it in other programmes now, but certainly in 2010 it was quite a change. There is evidence that this was not just something that people were receiving passively and moving on. It was a real event that they got involved in.

Michael Jermey: It is worth remembering that these programmes were a very, very long way away from entertainment formats or what have you. This was an hour and a half of very serious political debate on issues that matter, uninterrupted on the commercial channels by television commercials, and uninterrupted by any gimmicks or what have you. People stuck with it in their millions and the average viewing time was the majority of the debate. People did not switch off; the graph is pretty steady all the way through. It was an extraordinary phenomenon; perhaps we thought it was part of a bygone era of people engaging in that way.

The Chairman: Did you expect that?

Michael Jermey: No, I do not think we did expect that. I thought they would be a success. I did not think they would be a success on that scale.

John Ryley: Last night I watched the Sky News debate again to remind myself what had happened. After each debate finished on the BBC, ITV and ourselves there was then a very serious discussion with politicians about what they had heard. I think it did incredible public good.

Q11 Lord St John of Bletso: You all appear to agree that third-party involvement would not help the organisation of debates from those responsible for broadcasting them. John Ryley, in your written evidence you said it would add an extra layer of complexity to an already convoluted process. Can you explain how you reached these views, and in particular how you see the disadvantages of the third party being involved?

Ric Bailey: There are two things from my point of view. One is exactly as you have outlined, as John said, the level of complexity. In the end, the way we made these happen was to keep it as simple as possible. We as broadcasters have talked about the regulatory system. Whatever organisation there is of the debates, we still have to do that. If you remove it from the people who are making those judgments and have third-party involvement, you are not preventing us having to do exactly the same thing. That is the complexity.

I have a slightly bigger worry, which is around editorial independence. I do not mean this as a criticism at all of the commission in the United States because the context in the United States is very different. It is chaired by a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former press secretary to President Clinton. Those are the people who run the commission. They are in charge of it. Whatever system you have that is third party inevitably moves the system towards more political influence. A number of you are party politicians. I do not think that we should be moving the influence over the debates further in that direction because it inevitably moves it towards the biggest parties. In the end, that takes away from our job in making editorial judgments about what due impartiality means.


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That is why we are sceptical about whether a commission or a third party in any way is appropriate for the way that the UK political and media environment works.

Michael Jermey: The television debates are serious political programmes. They matter an awful lot, but they are not different in kind from everything else we do. In a sense, we are structured to bring to the public a range of programmes, including political coverage. We are regulated in a form to ensure that we do that with due impartiality, and I think that is what we achieved. In practical terms, adding a debates commission would probably add a level of complexity that we do not need. I see it certainly at the moment as an answer to a problem that does not exist. We achieved the debates in 2010. I think we can achieve them again. I do not have an absolute theological objection. It is more a practical one. If we fail to deliver the debates in 2015 I think it is worth looking at the question again. If there is a way of getting there in 2020 that we did not succeed in making happen in 2015, by all means let us have the discussion. It is interesting that this debate has become active after the broadcasters have succeeded and was rather less active in the 40 years when it might have been helpful. Let us see where we get to next year. I very much hope we can do much as we did in 2010 and produce engaging, serious political debate. I think a commission would not add to the likelihood of that happening and may diminish it.

John Ryley: We have at Sky our own editorial guidelines. On top of that, we have our regulator’s guide. I think it would add a layer of complexity. A more subtle point to make, perhaps, is that this third party is going to have no more oomph power to bring the broadcasters and the politicians together to make sure the debates happen than the broadcasters and the politicians themselves. The big thing is that we want these debates to happen and that adding a third layer is not going to make that a certainty at all.

Lord St John of Bletso: You all seem to agree as well that the Commission on Presidential Debates in the US is not workable and that their model could not work here. Obviously, in the United States there is a specific legal restriction, and we do not have a comparable situation here. Can you elaborate on your main rationale for why you believe the commission in the US just would not work here?

Ric Bailey: It originated when the League of Women Voters, who had been organising it before then, were found not to be able to have the clout, as it were, to withstand the power of the two big parties. That was why it was formed, I think, in the late 1980s. Essentially, what happened was that the two big parties came together to find a way of making it happen and the commission was the vehicle for that.

Over the years it has obviously established itself with a separate identity, but in the end that is the way it was formed and that is the basis on which it operates. Now, I think it does some tremendously good work around public interest and engaging people in politics—and that is absolutely excellent and I am sure we should do that building on the debates. It is a large permanent administration. It requires an awful lot of funding from donors and big institutions and so on. I just do not think that it is relevant to the way that we do politics here.

The Chairman: Bishop, do you want to come in now?

Q12 Bishop of Norwich: Thank you. I understand your point about a third party, but who finally decides which broadcasters and broadcast channels are included in this process if there is no third party?

Michael Jermey: In a sense, any broadcaster is free to set up a debate. Our grouping has no special authority or privilege to do that and any broadcaster who can persuade parties to


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take part can have a debate. The three broadcasters represented here were the only three broadcasters who consistently wanted to do debates in 2010. Channel 4 has indicated this time that they would like to be part of that process. We would welcome them into the discussion, and we are going to go into the processes for broadcasters. In a sense, all the broadcasters who were willing to make the commitment were involved last time and I hope that will be the case in future. There is nothing to stop another channel seeking to do something different. There is nothing to stop the broadcasters represented here acting individually if we thought that was the sensible course to take. We have taken the view that acting with a degree of collectivity, albeit making our own editorial judgments and being responsible for our own broadcasts, was the most likely way to achieve success in 2010. I think the evidence is that that was the right judgment then and I suspect will be the right judgment for 2015.

John Ryley: It is not unusual at all for broadcasters to work together on other big stories or on big set-piece coverage. It is not an unusual thing to do.

Bishop of Norwich: What about diversity in terms of programme format? You did say, I think, Mr Bailey, that it is quite a sacrifice to go for the same style of programme between three of you. That might have been the right thing to do last time. Would it be better to have rather more diversity in the programming next time? How would you decide all that? Would that be simply by agreement between you?

Ric Bailey: Yes. As I say, the simplification of having a single format and using that to negotiate as three broadcasters in the environment where we did not know whether we could make them happen or not was really important. They have happened once. There is no guarantee that they will happen again, but we at least have a framework there. I think all of us would think that the room for manoeuvre in terms of coming up with slightly different formats is something that would be good to see, but not at the expense of them not happening. It is less important than making them happen.

Bishop of Norwich: That was done for the sake of the politicians themselves, was it, to make them more comfortable?

Ric Bailey: No, it was done, I think, because after 50 years without them, we had to look at why they had not happened before. One of the reasons they had not happened before was that you had different broadcasters coming up with different ideas. Parties would use that sometimes, when they were perhaps less enthusiastic about them, as a way of not engaging. One of the things that we were trying to do was to come up with something very simple that we could agree on that took us beyond some of those initial hurdles that had been experienced by previous negotiators.

Michael Jermey: I think if we had not kept it simple in 2010, the debates would not have happened. The debates at root happened because all three party leaders thought it was a sensible thing to do, but by keeping it simple and by keeping to one format that we talked through with the parties, we got to a good conclusion in 2010. I agree with you that diversity in broadcasting, as in most things, is desirable. If we can move to a more diverse set of debates in the future, that would be a great result—but not at the cost of not having any debates. What we created in 2010 is not a bad fallback position. In any future election you can point to it. You can say it worked and that it would not be such an awful place to end up. Of course, we have ambitions to improve the format to include other ways of doing things and to develop what was built in 2010.


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Q13 Bishop of Norwich: Can I go on to something rather different? That is the use of social media alongside the debates. Last time Twitter had probably only been in existence a couple of years and all of that has taken off since. What do you see as the potential for the use of social media alongside the debates in future?

John Ryley: Speaking from Sky’s point of view, I do not see social media—and by that I mean a Twitter feed or whatever—appearing during the course of the debate between the party leaders. The key thing is to enable the party leaders to answer the questions that are being posed by members of the audience without any sort of screen clutter whatever. That is what the programme is about. It is to hear and watch the leaders give their answers to specific questions. If you add in social media, that is going to distract from what they are saying. You are right that tools exist to curate media in very imaginative ways. Maybe there is a role for the use of that elsewhere during the election campaign, but on the election debate programmes on Sky they would not play a role.

Michael Jermey: I draw a distinction between the debate and everything else that goes on around it. On ITV, we would like to have the debate as a clean video feed in which the party leaders debate with each other. We and a hundred other media organisations may well on a second screen or elsewhere allow people to participate on Twitter or what have you, but you will have the choice as a viewer to have no distraction and an unmediated debate, or a choice as a consumer to see what the Daily Telegraph or the Sun or the BBC or Sky or anybody else is saying about the debate on our channel.

Baroness Deech: Can I just pick up one tiny point that I thought the Bishop was going to ask? The view has been expressed that the last debates were a women-free zone. It cannot be impossible to find a woman presenter. I was watching Christine Lagarde on “The Richard Dimbleby Lecture” last week and the comments on Twitter were, “For goodness’ sake, we have finally found an older woman who is allowed to appear on television.” Can you not come up with a woman presenter, not some cutie who is there for her looks, but a proper, serious presenter?

John Ryley: I agree with that.

Baroness Deech: Good. Let us hope we can get that.

Michael Jermey: As a general observation, I think you are right that broadcasting is not as diverse as I would like it to be or as diverse as I intend my part of it to become in the years ahead. I do not think one should concentrate just on the debates in regard to that. Sometimes in discussion around the debates you would think it was the only television that existed. There are other election programmes. There has not been, as far as I am aware, a female main anchor of an overnight election night programme. On our network, half our main newscasters are women and half are men. More diverse broadcasting generally rather than specifically in the debates is desirable.

Lord Razzall: Since Elinor Goodman retired there has not been a female political editor, although whether John just gave a hint as to who is going to replace Adam Boulton will remain to be seen.

Baroness Fookes: Could I ask a related question about the format that you adopted for asking the questions? If I remember correctly, the questions were taken from members of the public but were not put by the members of the public directly.

Michael Jermey: I think that is a mis-memory. The questions came in two forms. There was a studio audience of 100 or so people selected by ICM who were politically balanced from within 40 miles or so of the studio centre. Half the questions came from members of the


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public that they put; half the questions came through questions that had been e-mailed in from anywhere in the country and the people whose questions were selected were also put in the studio audience. They put their question direct and, certainly on the ITV programme, half the questioners were female.

Q14 Lord Dubs: In the last broadcast, according to your written evidence, I think you said Sky was the only commercial broadcaster to make the debate available to be carried live to all broadcasters and news organisation—any platform, anywhere in the world. What do you think the policy should be next time from each of your organisations in terms of making the content available to other broadcasters and online?

Ric Bailey: The BBC did the same; we made all of ours available live to whoever wanted it.

Michael Jermey: We took the view that we wanted our debate to be available to as many members of the public as possible. We made it available live on ITV, which is available to the entire population, available online and available on radio—principally through BBC Radio 4. We then released the entirety of the programme to other broadcasters without charge to use as many times as they wished. We were the only programme that did not brand our channel on the feed itself, and that strategy led to the largest number of consumers of our programme. So I think we met our remit in terms of making the programme universally accessible.

Lord Dubs: Yes, that is pretty clear, thank you.

The Chairman: For next time around, am I right in saying that each producer of a debate, assuming it happens and assuming you are going to be part and parcel of it, will make the material available live to any broadcaster that wants it?

Michael Jermey: That is not what I said.

The Chairman: That is what I am not quite sure of. I am just trying to get it clear as exactly what you are saying.

Michael Jermey: If there is a debate on ITV next time, where I stand now—and it is a matter for discussion—is that I would want every voter in the UK to be able to see it easily. I care more about the voters than about other broadcasters. Post the debate, if channels want to rerun the debate, as some did, it would become—

The Chairman: It will be available after the debate to everybody?

Michael Jermey: After the debate to everybody. There were some people who do not have access to television but have access to radio, which is why we were happy for it to run on BBC Radio 4.

Lord Dubs: So ITV’s policy is slightly different from the other two?

Michael Jermey: Yes, I suppose that in a sense the BBC, as a publicly funded broadcaster, takes a view of universal access. Sky, which I think runs an extremely fine news channel, certainly at that time was not universally accessible on normal television to viewers. It was in a slightly different position and got the smallest number of viewers despite that distribution. We are a mass-market channel that everybody through DTT in the UK can see. We made sure that nobody was at a disadvantage in seeing our programme, but having invested a large amount of money in setting the thing up, having decided not to run advertisements, having decided not to put our branding on it, we thought it was reasonable, given that everybody could see it in its first transmission on television, for people to see it on ITV.


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John Ryley: We believe it is very strongly in the public interest to make it available to as many people as possible.

Q15 Lord Skelmersdale: Could I now turn to the worm that is used in political programmes rather differently than normal news? We have had academics concerned that the people who contribute to the worm are a very small sample. Would you like to comment on that?

Ric Bailey: Yes, I think we share the concerns about—

Lord Skelmersdale: They are not always a small sample but they sometimes apparently are, according to them.

Ric Bailey: That is why we did not use it. I think the view that it might influence the audience is a perfectly valid one and we were very keen in setting up the debates that we should not be doing it with gimmicks. Having said that, if audiences wanted to choose that, they could.

So for our third debate people had the option if they wanted to see it online rather than on television. We also used it as a way doing an instant reaction that we filmed within a focus group. So we were not showing the worm in a way that I know viewers across the country were seeing it; we simply showed it within a focus group and then did a report on that as a way of illustrating how the debates were seen and reacted to. We did not do it in the way the academic points out, which was a way that could influence the voters at large. I think we accept that would not have been appropriate.

Lord Skelmersdale: No worm of the bottom of the screen while the programme was going on, is that what you are saying?

Ric Bailey: Certainly not during the debate when it was on, no.

Lord Skelmersdale: That view is universal, is it?

Michael Jermey: We had a clean version of the programme. We talked about the worm in news programmes afterwards but it did not interrupt the main debate.

The Chairman: So no worms?

John Ryley: We did not use a worm, no.

Baroness Fookes: You would not want to do so, I gather, for the next one if there is one.

Ric Bailey: Not on the debates themselves, but as an option if people want to go and look at it and play around with it. You might want to do a lot of things that people have the opportunity to do, but as the central offering of the debate to the audience, no.

Q16 The Chairman: We are getting towards the end of our session, you will no doubt be pleased to hear. Is there anything that we have not touched on that you think is important and we ought to bear in mind, please?

Michael Jermey: I would just amplify a point Ric Bailey made earlier. The debates in 2010 were not an easy thing to achieve and we do not absolutely assume that they will happen in 2015, although we intend to work very hard for them to do so. It is possible that in some of the academic contributions to the discussion around the debates there is a starting position that they are an established fact and therefore all we need to do is refine the process of how you administer them and deal with public education around them and so forth. I believe there are still some very practical issues that need to be addressed and I think that


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broadcasters working together, in co-operation with the political parties, is the most likely way of achieving the practical result of debates happening again in 2015.

The Chairman: That raises an interesting point, because you said quite rightly that each of you operates according to your own regulatory environment, which in the case of the BBC is slightly different. Well, each of you in your own way has a slightly different one: two of you under the auspices of Ofcom and the BBC under the BBC Trust. At the same time you have also said that you work together collectively. When you start working together collectively, obviously at one level you are then answerable back to the particular regulator or regulatory system—let us call it that—under which you operate. Is there a problem about the fact that when you come together collectively there is no collective answerability for all of you together? I am not sure there is but I am just wondering about it.

Michael Jermey: No, we are accountable as separate organisations and therefore we would not commit to anything with each other that we were not prepared to stand up for.

The Chairman: So the safety net is that because you are firmly accountable down the lines of account that each of you are attached to, any collective decision is going to have to be bought into by each of you three separately within your own terms of reference.

Michael Jermey: Yes.

Q17 The Chairman: Finally from me. First of all, did you find that the political parties were sensible and constructive in their engagement prior to a debate last time?

Michael Jermey: Yes, my observation of the three parties involved in the negotiations was that they all wanted the debates to happen, they all worked to overcome some practical difficulties that happened along the way and they all made some compromises to achieve the end result. I have nothing but praise for the representatives the political parties put into the negotiations.

Ric Bailey: I agree 100% with that.

John Ryley: So do I.

Lord Dubs: May I ask one question that relates to something earlier that I am not sure you dealt with? Last time there were three of you. Channel 4 wants to come on board. What is it that says whether there will be three broadcasts next time or four?

Michael Jermey: I think we are at too early a stage of the discussions to be able to give you a useful and helpful reply. We believe that the debates should happen, and we believe that the broadcasters working together is the most likely way to achieve that. We welcome Channel 4’s desire to be involved in the process this time, and I think that falls into the great category of 100 practical issues that we need to resolve between now and next spring.

Lord Dubs: It is a pretty big one when the three of you had the broadcast to yourselves, as it were, and Channel 4 this time wants to come in.

John Ryley: We have a very good template to build on from last time and we are very keen that Channel 4 is part of the process now. Using the template from 2010 we can improve and perfect it.

Lord Dubs: Does that mean four broadcasts, because I do not see how you can include Channel 4 unless you have four broadcasts?

Ric Bailey: We are in a very different position now to where we were in 2009. In 2009 we had to make it up as we went along, there was nothing to build on. We are in a completely


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different position now and I think the level of trust that we have arrived at between the broadcasters is sufficient for us to be able to tackle what we know will be difficult problems. That may well be one of them.

Lord Dubs: You have been extremely helpful in this session, but these last are politicians’ answers, are they not?

Ric Bailey: But we are 15 months away from a general election. I do not think there is any point in us speculating about issues that will happen. We know that there will be lots of things we will have to sort out, but we have a greater confidence that we can do it. We are not hiding anything from you, we just think it is an issue and I am sure we will sort it out.

Q18 Baroness Fookes: Are you likely to encounter any problems with the leaders of lesser parties who have pretensions to the premiership knocking on the door and refusing to be content with the answers that you might wish to give?

Ric Bailey: Yes, in the same way as I think we said before. In all our programming at election time we were having to make these judgments about who was included, who was not included, and what different sorts of coverage we gave to different sorts of parties. All of the factors that we think about for all of our coverage will have to be part of how we think about the debates, and that is one of them.

The Chairman: Presumably if you were hypothetically to have more debates next time, then the way in which you feed the debate would have to change, would it not?

Ric Bailey: I think it is too early to be talking about that.

The Chairman: But that is the kind of detail that follows, is it not?

John Ryley: That would be for discussion in the next 15 months.

The Chairman: Exactly, but all these things are for negotiation within the historic framework of last time’s rules: is that the way you are looking at it?

Michael Jermey: Certainly within the historic context of the fact that a co-operative effort and proper engagement with the parties led to a good result. I think that the detail will be subject to all sorts of discussions between broadcasters, and between the broadcasters and the parties.

Q19 Lord Razzall: I wonder, in view of the comment that was made that we should not take the process for granted, whether we should re-emphasise—as I know we have done—that we do not think this Committee will have any say in whether the broadcasts take place. That is clearly way, way above the pay grade of this Committee. What we want to look at, assuming they are going to take place, is whether we can cast light on what the format should be. I would not want people to assume that we will say, “Clearly the broadcast should take place”—which we all believe—as a result of which the leaders of three political parties will immediately say, “Well, that is it then, we will have the broadcast”.

The Chairman: I regret to say that is absolutely right. The political establishment of the United Kingdom takes remarkably little notice.

Lord Razzall: This will be a decision that is taken right to the topmost level in all three political parties, will it not? We know Lynton Crosby is on record as saying that he did not think the Tories should have done it last time.

Bishop of Norwich: Does a coalition government make the repetition of the debate more likely or less likely?


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Ric Bailey: I am not sure it would go one way or the other, to be honest. In the end, when you are approaching an election, all these parties are offering themselves to the electorate, and that is the basis on which we are putting up a platform for them to debate on. Each of them will have to defend their history as much as their manifestos.

The Chairman: That is probably as good a moment as any to draw it to conclusion. Thank you very much for coming. The collaborative evidence that you have given has been extremely helpful and it makes me feel that, whatever the outcome, there is a real wish within your organisations for the process to repeat itself. Thank you very much for giving up your time to come and talk to us about it. Thank you.

Memorandum by the BBC Trust

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Memorandum by the BBC Trust The BBC Trust is pleased to offer this written evidence to the Lords Communications Committee as it considers the broadcast of General Elections Debates. Governance Structure We appreciate that the Committee will be well versed in the governance structure of the BBC, but as this evidence will be available publicly on the Committee’s website, we thought we might be helpful to readers if we begin by explaining the different functions of the BBC Trust and the BBC Executive in general before explaining how the Trust regulates with regard both to the broadcast of the Prime Ministerial Debates in the 2010 election and with regard to any projected General Election Debates. In accordance with the Royal Charter31, the Trust is responsible for setting the overall strategic direction of the BBC and for exercising a general oversight of the work of the Executive. It is also worth noting that the Trust is responsible for securing the effective promotion of the Public Purposes of the BBC which are set out in the Charter in Article 4 and include sustaining citizenship and civil society (which is of particular relevance to this inquiry).32 The Executive is responsible for making operational decisions on a day to day basis about the delivery of the BBC's services. The Executive is also primarily responsible for ensuring that the BBC complies with any legal and regulatory requirements imposed on it. Editorial decisions are (ultimately) for the Director General of the BBC to take because he is designated by the Charter to be editor-in-chief and "accountable for the BBC's editorial and creative output" (Charter Article 40(3)). The Trust's role is to hold the Executive to account for its performance of its functions, including the BBC's compliance with the general law, regulatory requirements, and the policies, editorial and other guidelines, codes, strategies and priorities set by the Trust. The Trust performs its duties in the public interest, particularly in the interests of licence fee payers. (Charter Article 7) At the highest level, the Trust is stated to be "the guardian of … the public interest in the BBC" (Charter Article 22). The Editorial Standards Committee (ESC)33 of the BBC Trust has primary responsibility for the exercise of the Trust's functions in relation to editorial standards and policy. This includes leading the Trust's reviews of the Editorial Guidelines; monitoring of editorial standards, especially accuracy and impartiality; considering serious breaches of standards reported to it by the Executive; and determining appeals about editorial issues. The appeals function can lead it to investigate in some depth issues raised by audience complaints.

31 The Royal Charter can be found at: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/about/how_we_govern/charter.pdf 32 Information on this public purpose can be found at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/whoweare/publicpurposes/citizenship.html 33 The terms of reference of the ESC can be found at: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/about/how_we_operate/committees/2011/esc_tor.pdf

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/about/how_we_govern/charter.pdf

http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/whoweare/publicpurposes/citizenship.html

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/about/how_we_operate/committees/2011/esc_tor.pdf


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In summary, compliance with legal and regulatory requirements is the responsibility of the Executive. The job of the Trust is to set an appropriate regulatory framework and exercise a supervisory function, holding the Executive to account for such compliance. The BBC Editorial Guidelines and Election Guidelines The Trust approves the BBC Editorial Guidelines which apply to the content of the BBC’s services and are designed to “secure appropriate standards”. (Article 24(2)(d) of the Charter, and clause 43(1) of the Agreement34.) In 2009 – 2010, the Trust reviewed the 2005 Editorial Guidelines which had been set by the BBC Governors. The Trust publicly consulted on new Editorial Guidelines. They were approved by the Trust and came into force in October 2010. The Trust is the sole regulator for impartiality and accuracy and thus of election coverage in BBC output. The Agreement requires the BBC to do all it can to ensure that controversial subjects are treated with due accuracy and impartiality. This includes drawing up a code giving guidance as to the rules to be applied and doing all it can to secure compliance with it. The code is included within the Editorial Guidelines. The Trust also approves significant guidance which assists in the application of the Guidelines. The guidelines are reviewed every five years. They can be found at this link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/ The guidelines which are particularly applicable to any general election debates are Accuracy, Impartiality, Politics, Public Policy and Polls and Editorial integrity and Independence from External Interests. In addition the ESC approves Election Guidelines for every election. Prior to approval the guidelines are placed on the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines site and are brought to the attention of relevant political parties who are invited to submit comments. These comments are reviewed by the ESC alongside correspondence with the Electoral Commission. The BBC must have regard to the views of the Electoral Commission before approving the Election Guidelines35. (Representation of the People Act 1983, s.93 (3)) As an example of this practise - the current proposed election guidelines for the European and local elections can be found at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/news/news-2014-01-28-draftelectionguidelines/ Any election debate therefore would also have to comply with bespoke General Election Guidelines. The Complaints Framework and complaints procedures set by the Trust

34 The Agreement with the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and amendments can be found at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/governance/regulatory_framework/charter_agreement.html 35 The standards protocol which explains the procedure for setting election and other guidelines can be found here: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/regulatory_framework/protocols/2013/b2_editorial_standards.

pdf

http://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/news/news-2014-01-28-draftelectionguidelines/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/governance/regulatory_framework/charter_agreement.html

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/regulatory_framework/protocols/2013/b2_editorial_standards.pdf

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/regulatory_framework/protocols/2013/b2_editorial_standards.pdf


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The Trust has a role in overseeing and enforcing the BBC's compliance with the Editorial Guidelines through the BBC’s complaints process. The Trust sets a framework and procedures within which the BBC will handle complaints. All appeals that raise a matter of substance are subject to a right of appeal to the Trust, and the Trust is the final arbiter as to whether an appeal is for the Trust to determine or not. (Article 24(2)(g) of the Charter, and clauses 89 and 90 of the Agreement.) The framework and procedures were set by the Trust following public consultation and audience research in 2008 and again in 2012. The overarching Complaints Framework is contained in a Trust protocol beneath which sit specific procedures for particular types of complaint. The editorial complaints procedure which is the procedure which would be applicable to complaints about the election debates can be found here: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/regulatory_framework/protocols/2012/complaints_fr_work_ed_complaints.pdf During an election significant complaints about election coverage are fast tracked. Generally the Trust considers complaints on appeal regarding broadcast content after it is transmitted. However, there have been occasions where the Trust has considered the principles prior to transmission. For example, the Trust assessed the BBC's decision not to include the leaders of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Plaid Cymru (PC) in the televised Prime Ministerial dates during the 2010 election campaign. The Trust did not seek to substitute its own editorial judgment for that of the Director-General (which would have been contrary to the requirements of the Charter and Framework Agreement), but rather it considered whether all relevant factors had been taken into account in reaching the decision and that the exercise of discretion was a reasonable one. A link to this decision follows: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/appeals/ad_hoc/snp_pl_cymru/snp_pl_cymru.pdf An overarching page covering the press release and the terms of reference of the ad hoc committee that made this decision can be found at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/news/press_releases/2010/snp_pl_cymru.html An application for judicial review of the exclusion of the SNP and PC leaders was rejected by the Scottish courts. The decision can be found here: http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/scot/cases/ScotCS/2010/2010CSOH56.html&query=bbc+and+snp&method=boolean

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/regulatory_framework/protocols/2012/complaints_fr_work_ed_complaints.pdf

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/regulatory_framework/protocols/2012/complaints_fr_work_ed_complaints.pdf

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/appeals/ad_hoc/snp_pl_cymru/snp_pl_cymru.pdf

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/appeals/ad_hoc/snp_pl_cymru/snp_pl_cymru.pdf

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/news/press_releases/2010/snp_pl_cymru.html

http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/scot/cases/ScotCS/2010/2010CSOH56.html&query=bbc+and+snp&method=boolean




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Conclusion The Trust is the sole regulator for impartiality and accuracy in BBC output. It acts in the public interest. It has a particular role in ensuring that the integrity and independence of the BBC is protected so that the editorial staff are free to make editorial and creative decisions on behalf of the licence fee payer to inform, educate and entertain and to promote the BBC’s public purposes. It sets Editorial Guidelines which cover impartiality and accuracy and also sets bespoke election guidelines. It can consider fast tracked appeals regarding election content and has done so in 2010 regarding Prime Ministerial Debates. The Trust sets particular value on the rights of licence fee payers to receive information and ideas and the right of the BBC to impart it (Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights) without interference by public authority. Accordingly it sets a very high premium on the freedom of expression accorded to political speech and is aware that any interference with that must be prescribed by law and necessary in a democratic society. With this in mind the Trust considers that any attempt to circumscribe the arrangements for election debates should be approached with extreme caution. Lord Patten, in his evidence to the Leveson Inquiry said that “Producers of BBC content should not only meet the standards set by the Trust and Ofcom but they should aspire in their daily behaviour to set their compass by what is in the public interest and what the audience expect of them.” That is the gold standard that the BBC should aspire to in the creation of all its content and such an approach would serve to protect the public interest in General Election debates on the BBC. 30 January 2014

BSkyB, BBC and ITV – Oral evidence (QQ 1-19)

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BSkyB, BBC and ITV – Oral evidence (QQ 1-19) Transcript to be found under BBC

Memorandum by Channel 4

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Memorandum by Channel 4 Channel 4 is a publicly owned, commercially funded public service broadcaster, with a statutory remit to be innovative, experimental and distinctive. Unlike the other commercially funded public service broadcasters, Channel 4 is not shareholder owned: commercial revenues are the means by which Channel 4 fulfils its public service remit. In addition, Channel 4’s not for profit status ensures that the maximum amount of its revenues are reinvested in the delivery of its public service remit. Channel 4 welcomes the opportunity to respond to the Lords Communications Committee’s inquiry into the broadcasting of General Election debates, which it believes is a timely and important inquiry. In particular we welcome the Committee’s focus on ensuring that the primary objective of the debates is to best serve the public interest. Channel 4 believes that the Leaders Debates played a significant role in the 2010 General Election. However, given the enormous potential television debates have to connect with voters and address broader trends around political disengagement and disenchantment, Channel 4 believes there is scope for improvements to future debates. In particular, Channel 4 strongly believes it would be in the public interest for the process surrounding the agreement, allocation and production of the General Election debates to be more transparent than is currently the case, and that any agreement should prioritise reaching the widest possible proportion of the electorate, including groups that have traditionally been less engaged with the democratic process. In this submission we therefore recommend that a set of key principles on the key aims of the debates is established which includes such considerations, which would be published at the outset of the process and used to guide the administration of the debates. We also argue that the programmes themselves should be subject to fewer rules and restrictions, preserving the editorial impartiality of the broadcasters and providing viewers with a more engaging and less ‘stage-managed’ format that may further bolster trust and participation in British politics. Role of television Television has significant power to engage and inform viewers about the wider world. This remains true even in an increasingly fragmented media environment – recent Ofcom research concluded that television remains the most popular, most important and most trusted news platforms amongst adults in the UK. In a 2012 study by Kantar Media for Ofcom, 89% of respondents said that they use television as a platform for news - substantially higher than the corresponding figures for radio and newspapers (both 55%). This responsibility is embedded into Channel 4’s own statutory remit – which requires it to, amongst other components, cater to a culturally diverse society, to support and stimulate well-informed debate on a wide range of issues, to promote alternative views and to ensure that people are well informed and motivated to participate in society. We deliver this remit across a wide range of genres, from documentaries to comedy, arts and drama, as well as through a strong commitment to high-quality and distinctive news and current affairs. Our highly-regarded flagship news programme – Channel 4 News – is widely perceived as playing a unique role in broadcast news. It is the only hour-long news programme in peak-time, and places particular emphasis on investigative reporting and foreign coverage. The programme


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also seeks to service groups others find hard to reach, and is disproportionately popular among younger and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) viewers. Channel 4 News also has a strong digital presence across websites, apps and social media, enabling it to extend its reach to groups such as young people who are increasingly consuming news online. Channel 4 News presenters are among the most digitally engaged correspondents in the UK; for example Jon Snow has a higher reach on Twitter than any other British political journalist with more than 370,000 followers, and has been named as one of Britain’s most influential Tweeters. Given the continued power of television to engage audiences and shape their perceptions of the world, Channel 4 believes that televised debates between UK party leaders are an extremely positive development. They are able to reach large audiences and facilitate public awareness of, and interest in, British politics at a time of continued low voter turnout. A report on the 2010 election debates from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that a majority of viewers said they knew more about the party leaders and the policies they represented as a result of watching the debates. Crucially, the same report found that the debates energised young and first-time voters: young people were shown to have valued the debates more highly than older voters, with a higher proportion of 18-24 year olds saying that they learned something new from the debates than any other age group. While these are welcome developments, Channel 4 believes that there is scope for the leaders debates to have an even greater impact, particularly amongst groups who are traditionally less likely to engage with the electoral process. However, given the critical role that they can play in informing and influencing the electorate, Channel 4 believes that there should be greater scrutiny and accountability of the processes that lie behind the administration and allocation of the debates to ensure that they are as effective as possible in serving the public interest. Transparency The process of establishing the 2010 General Election debates - including the specific rules relating to themes, audience selection and participation, as well as which broadcasters would be involved in their transmission - was conducted largely through private negotiations that took place behind closed doors and away from public scrutiny. While we recognise that the closed nature of the negotiations in 2010 can be attributed in part to a lack of precedent – with no previous televised General Election debates in the UK’s history – Channel 4 believes strongly that an open and transparent process should be favoured in the future. Transparency would enable scrutiny as to whether the decisions being made in relation to the debates are truly in the public interest. This in turn would encourage greater public trust in the debates, and because the debates are likely to play a central part of the election campaign, in the political process more broadly. Channel 4 believes that there are a number of changes that could be introduced to give greater transparency to the process underpinning the election debates. Most significantly, we would welcome a published set of principles, outlining the core objectives and considerations for the debates, which would then form the framework for their subsequent allocation and production. Minutes of any meetings held between relevant parties in relation to the debates could also be published online and made available to members of the public.


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Channel 4 notes that a list of seventeen ‘key principles’ was agreed between involved broadcasters and political parties ahead of the first General Election debates in 2010. However, the vast majority of these related to the mechanics of the broadcast content rather than setting out more broadly the central aims and purpose of the debates. We also note that several of the “key principles”, such as the length of the programme and the topics to be covered, related to editorial issues which we believe should be a consideration solely for the broadcaster rather than a matter for political negotiation. Ahead of future debates, Channel 4 believes that the process should follow two stages: before allocation of the debates to specific broadcasters, a list of key principles should be developed that sets out the guiding purposes and principles of the debates. These can then be used to determine any initial administrative matters that need to be addressed – such as who should be involved in the decision-making process, how that process is conducted, the number of debates held and which broadcasters should take part. More detailed points about the implementation, production and content of the debate programmes, such as the right format and the appropriate level of audience interaction, should be a matter of consideration later in the process. Key principles Channel 4 believes that to ensure the debates are most effective in serving the public interest, they should seek to engage with the widest range of voices – including those groups that traditionally are less engaged with the democratic process. While not exhaustive, we believe that the following key principles should be considered as important factors in guiding any decisions on the 2015 and future General Election debates, including which broadcasters are involved in their production:

• Ensuring sufficient diversity in its coverage. Channel 4 believes that it is important that no one broadcaster should have the monopoly on the election debates – audiences benefit from having a plurality of broadcasters involved in their transmission and production, each with a distinctive tone and audience.

• Ensuring the debates reach as large a number of voters as possible. The 2010 General Election debates reached more voters that any other single aspect of coverage of the election campaign, providing viewers with four-and-a-half hours of informative discussions between the three party leaders. The impact of this coverage should not be understated – independent research has revealed that up to 70% of viewers felt they knew more about the policies of each party after watching the debates. Greater knowledge of the policies of each political party fosters a more informed electorate; it is therefore clearly desirable that any future debates are established with the aim of engaging as wide a number of voters as possible. We would note that free-to-air broadcasters are undoubtedly best placed to achieve this.

• Encourage engagement with younger voters. It is widely accepted that voter turnout amongst young people is a particular matter of concern. Electoral turnout for younger voters at the 2010 General Election remained lower than the national average (65%), with those aged 18-24 (44%) and 25-34 (55%) significantly less likely to vote than those in the older age groups. General Election debates are well placed to address this democratic shortfall – as noted, Reuters found that 55% of 18-24 year


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olds said that the 2010 debates made them ‘more interested’ in the campaign, higher than that for older voters. While this trend is welcome, given the particular issues around engaging young people in the electoral process, Channel 4 believes that even greater focus should be placed on attracting these younger age groups to the debates. This is supported by other expert commentators – for example Ric Bailey noted in his recent analysis of the 2010 debates, “younger voters…should remain prominent in any discussion of future debates and their objectives”.

• Encourage engagement with ethnic minority voters. BAME voters similarly recorded lower levels of electoral engagement at the 2010 General Election, with the ‘non-white’ turnout level remaining lower than the national average at 51%. Given television’s ability to reach the UK population as a whole, the General Election debates provide an opportunity to reach out to such groups directly. Decisions relating to which broadcasters are involved in the debates should, in part, take into account their reach amongst these harder-to-reach audiences.

We believe that these principles would be effective in ensuring that decisions taken around the debates were focused on delivering the public interest. Content of broadcast Once allocated, we believe that the broadcasters should have the primary role in assessing the appropriate format and content of the programme, in line with the central principles of editorial independence. Broadcasters have a strong track record in providing fair and balanced political coverage that is also engaging and informative to viewers, within the context of an overarching regulatory framework set by Ofcom. Channel 4 believes that the same approach – of a broad regulatory framework which then allows broadcasters to make their own editorial choices - would be appropriate for agreeing the content of future election debates. This would ensure that the debates are as compelling, engaging and as relevant to viewers as possible, rather than being restricted by the highly detailed set of provisions of the kind that characterised the 2010 Election Debates. In existing cases such as party election broadcasts or election reporting, broadcasters must abide by the overarching regulations outlined by Ofcom. Broadcasters are required at all times to adhere to Section 5 of the Ofcom Broadcasting Code, which includes requirements to be duly impartial across all programmes when dealing with major matters of political or industrial controversy and major matters relating to current public policy. In addition, Section 6 of the Broadcasting Code sets out that during the election period broadcasters must provide ‘due weight’ to the parties considered by Ofcom to be ‘major parties’ and ‘appropriate coverage’ to other political parties. Within this regulatory framework, broadcasters then retain discretion on editorial matters. Channel 4 believes that this approach is suitable for the Election Debates. For example, Channel 4 does not believe that it should be a matter for political negotiation as to which particular political parties take part in the Debates. Within the parameters of the existing regulatory framework, which, as set out above ensures that all political parties receive fair and appropriate coverage, Channel 4 believes that deciding the participants of the debate should be a matter for a broadcaster’s editorial discretion and not subject to influence or discussion with political parties.


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Similarly, Channel 4 believes that broadcasters should retain ownership over the more detailed production issues such as the format and style of the programme. The specific programme format of the 2010 General Election debates was agreed following negotiations with the parties and broadcasters involved, and included a detailed list of seventy-six rules, covering a wide range of issues including audience selection, the role of audience members, discussion topics and audience cutaways. While we recognise that there was an understandable level of caution around the 2010 General Election debates, given their unprecedented nature, we believe there is scope to now evolve their format to provide viewers with a more engaging experience. We believe that agreeing such a prescriptive list of format rules with political parties prior to broadcast risked the quality and diversity of the programme and its ability to engage viewers. For example, the rules agreed for the 2010 debates meant that leaders were restricted to an identical format across the three debates. All three programmes were also required to have limited audience participation. Channel 4 believes that it would be desirable for voters to be active participants in the debates rather than passive observers - the debates should involve ordinary voters as well as inform them. However, the agreed rules prevented broadcasters from introducing more interactive elements to the debates. The Reuters report on the election debates concluded that many viewers found the format of the 3 debates in 2010 ‘scripted’. Channel 4 believes that enabling greater diversity both within each programme, and across the series of debates, would provide a more engaging, authentic and informative experience to viewers. We would note that Channel 4’s own Ask the Chancellors debate at the 2010 General Election – which featured a three-way debate between the would-be Chancellors Alastair Darling, George Osborne, and Vince Cable – was subject to far fewer rules than the 2010 General Election leaders’ debates. This allowed Channel 4 to innovate with the programme format, with greater audience interaction and an interactive online poll running alongside the debate itself. The programme was critically acclaimed, watched by 1.8 million viewers and was considered by many to have provided a more engaging format than the Leaders Debates. Conclusion With the next General Election taking place in less than eighteen months, we believe that it is important that arrangements for establishing future debates are agreed in a timely, and most of all, transparent manner, in order to ensure that they best serve the interests of the British electorate. Channel 4 would recommend that the Committee’s work leads to a set of key principles being established and used to determine a number of administrative matters. These principles should aim to set out the key aims of the debates which, in an age of historically low voter turnout, we believe should be focused on ensuring the debates maximise their democratic potential by reaching as wide an audience as possible, including those parts of the audience who are traditionally less engaged with the democratic process. Once selected, broadcasters must be able to maintain their editorial independence and have greater freedom to make their own decisions in relation to format and style, while continuing to comply with the wider regulations relating to election coverage and due impartiality. This would provide viewers with a more engaging experience.


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Channel 4 hopes that this submission is of assistance to the Lords Communications Committee, and would be happy to discuss further any elements of this response if helpful. January 2014

Channel 4 – oral evidence (QQ 57-69)

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Evidence Session No. 3 Heard in Public Questions 57 - 85

TUESDAY 11 MARCH 2014

Members present

Lord Inglewood (Chairman) Baroness Bakewell Lord Clement-Jones Baroness Deech Lord Dubs Baroness Fookes Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill Lord Razzall Earl of Selborne Lord Skelmersdale ________________


Dorothy Byrne, Head of News and Current Affairs, Channel 4, and Dan Brooke, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Channel 4.

Q57 The Chairman: Welcome, Dorothy Byrne and Dan Brooke from Channel 4, in coming to give us some evidence this afternoon. It is very good to see you. You have submitted some written evidence to the inquiry already, which we are very grateful to have. Dan, you would like to make an opening statement. Is that right?

Dan Brooke: If I may, yes, a brief one.

The Chairman: By all means. Before we start formally, we have a copy of the rules agreed for the last general election’s “Ask the Chancellors” debate. I gather they are not in the public domain as such, but I think we have been in touch with you and you are happy that we could append them to our report together with the rules for the leaders’ debate? Is that right?

Dan Brooke: That is right.

The Chairman: That is good of you. Thank you very much. Probably the right thing to do then, before each of you speaks, is just say who you are for the purpose of the record and if you want to make an opening statement please go ahead.

Dorothy Byrne: I am Dorothy Byrne. I am the Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4.

Dan Brooke: I am Dan Brooke and I am the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer from Channel 4. Thank you so much for the opportunity to make some opening remarks, which I will keep brief.

We very much welcome the Committee’s inquiry. As I think other people giving evidence to the Committee have also said, the election debates very clearly had a significant impact on


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the election last time and we can see this in the extensive piece of research that was done by the Reuters Institute. We note, most particularly within that, they had perhaps the most powerful impact on younger and first-time voters, which, as an organisation with a hinterland in appealing to those audiences, we were very pleased to see.

Just stepping back from that, Channel 4, as you know, has a very wide-ranging public service remit given to us by Parliament and included with that there is a series of elements. Two of them are for us to stimulate debate around a wide range of issues and, secondly, to ensure that there is a well-informed citizenship who can be motivated to participate in society. I hope, when one sees those aspects of our remit, one perhaps is not surprised why Channel 4 would want to be part of election debates. We did want to be part of them last time. In the end we did broadcast the Chancellors’ debate and we very much want to be a broadcaster involved in the process this time round, should it go ahead.

Q58 The Chairman: Thank you. That is a very helpful and useful beginning. Could we just go back to what you touched on, which was that the last time, at a point in the negotiations leading up to the three broadcasters taking the debates forward, you withdrew. Could you just explain why it was you did?

Dorothy Byrne: We felt excluded from the debates last time.

The Chairman: When you say you “felt excluded”—

Dorothy Byrne: As far as we were concerned, we were excluded.

The Chairman: I thought you were involved in the negotiations as a company—I do not know if you individually were involved—and then at some point you decided, for whatever reason, to pull back. Is that right or is that a misunderstanding?

Dorothy Byrne: I think that is a misunderstanding. We wanted to be part of the debates and we were unable to be so. I do not know how or why we were not involved, because we were not involved. I cannot say exactly how—

The Chairman: You were not involved, so you cannot answer that.

Dorothy Byrne: We tried to be involved and we were unable to be involved, but I think the fact that we then did the Chancellors’ debate is a demonstration of our interest in being involved in television debates.

The Chairman: I do not think there is any doubt that we understand that you would like to be involved with the other three broadcasters in the event of the kind of thing that happened last time going forward this time. We respect your position on that. I am just trying to find out a bit more about how it happened that, at some point, having initially been involved in discussions, I believe, you did not end up doing one of the leaders’ debates, being part of that. You are saying you were not involved in all that, so you do not know.

Dorothy Byrne: We were excluded and, therefore—

The Chairman: When you say “excluded”, do you mean you were just told to run away or cold-shouldered?

Dorothy Byrne: Yes, that is quite a good description of it.

Baroness Deech: Were you there at the time?

Dorothy Byrne: Yes.

Baroness Deech: You were? I see.


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The Chairman: But I think I am right in saying that the other broadcasters are on record saying they would welcome your involvement this time. Is that not correct?

Dorothy Byrne: Absolutely. This time we have said that these are more than mere television programmes: these have become key parts of Britain’s democratic process and, therefore, as a public service broadcaster, particularly one with an ability to reach young people and ethnic minorities, it is absolutely vital that we be involved. The other broadcasters have accepted that completely and we are now involved.

The Chairman: That seems to be a better state to be in than all at sixes and sevens. Is there anything else you would like to add, Dan?

Dan Brooke: I do not think so at this juncture, thank you. No.

Q59 Baroness Fookes: I wonder if we could do the nuts and bolts of how you have become involved this time. Did you, as Channel 4, make the approach to the other broadcasters?

Dorothy Byrne: Yes. We approached the other broadcasters and, after some discussion, they have all agreed that we can be involved.

Baroness Fookes: Were they fairly easy about this from the beginning or did you have to get the door opened?

Dorothy Byrne: We stressed very strongly that it would be absolutely vital that we were involved.

Baroness Fookes: Yes. They have accepted that.

Dorothy Byrne: Yes.

Baroness Fookes: What point have you reached in the discussions? Is it at a very early stage or are you all well involved now?

Dorothy Byrne: We have now attended our first meeting of the broadcasters.

Baroness Fookes: Was that the first meeting for all of you?

Dorothy Byrne: I cannot say if they had had meetings before, but that is the first one that we attended and we have been assured we will now attend all future meetings.

Baroness Fookes: Thank you.

Q60 The Chairman: Can I ask something that occurs to me, putting two things together in my mind? In your written evidence you made it absolutely clear you think there should be transparency about the pre-debate meetings. Does that have anything to do with the facts as you have described them about last time?

Dorothy Byrne: I think what is vital is that the principle should be transparent and the principle, as far as Channel 4 is concerned, is that the largest possible number of voters should see these debates. If a broadcaster wishes to be involved, the principle should be that they should be involved. I think that is the vital principle.

I would say that another vital principle is that whatever rules are come up with should be transparent to the audience and the voters. As long as those two principles are abided by, we realise there will be negotiations and discussions with people and with broadcasters and we are open-minded as to how those are organised, and we have to be.


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The Chairman: I think we may have slightly misunderstood what you have been saying and the particular use you have been making of the word “transparency”. The way I read your evidence—and I may have been doing it wrongly—was that you were saying the minutes to do with the way in which all this evolved should be transparent; i.e. available. It is not quite what you are saying. I think you are recognising that, in order to get an agreement about a series of rather difficult propositions between a number of parties who, by definition, are not best friends with each other, you must have some private negotiations in order to enable the process to evolve to a position where you do get a final conclusion and the final conclusion is the bit that should be transparent. Is that correct?

Dan Brooke: Yes, and that, in between, the discussions that go on should flow from a set of clear principles that everyone has signed up to and that themselves are transparent.

The Chairman: I understand that. The bit in the middle, which is the nub of any negotiation, should remain in-camera until you have finally sorted it out. Is that correct?

Dan Brooke: Yes.

The Chairman: Thank you very much.

Q61 Lord Dubs: I believe you said you thought any broadcaster that wanted to have these broadcasts should be entitled to do so. Do I have you accurately for what you said a minute or two ago?

Dorothy Byrne: Yes, in principle.

Lord Dubs: But we also have Channel 5 and we might in future have many more broadcasters. Would that still apply to the whole range of broadcasters?

Dan Brooke: From our perspective, the most important thing here is what is in the best interests of citizens and it would seem to us that what is in their best interest is that the audience for the debates is maximised. If more broadcasters wanting to show them is going to have that effect, then that has to be a good thing.

The Chairman: Can I just pick you up on that? There is a difference between showing them and “making” or “doing” them. Are you saying that every broadcaster who wants to should be able to get hold of the programme and transmit it or are you saying that, as part of any grouping of broadcasters, any broadcaster should be able to come along and take part in the making of the programmes?

Dan Brooke: It is rather more the former. In the case of the latter, there is obviously quite a significant cost to the broadcaster of putting on these events. I am sure there will some level at which a small broadcaster may say, “We would like to broadcast them, but it is too expensive for us to be involved in them”.

The Chairman: It is always open to any broadcaster to do anything they want within the electoral, public service and other rules, is it not?

Dan Brooke: Exactly.

The Chairman: I would just like to go back again—if you will forgive me, I am sorry to hark back over something that may look like old ground—to last time. Michael Jermey said to us, when he and the BBC and Sky were sitting where you are now, that the three broadcasters represented there were the only three broadcasters who consistently wanted to do debates in 2010. I do not think that is incompatible with what you have told us, which is, at some point, you felt you were excluded and walked away. Is that right?


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Dorothy Byrne: We felt we were excluded and had no choice but to walk away.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Baroness Fookes: Constructive dismissal.

Dan Brooke: I think you can see what our underlying motives consistently were, because we ended up doing a Chancellors’ debate and why would you do that if you were not interested in the concept of debates during elections?

The Chairman: I appreciate that. I am trying to get the narrative of the background clear because there have been slightly different permutations of interpretation of the events of nearly five years ago now. It is important to set the scene. I do not think there is anything I personally am going to want to say about that, other than to emphasise the fact that you are now telling us, and this is the important thing, that you are back with that group and it is a group of four—a bit like the European Union, it has become a bit bigger—and they are all equal members within it. Is that right?

Dorothy Byrne: Yes.

Q62 Lord Dubs: I think it was ITV who told us last week that this grouping of broadcasters that exists does not have any particular status or privilege: it is just an informal arrangement and yet you have applied to join that. Why have you done that and what are the benefits of doing that as opposed to going it alone?

Dan Brooke: In the round, there are a number of different people involved between the broadcasters and the political parties. Our starting point, particularly given our remit, is what is in the best interests of citizens, whose starting point is that the debates should occur; and then, secondly, if they occur, that they reach the maximum number of citizens. Our view is that, because of the number of people involved, it might perhaps increase the opportunity for divide and rule. If the broadcasters are operating in unison then there is perhaps less of a chance of that happening and, therefore, more of a chance that the debates might occur. That is the way we come at it.

By the by, last time, when we felt excluded, we peeled off and did our own thing directly with the political parties in relation to the Chancellors’ debate. That was only having gone past our first choice, which was to act in unison with the other broadcasters. Now that the cycle has begun again, that is the position we have taken.

Lord Dubs: Of course, for the next election they will be better established because they have the precedent of 2010, but do you think that, once the system becomes even more embedded in our traditions and culture, there might be a time when broadcasters would prefer to act individually, once there is no danger of the things not happening at all?

Dan Brooke: There might be. It certainly seems to us that, the place where we are today, it is better for the broadcasters to act together because that means the debates are more likely to happen and, therefore, that is the greatest extent to which it is in the public interest.

Q63 Baroness Deech: I wonder what your views are now about the format of those debates, whether there is anything in particular that you would bring to the table if you are making recommendations about style, and whether you learned any lessons from the Chancellors’ debate.

Dorothy Byrne: Firstly, given the fact that we are so used to making news and current affairs programmes that are aimed at young people and we know we have a high degree of


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credibility among people from ethnic minorities, I think we can bring something useful to the table there in terms of when there are discussions about what are suitable subject matters to be discussed in the debates. I also think that, because we have a lot of experience in second screen, we can bring something important to discussions about digital engagement around the debates.

In terms of the Chancellors’ debate, we negotiated on the basis of 28 rules and I believe that all the parties thought that our debates were duly impartial and were happy with them. There were 76 rules in the other debates and other broadcasters have said they thought that our debates worked well.

Then there is the issue of whether all the debates should be the same as they were last time. Again, that is all for negotiation, but I think we could bring something interesting to the discussions there as to whether it might be possible for there to be more diversity. We are aware that we are only one in a group and that it will be a majority that wins.

Baroness Deech: You have mentioned having questions that you think might be more appealing for young viewers and you have mentioned more diversity. Do you mean a different style or do you mean different types of people being involved?

Dorothy Byrne: I think it could be either or both. I understand that in the first debates people felt comfortable with all three being the same and it may well be that that is what people want to do again, in which case it is so important that the debates should be held we would be happy to go along with that. We thought they were very good last time, but I think some of these things can be discussed.

Baroness Deech: If you had your way, if you were in the lead when it comes to format, I think you are on record as saying that there should be more interactivity with the audience. You would have a different style, would you?

Dorothy Byrne: If that is possible, but it might not be possible.

Baroness Deech: Why would it not be possible?

Dorothy Byrne: Because everybody has to agree to it.

Baroness Deech: What are the dangers there? Why would people not agree to that interactivity?

Dorothy Byrne: The politicians would have to feel confident.

The Chairman: In your Chancellors’ debates last time the three Chancellors, who are senior politicians, all must have agreed to that in advance. That met the case in that instance, did it?

Dorothy Byrne: Yes. We agreed those rules and, as I say, I think the parties were happy with the outcome.

Baroness Deech: They are all used to formats like “Question Time”; so they would not have any qualms, would they, about more interactivity?

Dan Brooke: One would hope not. Certainly, from my perspective, that might be a way of involving the audience, more particularly the audience at home. We know that the audiences we think it would be particularly beneficial for the debates to reach again are younger people and, of course, they are more likely to be using a second screen while they are watching something on the television.


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Baroness Deech: You do not mean people in the studio audience. You mean people at home using Twitter and so on.

Dan Brooke: I think that is where the use of interactivity has had most impact for us in other things that we have done.

The Chairman: Are you looking, therefore, for questions derived from Twitter and so on? In both your own case and in the case of three leaders’ debates, the scrutinising of the questions in order to ensure absolute impartiality was very important. To have feedback and doing it all as it goes along would be quite difficult to ensure that, would it not?

Dorothy Byrne: You are absolutely right because they have to be sure that the questions are fair. It is what methods you use to get those questions that can then be mediated. We did have a group who looked at the questions to make sure that they were fair. The questions could come from all kinds of different sources, rather than just from the audience in the studio.

The Chairman: But that happens already, though obviously not live, in the existing three leaders’ debates, does it not?

Baroness Deech: I felt very much last time it was an all-male, white scenario. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Dorothy Byrne: I noticed that, too, yes.

Baroness Deech: What do you do about it?

Dorothy Byrne: I think that is something that we would all have to think about.

Dan Brooke: The majority of the protagonists are political-party leaders, so that possibly is a question more for them than us.

Baroness Deech: But the inquisitor, the moderator, you could do something about that?

Dorothy Byrne: Yes.

Q64 Baroness Bakewell: You felt excluded. You were not part of it. They went their own way and they did it. When it was over, did you critique what they did? What did you make of it?

Dorothy Byrne: I thought it was successful in engaging viewers. I thought it was an important part of the election process. I did notice that they were all visibly similar people and I thought it would have been good, if it had been possible, for there to have been some diversity in the form and style of them. We absolutely accept that that will not be up to us, but certainly we would make a suggestion to people to consider that.

Baroness Bakewell: Had you been part of that discussion that is what you would have brought to the table.

Dorothy Byrne: Yes.

Baroness Bakewell: That is what you are likely to bring to the table again.

Dorothy Byrne: Yes.

Baroness Bakewell: There is no question of them not understanding what your contribution will be. Right, thank you.

Dan Brooke: One cannot help but observe that, in our debate, we agreed 27 rules with the political parties and presumably they were the same set of people who agreed the 70-odd


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rules with the other broadcasters for the other debates. There were lots of details in the broader set of rules about style and format.

The Chairman: Your rules were determined after the earlier rules, were they, sequentially?

Dorothy Byrne: We negotiated them independently as well.

The Chairman: Was it before or after or you do not remember?

Dorothy Byrne: I cannot remember, but what I can remember is that we sat down and thought about what the rules are that you might absolutely need to ensure fairness and due impartiality. We did our best to keep the rules as few as possible and entered into the negotiation with the parties on that basis.

The Chairman: The substantive difference between the effect of the rules in your case and the effect of the rules in the other case was that, in your case, the mediator had a more engaged role and the relationship between the audience and the parties was slightly different. That is what the two substantive differences boiled down to, did it not?

Dorothy Byrne: Yes.

Dan Brooke: Certainly one of the things the Reuters research among viewers says is that viewers said they felt there was an element of formula to the leaders’ debates, partly because there were three of them and they were all done with exactly the same formula but I think also as a result of the significantly greater number of rules that had to be adhered to.

The Chairman: We must keep going now.

Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: Did you negotiate directly with the Chancellor’s office and the Shadow Chancellor or the party parameters in the press office? I think that might account for the different number of rules, possibly. I just wonder what the experience was.

Dorothy Byrne: I cannot remember the answer to that question.

The Chairman: Right. Fine, that is a fair answer. It is a better answer than making it up.

Q65 Lord Skelmersdale: You said in your written evidence that “Editorial issues ... should be a consideration solely for the broadcaster rather than a matter for political negotiation”. Now, this clearly does not come from your experience with the Chancellors’ debate because you have just said exactly the opposite, as I understood you. Given the fragility of the debates even happening, do you recognise that it may be somewhat optimistic to expect the parties not to have any say in the format?

Dan Brooke: I do not know if we said “solely”. I think it is possible we may have said “primarily”, and “primarily” within the general concept of editorial independence. I think the concept of editorial independence is obviously a very important and significant one within the British media and one, I am sure you will not be surprised to hear, we think it is important to maintain. I cannot see circumstances under which we would go along with a set of arrangements that we thought in any way compromised our editorial independence. Within that principle, I think we recognise that there will be different opinions about what the detail of the format should be and that should be the subject of negotiation. Ultimately there will be some limits to that for us.

The Chairman: In your written evidence you write that the editorial aspects should be considerations “solely for the broadcaster” but, having said that, as you have put it yourself,


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within the limits of what is solely for you there may be a degree of discretion over which a certain amount of negotiation might be involved.

Lord Skelmersdale: I do not want to argue about this particular word but just to satisfy my mind, given that your application to the leaders’ debate has clearly been successful—assuming the leaders’ debate goes ahead but, anyway, as far as where you are, it is successful—are you also intending to run a Chancellors’ debate this time round? It is easy: yes or no?

Dorothy Byrne: I do not know.

Lord Skelmersdale: You have not considered it?

Dorothy Byrne: I do not run the channel schedule, but I think it would still be a very interesting thing to do.

Lord Skelmersdale: You would like to do it, but you have no authority to answer my question. Is that what you are saying?

Dorothy Byrne: Yes.

Lord Skelmersdale: All right. Thank you.

Dorothy Byrne: It was interesting to people last time because the economy was the big issue of the election and I think people appreciated a debate on that. If it was down to me alone—

Dan Brooke: I think we can be perfectly clear that our first choice is to broadcast one of the leaders’ debates and that was our position last time.

Lord Skelmersdale: Yes, you have made that clear. I am just trying to satisfy myself that your doing the Chancellors’ debate last time round was not a de minimis activity, if you like.

Dorothy Byrne: We were proud to do it. We thought it was successful and that the viewers appreciated it.

Lord Skelmersdale: How many viewers did you have?

Dan Brooke: 1.8 million.

Baroness Deech: Given your evidence on diversity, would you not be absolutely insistent on wanting to do it again because it brings a different dimension to the debate? In fact, it would be more important, perhaps, from your point of view, even than the leaders’ debate.

Dorothy Byrne: That is a very good point that I will make.

Dan Brooke: The leaders’ debate will generate significantly more audience. The smallest of the leaders’ debates last time, which was the one broadcast by Sky, had more than 1.8 million viewers.

The Chairman: But is it not the case, as a general proposition, that, although your remit is to focus on diverse and younger audiences, nevertheless in the overall scheme of things, in absolute terms, more of them probably watched the BBC?

Dan Brooke: In the totality that is true, but en passant the audience for all of Channel 4’s channels is about one third of all the BBC’s audience for all of its channels and yet it is 70% rather than 33% where young people are concerned.

The Chairman: I understand that point, yes.


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Q66 Lord Clement-Jones: We touched on this earlier, but in your written evidence you put forward a number of reforms to the way the debates are run: a two-stage process for decision-making; greater transparency, which we have talked about; minuted meetings and so on. Would you just take us through these suggested reforms again and explain why you think they are important and how you think they can be achieved?

Dorothy Byrne: The first one is somebody somewhere stating clearly the importance of the debates and the underlying principles to them, which did not happen last time. I think that would be the single most important thing to us, that since they are now so important it should be so stated. Second is the principle that if broadcasters wish to be involved then they should not be excluded. They should be involved. Finally, whatever the rules are, those rules should be published and made clear to the audience as widely as possible before the debates.

Lord Clement-Jones: Obviously we do not have everything set in stone from the last set of debates, but do you think there is a danger that, if the parties accepted your changes, they could argue that the broadcasters’ terms of the agreement would have been changed so much that they no longer wanted to take part or they no longer thought it was the right thing to take part? What you are suggesting is quite radical, is it not?

Dorothy Byrne: We are aware that these are all matters for negotiation. Everybody would have to agree. As far as we are concerned, we are making some suggestions as to how things could be organised, but we accept completely that the debates last time were a good thing and were good and important programmes. If it ended up that the debates were made according to the rules last time and were all of the same format and that is what everybody agreed, we would agree with that. We are just one voice. We are not here to rock the boat.

Lord Clement-Jones: This is what you are bringing to the table, but these are not absolute demands for your involvement.

Dorothy Byrne: No.

Dan Brooke: The most important principle is that they should happen and if we have demands or whatever that are likely to compromise that, then we think the more important principle is that they happen within this envelope of the principle of editorial independence and, because we believe that the best way of them happening is for the broadcasters to act in unison, by definition we are, at this stage, one voice within a group.

The Chairman: Can I just pick you up there? Do you not mean that the broadcasters should act in concert, rather than in unison?

Dan Brooke: Yes, I do mean that.

The Chairman: I think you are inferring that you should not necessarily do the same thing, but you should be part of a single overall scheme? Is that what you mean?

Dan Brooke: I do mean that. Thank you.

The Chairman: You just hope to be suitably persuasive in the discussions.

Dan Brooke: Yes.

Baroness Bakewell: Who will decide?

Dorothy Byrne: In the end the political parties will only agree to do them if they accept the format suggested to them. No broadcaster can force any political party to take part.


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Baroness Bakewell: But how do you think the dynamic might work out? Suppose there are the conditions you have brought to the table, and those that have been used or versions of them—that have been included in the former rules or adjusted. There is going to be a debate with each of the parties saying, “We do not like that clause and we do not want that”. Is that going to happen over periods of long, drawn-out discussions or does someone eventually say, “We have to decide; the elections are next week”?

The Chairman: Can I just interpose and put to you: is not the crucial characteristic of this process that there are a number of parties sitting round a table, all of whom have to agree. Therefore, there is not somebody who judges what happens. It is for all to agree and if one does not agree, because of the electoral rules, it does not happen. Is that not correct?

Dan Brooke: That would appear to be the case at the moment.

The Chairman: That is my understanding of where we stand.

Dan Brooke: But, as I said, one hopefully reduces the number of potential disagreements if some of the people involved are acting in concert with each other, which would be the broadcasters.

Baroness Bakewell: We can imagine what that table would be like. It will be an extremely strategic set of discussions, will it not?

Q67 Earl of Selborne: Of course, there is an alternative formula that the Americans have. They have a commission that is the ultimate authority and that ultimately determines what the ground rules are. The broadcasters negotiate and the political parties negotiate, but the commission acts effectively as the broker. Now, presumably that is not going to happen in this country. It does not seem that there is an appetite for such an authority; so we are back then to a group of four equal members, of which you are one, negotiating with political parties, which may or may not be enamoured with the whole concept. They may have their own agendas and they may have a vested interest in making sure that things grind to a halt. Does that sound like a scenario that adds up?

Dan Brooke: Is that a scenario that hypothetically could happen? Yes. As far as the political parties’ end of that is concerned, the only other way one could do it is to compel them to take part. We are not aware of any precedent for that around the world and I presume it would involve legislation. Therefore, that would unquestionably be a matter for Parliament. What we are trying to do is to reduce the risk of them not occurring by having the broadcasters act in concert, which the other broadcasters very much agree with.

We would entirely agree that the concept of a commission like they have in the US is just not necessary here, in part because, as we understand it, part of what the commission is doing is establishing a set of principles that exist here before the process even begins because they are enshrined within Ofcom’s broadcasting code around impartiality and due weight during elections. We do think that such a commission is not necessary and that, in fact, certainly at the broadcaster end, with the broadcasters working together, a system of self-regulation could certainly work.

Earl of Selborne: Let us just look at another role of the commission in America and that is that it has a role in promoting the debates, interpreting them, putting them online and generally ensuring that they are accessible. I suppose that this is, therefore, a responsibility that the group of four should take on themselves. You are capable of doing this, after all. You have the expertise. Do you see this as a function of the group of four?


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Dan Brooke: I certainly think it is a subject that we should discuss. If you mean some sort of aggregated one place—

Earl of Selborne: I do mean just that.

Dan Brooke: That seems like an interesting idea. I suppose the parallel of that within the broadcasting aspect would be to ask all the broadcasters to co-produce every single one of the debates, which is not inconceivable. That would involve a greater level of complication than already exists and I dare say—because the different broadcasters have different budgets, different online capability, different levels of online audience—there would be some complexity in getting everybody to agree, but it does not seem inconceivable.

Earl of Selborne: There is nothing stopping each of the group of four having their own websites about it, but I would expect there to be a good case for having a one-stop shop. If people want to know when the debates are going to happen, who participates, what the rules are and what the opportunity for public participation is, all that should be available in an accessible form if it is to achieve the objective, which you say it should, to extend to parts that have not been reached before.

Dan Brooke: I do think it is an interesting idea and one that I think we should discuss in the broadcasters’ group.

Earl of Selborne: If you do not do it, who else is going to do it?

Dorothy Byrne: If each of us markets to our own audiences in a way that we know our audience engages with, I think that could be very successful. We also know from the way that people use the web that, for example, the BBC audience will possibly tend to go to the BBC website rather than to a special website, but perhaps there can be both.

Q68 Lord Razzall: I think you have been very clear as to what you are saying to us. This is a wrap-up point. Is there anything else you would like to add to our deliberations before we all have to go and vote in about four minutes?

Dan Brooke: I do just want to clarify for the avoidance of any doubt one thing in the first question you asked. At the end you talked about—perhaps once a set of principles had been agreed on and negotiations have been completed—the extent to which the process in the middle was in-camera, I think you said. I said yes. I just want to clarify; what I meant by that is that the existence of that process should be transparent and people should be aware that it is going on. Whether or not every single moment of all those negotiations should be minuted and published is an altogether different matter.

The Chairman: That is fair enough.

Lord Razzall: The obviously critical issue is whether anything is going to happen at all but, assuming it is, I suppose the critical issue is, if the politicians insist on only three debates and there are four broadcasters, how that gets dealt with. Presumably those are discussions you are involved in, but you cannot tell us at the moment how that is going to pan out.

Dan Brooke: We hope there will be a better outcome than was the case last time.

Baroness Deech: Will the public not lose their appetite by the time we get to a fourth debate?

Lord Razzall: What I was saying is if the politicians insist on only three, and that would be the politicians’ decision, there are four players here. How that would be divided up among the four of you is obviously something that you are discussing and cannot at the moment tell us where you are with that. That is what I understand you to be saying.


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Dan Brooke: Yes.

Q69 The Chairman: Answering for the witnesses is not my job, but if I were in their shoes I would say I would cross that bridge if and when we get to it.

Winding up, there are two things we want to be clear about. Do you think there is any tension between the prime ministerial debates and any other debate and/or the rest of general election coverage, because the prime ministerial debates are set in a wider, complicated legal environment? Do you think that the whole thing is part of a seamless larger whole? Do you see it that way as a broadcaster?

Dorothy Byrne: All our coverage in a general election is governed by the same rules. To us, it is part of that.

The Chairman: Yes, fine. Thank you very much

Baroness Bakewell: You did mention that different programme makers had different financial resources. Does that mean some of the programmes will be better-funded than others and look better, be more stylish or more appealing?

Dan Brooke: I do not think so at the level of the public service broadcasters, who are the ones, excluding Channel 5, who are expressing an interest in participating this time. Smaller broadcasters, who are broadcasting only on satellite and cable, will certainly have fewer resources. In terms of funding leaders’ debates, although we do have different levels of funding as an organisation, I do not think we would let that affect the quality of what was broadcast in this context.

The Chairman: Can I pick up something you have just said? When you were talking about public service broadcasters in this context, you rightly mention Channel 5 is a public service broadcaster. Are they interested in participating in this particular process, do you know? My understanding was that they were not.

Dorothy Byrne: They have not approached that group.

The Chairman: Fine, thank you. I thought that was a misunderstanding of what you had said by me, but I just wanted to be sure.

The other thing, before we go and vote any minute now, is I take it from everything you have said that all the research that you have carried out has shown that these television debates have helped the British electorate in deciding what it did decide in 2010.

Dan Brooke: Unquestionably, and it does seem to be particularly the case that it has had an effect on some groups who are, on average, less likely to vote. The debates do seem to have been very influential in how informed they became in advance of polling day last time, unquestionably.

The Chairman: Certainly turnout, for the first time in ages, was up in the last general election.

Lord Razzall: I think we have had evidence that your natural world of younger people was more likely to vote as a result of the debates than they would have done otherwise. We have had evidence to that effect, have we not?

Dan Brooke: The other thing that we saw was that they were more inclined to then continue a conversation about the subjects that they had seen on the debates outside in the digital world.


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The Chairman: We have just about run out of the time you have kindly agreed to give us. Unless you have anything else you are burning to tell us, I would like to say, on behalf of the Committee, thank you very much for coming along.

Dan Brooke: Thank you for inviting us.

Dorothy Byrne: Thank you.

Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.

Professor Stephen Coleman and Tim Gardam – Oral evidence (QQ 86-103)

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Members present

Lord Inglewood (Chairman) Baroness Bakewell Lord Clement-Jones Baroness Deech Lord Dubs Baroness Fookes Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill Bishop of Norwich Lord Razzall Lord St John of Bletso Baroness Scotland of Asthal Earl of Selborne Lord Skelmersdale ________________


Professor Stephen Coleman, The Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds, and Tim Gardam, Chair, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and Principal, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford

Q86 The Chairman: I do not think that for either Stephen Coleman or for Tim Gardam I need to make any formal introductions, since we have brief descriptions, CVs, and we obviously know of your work. It is going to be very helpful to hear what you have to tell us. Just before we get into the hearing proper, if you could, please each identify yourself and who you are. That is for the purposes of the recording, and it is being broadcast as we go. If you would like to make each an introductory comment, please feel free to do so.

As far as the questioning is concerned, please range widely when you respond. Sometimes you both may want to reply, and on some occasions you may feel the other person has said everything before you get a chance to chip in. Do not hesitate to say, “I have nothing more to add”. Just play as it comes, please. First of all, would either of you like to make an opening statement?

Professor Coleman: Yes. I am Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds. What I hope to draw upon in the answers that I give you today is research that I have been doing over a number of years into televised leaders’ debates in different countries. In particular, I want to refer to the 2010 UK debates, in which I led the team conducting the main audience research and research on the media coverage. I would also like to draw on some recent research that I have been conducting with audiences in


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focus groups looking back to the 2010 debates and looking forward to the 2015 debates and thinking about what they would like from them.

Tim Gardam: I am Tim Gardam. I am the Chair of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford. The Reuters Institute’s research frequently focuses on what constitutes the public value of news journalism in an age of digital convergence. It increasingly comes back to the question of how an individual citizen in the digital age can engage with the information and get hold of the information they need to make the sorts of informed choices on which a representative democracy depends.

Three publications as a result of the 2010 election related to the debates: Stephen Coleman’s analysis; Ric Bailey on how they changed election broadcasting; and Nic Newman who talked about the catalytic effect of social media. I think all of them point to the paradox of the debates, which was this was an election that we expected to be defined by social media and online media, which ended up being defined by a very much 20th century technology and, the most traditional of all, public service television, and a programme format that is 50 years old. Yet all the Reuters Institute research emphasises that it is the interaction of old media and new media that gave the public service purposes to the debates, because social media became a viral transmitter, essentially, of this conversation rooted in a mass audience.

It is just worth refining that point further for a moment. It seems to me that one of the lessons of the debates—and I think this emerges out of all the Reuters research—is that they exemplify a public value to public service broadcasting that is rooted in political broadcasting but goes beyond that.

Social networks today characterise the way people express themselves and relate to each other in a society that is both increasingly connected but, of course, increasingly diverse.

The public service culture of British broadcasting is not so much a social network as a civic network. Although the evidence shows that the social networks were very important in amplifying the message of the debates, they are essentially rooted in a civic network, a common place, where, if you are viewing, you have to take account of views that you may not agree with or may not know about. I think all our research comes back to this space, which I hope we will be able to explore this afternoon, because even though social media has developed a lot in the past five years and the debates may not have the same power of novelty in the future, the need to understand what a civic media is remains central to what we are talking about.

The Chairman: In short, you are saying that the public service broadcaster, the civic medium, is where the business took place, and the social media were the means of transmitting it and amplifying it and reconfiguring it throughout the rest of society?

Tim Gardam: In the end I think they become interdependent, but the locus is the arena that public service broadcasting provides, which is an arena where everyone can come together in one place and understand the point of view of the other and encounter the point of view of the other, whereas social media, by its nature, are many separate communications, a web of them taking place, but you do not have this common ground that public service broadcasting provides.

What this interaction shows—I think this is fundamental both to the future of public service broadcasting and indeed democracy—is that citizens, when they think it is important to take something seriously, do just that: they take something seriously, and they need a public arena in which they can focus on what they need to know in order to make those serious choices.


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Q87 The Chairman: One of the things that has struck me about the work that the Reuters Institute has done, and your work too, is that behind it all there is a feeling that these debates were in the public interest and that they should happen again. Indeed, to go further than that, there is an inference that somehow they assisted in increasing voter turnout, particularly among younger voters. Do you think there was a killer phenomenon, if I can put it that way, in the debates that appear both to have improved turnout and to have contributed to the general election of that year?

Professor Coleman: Let us first look at what we found from the audience research, which is that over half of 18 to 30 year-olds said that watching the debates led them to in some ways rethink how they were going to vote. That is a very, very striking finding. Three-quarters of them said that they understood more about the party leaders as a result of watching the debate, and two-thirds of them said that they understood about the policy differences between the parties, although of course that is self-reporting. That is not to say they understood them in a very sophisticated way, but they understood them.

What I think is significant here is that the debates provided a simple and limited framework for public attention, particularly for young people. They were media events; you knew they were coming. You could talk about them to other people, very often doing so, in the last election, through the blogosphere, in the next election much more likely through Twitter. You could do things while you were watching them, and we know there were a lot of people who were not just watching them but were typing messages to one another while they watching them. Straight afterwards you could arrive at some verdicts both about policy and about who you wanted to talk to about them.

The evidence about increasing turnout is, at best, suggestive. Members of my research team conducted regression analyses in which they looked at the predictive factors that might have made people likely to vote. They pulled those out and they controlled for them, and they said, “If only watching the debate was a predictive factor, what would happen?”. Certainly, in terms of what people reported, the number who said they were going to vote increased after each debate. That is particularly striking in the 18 to 29 year-olds. I think there was something suggestive here; I think it would be very unwise to say these debates were the sole cause of increasing turnout.

Can I say one other thing about increasing turnout? In social media, Facebook ran a very interesting campaign around the debates, which was called the “I voted” campaign. What happens there is you press a button, you say you voted and you tell all your friends that you voted.

The Chairman: Was that during the debate or on election day?

Professor Coleman: During the debate you would say that you were going to vote. On election day you said you had voted.

The Chairman: Do we know whether there was a correlation between what people said in the first response and whether they went out and did it?

Professor Coleman: There was an increase, but there would be bound to be as the election got nearer. We can say that there was a correlation, but we cannot say that it was a cause.

Tim Gardam: You asked about the public value. Reading Stephen’s research again, it seems to me the most powerful evidence for the argument that they had a public value was the impact on what the research identifies as the marginally attentive voter, or marginally attentive citizen: the sort of person who otherwise would not have encountered the arguments that were central to the campaign, but did so because of the debates. There were


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clearly differential responses from the marginally attentive citizen, who often were younger voters.

The conclusion that is drawn out from the research, which I think is the most important, is that the debates bolstered the confidence of viewers. That is, I think, the conclusion that comes from the numbers that Stephen was quoting: the fact that 90% who watched discussed them, and 70% thought they knew more about politics at the end than they did before. It is quite easy for those of us in the thick of political journalism, political discourse, to forget that confidence is an issue and that the closed nature of political language and political debate can make people shy away. They feel they are not somehow emancipated to take part in it. Picking up Stephen’s point, the simplicity of format, the space given to the three party leaders to do something very clear and specific gave people the confidence, who might not otherwise have had it, to engage in the arguments.

The Chairman: Do you think that confidence goes a step further and propels them into the polling booth?

Tim Gardam: We cannot point to definitive evidence, no, but I think the correlations are quite interesting. The other response we get from the research is that the debates were seen in terms of utility, particularly by younger voters, in the sense of, “They helped me make up my mind”. In a world where people are short of time for attention, this was a very time-efficient way to give your attention to something that you wanted to get your head around. You did not want to spend a lot of time on the election per se, but the sense of event and the sense that here was a way of being able to calibrate your sense of responsibility was laid out before you.

The other interesting thing, I think, is that precisely because the debates were an event that allowed people to comment simultaneously and afterwards, the deliberative nature of the conversation continues long after they are over. If you look at the analysis of the blogs, as Stephen’s research did, there was a very low level of abuse. There were not a lot of people throwing insults at each other and there was quite a low level of partisanship. People were commenting on what was being said and on the leaders. None of this is evidence for the debates driving turnout, but I think it implies that the debates upped the level of political engagement, political articulacy and political confidence, and turnout did increase.

Q88 The Chairman: The sense of the responses that each of you has given indicates to me that you feel that what took place was a civic good. The nature of the arrangement is that the broadcasters are part of the civic component of society. The academic perspective buys into that—or should do, I think—but for these things to occur you also need the political parties to engage. The political parties and the attack dogs that they engage have, in a general election, only one thing in mind, and that is winning. Do you think that represents a kind of fault-line through the process?

Tim Gardam: I do not think the desire to win an election would be a fault-line in democracy.

The Chairman: No, but if you are an attack dog, a behind-the-scenes man, or even for that matter the leader of a political party, when you get to this point in the game, your approach to the election broadcasts will be, “Will it help me or hinder me?”. That, in reality, is the only factor that is going to play.

Tim Gardam: I think the right answer to that is this: clearly a series of circumstances came together at the last election that made the debates possible, and it does not necessarily mean that those circumstances will be there again. Not only was it the first election almost


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in living memory where none of the three leaders had fought an election as a leader before, but there was the low public esteem in which politics was held following the expenses scandal. A point was made in Ric Bailey’s report that the lack of money that the Labour party had to fight the election made the debate a very cost-efficient way of finding a major point where everyone would come and engage in the argument, all of which became a virtuous circle that led to the debates happening. Of course there will be a huge level of self-interest in the parties taking part. Having happened, it is obviously quite possible that, if they should fail to happen again, there will be a cost to be considered in pulling out of them.

I think the paradox of the debates is that they could have been construed as rather old fashioned. The 76-point agreement, even by the standards of the negotiations that broadcasters and politicians always have, was somewhat involved. There was no independent interrogative voice. There was a moderator not an interviewer. The audience could be heard but were not invited to engage otherwise, so it could have been seen as rather a patriarchal format. I think the fact that it was not was because of two things. First, we have been talking about the effect of the social media conversation that went on around it. Also, and this is where I would like to refer to the wider idiom of television and how that affects politics, since 2000 there have been a series of programmes, far away from the political arena, that are largely entertainment programmes, where the audience has been invited to interact. That audience has tended to be young adults in their early 30s, from “Big Brother” in 2000 through to the “X Factor”, and other programmes. Voting by text or engaging by text has become a core part of the exercise. I think the debates ended up offering this appetite for information and transparency—and transparency was very necessary to political culture in 2010—but then allowed the viewer to interact, to talk about it and then later on to go to the polling station and vote for real. What could have been a very old fashioned format becomes a very modern one. You get this interesting and I think very virtuous relationship between traditional, regulated public service broadcasting with lots of rules, and a completely unregulated conversation that goes on around about it. The debates allowed people to speak for themselves and to each other.

I think they also had an effect—and this may be something to explore later—that allowed the party leaders much more of a chance than you would normally get in a one-to-one interview or in a hustings programme to expand straight to camera their thinking on a policy. Given that the trajectory of most political coverage in the last 20 or 30 years has been much more towards a hustings/direct encounter with the voter, it was an advantage to the party leaders that they were given some space. What was interesting is that that was not seen by the audience as in any way paternalistic or putting them up on a podium and not a soapbox. It was welcomed as a chance for people to be able to judge for themselves. I think there are a lot of incentives for politicians wanting to win to think hard before abandoning the format.

Professor Coleman: I want to emphasise the point that there is a systemic zero-sum game for the negotiators to think very hard about in the coming months. The big loser in the debates not happening next year would be turnout, because I think people would feel let down; they would feel that the political leaders had not bothered to appear before them and provide them with the opportunity to do what they could do in 2010.

One of the things that they could also do in 2010, to add to Tim’s very good analysis of what the debates made possible, is determine the result of the debates. The public could determine the results of the debates without spin doctors telling them what they thought. One of the most interesting things that happened after the first debate last time was that there was spin room based very much on a replica of the US model, with lots of spin


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doctors running around with their mouths opening and no sound coming out, because the flash polls had already arrived, the social media analytics had already been conducted, and everybody knew exactly what the public thought of the debates because the public were making up their own mind. So the spin doctors found themselves out of work.

The Chairman: That is interesting, but it is a contest for the politicians where there is no silver medal for being second.

Q89 Lord Razzall: I suppose you two are marginally less convinced, or less absolutely convinced, than the broadcasters who have given evidence to us as to whether it was the debates that drove the increased turnout. I think you are being slightly cautious on that, for understandable reasons to do with academic research, but I assume you would accept that the corollary of the success of the debates was a reduction in the audience for all other political programmes during the election campaign. Could I follow up that half-statement/half-question with asking whether you have given any thought to what would happen, if there are no debates this time, as to how, through other forms of programming, the audience could be engaged in the process if the debates do not take place?

Professor Coleman: We are looking at a very long-term decline in viewers for election programmes, so I am not sure that the debates had that effect last time. I think the debates focused people.

Lord Razzall: It was going to happen anyway.

Professor Coleman: I think if there are no debates this time, the broadcasters will no doubt try to put together some informal discussions—audience discussions—of one kind or another, but I think Tim’s analysis is correct. The place where particularly the generation of first and second-time voters want to have the conversation is not with a virtual deliberating audience in a television studio speaking for them as the public; they want to do it themselves. I am not at all convinced that, in the absence of the debates, having the “Granada 500”-type programmes would do the trick.

Tim Gardam: Stephen and I take a slightly different view on this, I think. We are absolutely agreed on one thing, which is that without the debates last time the likelihood of a collapse in viewing for normal-type election programming would have been very great indeed, because we were going into an election at a time when trust and respect for politicians was at a very low ebb. There was an incipient crisis of legitimacy across the parties, so I think the debates offered a new clarity with which to see the party leaders, which was very important in changing that mood and in that sense was, I think, a huge democratic good.

The other point I would make—and this is as a former director of a television channel—is that in today’s multi-channel world the solution cannot be the same as at election time in the 1980s, when I was running “Newsnight”, where you just flooded the airways and you extended every programme by 15 minutes. The “Nine O’clock News”, as it was then, became an hour and you just poured this stuff at people and they had nowhere else to go. Today they have lots of other places to go. They go off into a multi-channel world, and you would see those programmes collapsing or, even worse, you would see a desperate attempt to try to do ingratiating programmes to hold the audience there. I think political television has to follow the rules of all public service broadcasting, which is that a few big-event programmes, if well conceived, can capture the imagination, and if you get the format right, less is more.

There is, to my mind, a quite serious secondary question here. The debates posed a difficult question for the traditional one-to-one political interview with the Prime Minister, the leader


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of the Opposition and the leader of the Liberal Democrats. They suggested to me that the era of the Brian Walden and Robin Day interview, which was a “make your mind up” moment as you watched as a voter, is probably over. The closed political discourse that is inevitable in an interview like that does seem to turn off a large number of people watching.

Lord Razzall: Although they still did them in the last week.

Tim Gardam: They did but they were not things that captured the imagination. I think it would be a great pity if they were not there. Similarly, and I think this is where Stephen and I slightly disagree, the hustings programmes, the “Question Time”s and the Granada 500s, have a really important history in democratic broadcasting. If you look right back to the 1970s, those programmes bring leaders from the podium to the soapbox at a key moment in an election when the Cabinet Minister or the Prime Minister is head to head with the voter. From Jim Callaghan getting it wrong with the nurse in 1979, through to Tony Blair having a tough time in 2005, and others, that sense of the voter, the audience, taking on the party leader is very important. But Stephen’s point is an interesting one: how far that is seen to be sufficient now for a generation that is used to having direct, unintermediated access might mean that those question-type programmes are not themselves enough.

Q90 Lord Skelmersdale: It has been put to us from time to time that the debates can dominate the campaign—in other words, to the extent in people’s minds of what you might describe as normal election broadcasts—and that they might presidentialise a general election and hence a future Prime Minister. It has been put to me privately that they might well have caused the coalition in the first place. Do you have any comment on any of those three ideas?

Tim Gardam: I have thought about the presidential question. I do not think it is an issue. As Ric Bailey’s research reminds one, the elections in the 1970s, and 1974 in particular, can be seen as the height of presidential politics in Britain because you have a Prime Minister and a leader of the Opposition, both of whom had been our Prime Minister. In the Wilson-Heath years you have two people, both of whom were in No. 10. The research shows that 60% of each party’s coverage was with Wilson or with Heath; 90% of the bulletins had Heath or Wilson on them. Remembering those elections, they were absolutely dominated by that sense of the two of them. I think they were as presidential as anything today. Indeed, if you look at the history of this Parliament from the debates, this has not been one where Parliament has been inactive.

The Chairman: Might I just put a point to you there, which is that at that time there were very, very few other parties in the frame, so it was easier for it to be presidential?

Tim Gardam: That is true. If there had been such an encounter in 1970 the Liberal party would not have had anything like the same—I think I am right that Jeremy Thorpe gets a lot of coverage in February 1974 because of surge and 69% of the Liberal party’s coverage in 1974 was with Thorpe.

On the issue of the coalition and was it formed as a result of the debates, one can speculate and opine. It would be interesting to know whether the concept of Nick Clegg as Deputy Prime Minister emerges from out of the three of them on the podium. That is something I have seen written.

Lord Skelmersdale: What I was trying to get at was, if you like, an unclear election result, rather than specifically the coalition. In other words, no party ended up with an overall majority of the seats.


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Professor Coleman: That would suggest that the third party had the benefit of votes gained as a result of the debates. In fact, it did not. I think it is correct to say that the debates made coalition thinkable in the public imagination in a way that was quite helpful, because there was no clear majority and it had to become thinkable. I am quite certain that in 2015 people will be watching the debates with an eye to the possibilities of coalition, because coalition I think is now regarded by people as a part of mature politics.

Q91 Lord Dubs: Can I avoid appearing to make a party political point? I say that with respect to colleagues. My memory of it is that Nick Clegg did extremely well in those broadcasts. Everybody said he had done well, and when the election results started coming through, the Liberal Democrats did not do as well. Can you explain that in terms of the answers you have been giving?

Professor Coleman: The fall in polling for the Liberal Democrats happened between the first and second debate and particularly between the second and third debate. Anybody a week before the election, predicting the election result, would have assumed that the Liberal Democrats were going to do not as well as one might have thought after the first debate.

Lord Dubs: Obviously you have thought about it. My memory of it is that it was quite a surprise, when the results came out, that the Liberal Democrats had not done better, given the expectation that had been built up through the broadcasts.

Professor Coleman: It was quite as surprise to the Liberal Democrats, and I think that after the first debate the Liberal Democrats certainly saw the debate format as the magic route to coalition. But the arithmetic did not add up that way, for all kinds of reasons. Clearly the parties, and indeed the partisan newspapers, decided that they had to be much more aggressive in looking at Liberal Democrat policies after the first debate, and they were, and it registered with voters.

Lord Razzall: The reason there was a coalition was because Labour did better in the last week than everybody anticipated, so that is why we had a coalition.

Lord Skelmersdale: Could I ask you both to answer my third thought: that these election broadcasts came to dominate the campaign?

Professor Coleman: I do not think they did at the local level. Tim might have views on this, but certainly what is interesting is that when we conduct focus groups people make a very clear distinction in their minds between the local campaign, which was pretty similar in 2010 to previous elections, and the big centralised campaign, the rhythm of which did change in 2010 because the leaders had to prepare for the debates. But I do not know that that can be seen to have an overall effect on the campaign, because most people experienced the campaign locally.

Tim Gardam: I would say that one should distinguish between news coverage and the debates and other election coverage. It is undoubtedly true that the leadership debates dominated the overall coverage of the campaign. I do not think that the news itself and the news bulletins—and the debates were a major component part of the news—were dominated solely by the election debates. Indeed, as in every election campaign, incidents are blown out of all proportion that can take over two or three days of the campaign and which you could argue are of far less substantive import than the policy explanation and debate. There will always be a “bigoted woman” moment in the campaign of one sort or another. The interesting thing about the debates was that they focused on substance.


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It is also true to say that if there was a loser out of the coverage of the campaign, it may well have been the press corps. If you look back to the 1970s, 1980s and even 1990s, the morning press conference was absolutely fundamental to the discourse of the campaign. That was the journalists from Fleet Street, as was, and the political correspondents interrogating and pushing the agenda. The salience of that had worn off in the elections in the early 2000s, but just as the one-to-one interview, to my mind, does not have the bite that it did, the press conferences were also not having the same effect.

The other programme that used to be there, which I think had come to an end before the last election but in the 1980s and 1990s was very influential and very good, was “Election Call”. So there have always been formats in the course of election coverage that have come to be the format of that era, and formats change. I am sure it will be the case in so many years to come when the format of the election party leaders’ debates will also seem to have become tired.

Q92 Baroness Deech: Are you sure the post-television debate amongst the public was actually about substance? I have this theory that we are a very visual society, especially younger people, and I recollect these American presidential debates where, sure as anything, the younger, better looking candidate would always come out top, almost regardless of what they say. Clegg looked so nice.

Professor Coleman: You may well think so, and so did I, but there is a very counterintuitive finding from our research. We did very serious research on the media content after the debates. First of all, the debates themselves had very rich argument, so the substance of the debates was good, I think. Secondly, the media covered the arguments. Thirdly, the media organisations that were best at covering and simplifying the arguments were the tabloids. The tabloid press did a remarkably good job after these first debates by setting out tables and diagrams and comparing arguments and claims in ways that I suspect might have had an effect upon the turnout.

Certainly it is true that some editors wanted it to be a very superficial visual and rhetorical analysis that they were going to be providing for people, and they borrowed a lot of not very good American ideas, such as having body-language experts watching the debates. But it turned out that the body-language experts ran out of things to say very quickly. It was the substantial political journalism that followed the debates that dominated both broadcasting and newspapers, although I accept that is a very counterintuitive finding.

Baroness Deech: The tabloids, of course, are good for things like, “I agree with Nick”, which is a perfect tabloid headline and was repeated over and over. Does your research indicate whether the political classes, as it were in collusion with the broadcasting bubble, shifted the vocabulary in which the discourse was sustained in order to meet that broader constituency of which you speak, Tim?

Tim Gardam: I think I would put it the other way around. What is quite interesting about the relationship between the broadcasts and the social media is that the “I agree with Nick” phrase was picked up in social media first; it was picked up by viewers. I think one of the things we can underestimate is the very healthy role of social media as popular satire—the jokes, the potential to mock or to make a satirical point, goes around virally—so I think it takes the discourse away from the elite. It may well be, and I think it is the case, that the political class picks up very fast on what is being said online and in social media and adapts to it. For instance, in the first debate, following on American examples, some party leaders armed themselves with rather cheesy anecdotes. These are mocked in the social media


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reaction to them and they do not try to use the anecdote again; they move much more towards substance.

Stephen has an interesting framework in his research which describes the relationship between game and substance. The research concludes that you should not see these as two things apart; they interrelate. In the reporting of the debates—in gaming terms, the horse races and so on—versus the substance, one feeds into the other.

I would take us back to what I think was the greatest achievement of the 76-point agreement, which is that it sets out in really clear terms what the debates are there to do. This was written some months before. It says, “To ensure maximum debate between the party leaders—the distinctive characteristic of these programmes—whilst allowing the audience’s voices to be heard directly posing questions”. I think that is a very, very successful summation of the purpose of a programme. That sense of seriousness of purpose and simplicity and the desire to illuminate substance is what made these programmes honest. Although clearly there was a lot of froth and talk about who was the good looking one, I do not, in the end, think that was the important thing.

Picking up Stephen’s point, the trajectory of the campaign and the debates was that after the success of Nick Clegg in the first debate, the other two parties decided to focus on Liberal Democrat policy. I think the research shows that the move towards discussing issues of substance increases as the debates go on. Is that right, Stephen?

Professor Coleman: Yes.

Q93 Baroness Deech: Do you know of any research that shows that the UK public understood that these three were chosen as party leaders, and all the complications attaching to that? Did the public know that there were other parties and leaders whose voices could be heard elsewhere in the media in other coverage?

Professor Coleman: No, I do not think there is any significant research there. Anecdotally in the focus groups that we have just been running looking back to the 2010 debates and asking people about participation in the next ones, a lot of people have been suggesting that if there are other parties that ought to be forming the agenda in these debates, the public who support those parties should be making that clear through the kinds of questions that they are sending in. What people seem to be saying is participation of more parties in the debates is rather less important than participation of more of the public in the debates. If the public can form the questions and can be seen to broaden the agenda so that it reflects what real people are interested in, that is possibly more important than who is standing on the platform.

Tim Gardam: I do not know of any research either. Looking back again at the debate programmes themselves, I think they were quite clearly signposted. This is where the moderators did a good job. They signposted a context to each debate, particularly in relationship to the difference between England, Scotland and Wales in education policy and policies that do not apply to Scotland, which were being debated, and they pointed forward to the contextual programming around the debates, where those who had not been included in the debates were included. I think as a piece of television they are very carefully framed. I do not think we know, though, what the public consensus is, if there is public consensus, about who should or should not appear, and where. I remember in those main programmes there were certainly very deliberate pointers to the separate debates that were going to take place in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I think the grammar of the programmes were pretty clear.


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Professor Coleman: And calling them the prime ministerial debates rather than election debates was a very good move, because this showed that there was a focus in some sense upon a single Government of the United Kingdom and their leader, which are reasonable preoccupations of people leading up to the vote.

The Chairman: I do not think it was ever supposed at any point that Nick Clegg was going to be the Prime Minister.

Lord Razzall: It depends who you asked.

The Chairman: Have you found any evidence that at any point it was thought that you had these three candidates debating it and that the eventual Prime Minister, as opposed to a possible Deputy Prime Minister, would be the leader of the liberal party?

Professor Coleman: I think it is a plausibility issue. Whoever takes part in a prime ministerial debate has to be regarded as plausible in accordance with fairly clear criteria, such as the number of candidates standing and the possibility of being a major coalition partner, in becoming if not Prime Minister then Deputy Prime Minister in a coalition. In 2010 that probably entitled Nick Clegg to be there in a way that it might not have entitled others to be there. There might have been other entitlements that could have put others on the platform, but I think not that one.

The Chairman: That might be the case in the future.

Professor Coleman: I cannot see how it would be the case in 2015, from where we are sitting now.

Q94 Lord Razzall: Taking your point about involving the public in those sorts of decisions, the obvious issue that has not been mentioned but underlies this question is what to do about UKIP. When we asked the BBC, when it gave evidence to us, what its view was and how it would go about making the selection for who would appear in the debates, one of the factors that it said it took into account last time, and would propose to do again, was public consultation. It went out to consultation to get the views of the public as to whether it wanted Mr Farage there.

Professor Coleman: Public consultation can mean many things, but I would have thought that what the BBC means by public consultation is what the federal debates commission in the United States means, which is a very peculiar and in my view rather dangerous formula of aggregating opinion poll results over a six-month period prior to the debates to see whether—

Lord Razzall: They were going to do that as well but this was going to be separate.

Professor Coleman: Just on the principled objection to doing that, it seems to me that a general election is a legitimate election, but opinion poll aggregates are not. The decision about who takes part in the debates is complicated—politics is complicated—but it seems to me that putting that in the hands of the pollsters would be a complication too far.

Baroness Deech: You two are very familiar with these arguments and the 76-point agreement, which I have to say I had never heard of until I sat on this Committee. If I had not heard of it, I just wonder whether the public know enough about how you get to that point of the three people, why those three, what the 76-point agreement is and so on. I had no idea until we started this inquiry.

Tim Gardam: It is quite important to stand back a bit from the debate programmes. They were a very important part of the election coverage and, to my mind, undoubtedly a


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democratic good. But they were a political programme format. They are not an essential part of the constitutional architecture of the United Kingdom. Here I am not talking with my Ofcom hat on but just from my experience as a regulator. The advantage of the regulated system of British broadcasting is that frameworks are established within which broadcasters have the editorial independence to propose programmes and then wrestle with the political parties to see who is going to come on. That is the case both at a daily programme-making level and when you are making a programme of this significance.

As a broadcaster, in guarding that independence, which I think is fundamental, you have reference to a framework that has been laid out that is deliberately flexible and not too prescriptive. Although the BBC and the commercial PSBs have separate codes, they are broadly the same. The regulatory code gives the broadcasters discretion but also gives guidelines on what constitutes a major party. The code makes clear that major parties can vary depending on the election. For instance, the designation of UKIP recently as a major party for the European elections in England and Wales is due to the fact that UKIP, after all, has a substantial number of seats in the European Parliament. It was second last time and in the election before that it polled well. Those are criteria surrounding the European elections.

Surrounding the general election, different criteria may apply. UKIP has no seats in the British Parliament at the moment, so it is for the broadcasters, I think, guided by the regulatory architecture, to make editorial decisions for themselves about who they think should appear on their programmes and then try to get the parties to agree with it. I would be slightly worried if we tried to put more than this architecture around that. My perhaps conservative view is that this is an area where, in the end, public service broadcasters and Sky should have the freedom to work this out with the parties for themselves. Of course, the great advantage of the last election campaign was that Sky, the BBC and ITV worked so closely together and produced an extraordinarily long document but one that, when you read it through, allowed these rather clear, simple and worth-while programmes to emerge.

Baroness Deech: It is just that the public did not know about it. I do not think they knew.

Q95 Baroness Fookes: This brings us very neatly to something I would like to ask your opinions about, and that is whether the format, the 76 rules and so on, could usefully be changed on the assumption that these debates take place and that you get some concordat with the broadcasters and political parties.

Professor Coleman: I think it is for the broadcasters to think imaginatively about what is going to make good television and what is going to contribute to a fair election. I suspect that in doing so they are going to want to replicate a lot of what worked well last time. I think there is one key change that would inspire public confidence, and that is in relation to the last question about transparency. I think there needs to be much greater clarity about how questions are asked in the debate and the source of questions, and there should be opportunities for those questions to deviate if the public are of a mind to deviate from the standard political agenda.

Baroness Fookes: How would that work in practice? Would you have some arrangement before the broadcast began, explaining how the questions have been selected and so forth?

Professor Coleman: Yes, and there would be a process of selection that would itself need to be more transparent. At the moment, my understanding of the question selection in 2010 was that people could e-mail questions, which were selected by a group of people from the broadcasters. Alternatively, some of them came from the questioners in the audience. I think


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that could be expanded to opportunities for people to go online, raise questions, perhaps do more than raise questions, tell stories, make films about their lives reflecting the complexity of policy, not just one single policy-issue question but perhaps a question about what it is like to be in a particular sort of position. It would then be for the broadcasters to work with the debaters to integrate that greater depth of questioning into the debates.

Baroness Fookes: I see. Mr Gardam, do you have views on this?

Tim Gardam: Yes. As a former programme maker, mine may be somewhat conservative. My worry is that a single programme format can do only a limited number of things. Although I spoke earlier of my concern that the hustings-type programmes do not disappear, because I think there is a real value in the Question Time and the “Granada 500” type of format, to overelaborate a format that I think worked well, because it gave space for politicians to explain things and at the same time be challenged by each other, might vitiate the effect of the programme overall and its impact.

However, I agree with Stephen that it would be possible to make the process more transparent whereby the questions emerge and perhaps the questioner is given a chance to follow up. However, the programmes are already an hour and a half long. To make them more interrogative, for instance to give the moderator a chance to jump in too, there is a danger that you would overload the programme and its grammar would become damaged.

However, the one point I think the broadcasters should take away from the research of the Reuters Institute is the criticism that you hear time and time again that the political leaders evade questions. I wonder whether that is because there was no chance to follow up a question once it had been asked. That is the area that I think could perhaps be explored.

Baroness Fookes: Is that something you could leave to the moderator, assuming we have a moderator?

Tim Gardam: You could. I think the constraint on the moderator last time was one of the things that made them rather old fashioned programmes. On the other hand, I come back to my point that the more you give others the chance to jump in, the less time there is for what the programme is there to do, which is to ensure maximum debate between the party leaders. The importance of the debates is that you get all three party leaders in one place debating with each other, and you want to ensure there is enough time to make that happen properly.

The danger of the moderator taking too great a role is you are back into that old, closed political discourse of someone you have seen on television a lot talking to politicians as they always do, as opposed to giving a greater breadth of discussion that you would not get otherwise.

Professor Coleman: Also, it is risky. It only has to go wrong once or be seen to be an unfair challenge by the moderator and the greater good of the debate can be lost. I am very much in favour of supplementary questions from the audience, but I am also in favour of different types of questions from the audience.

Q96 The Chairman: The Chancellor’s debates only had 26, or 28, rules. I do not know whether you did any work on them, but I never heard the wider public differentiate between those debates in a way that indicates that one was lesser or higher quality than the other. Maybe once you got into the swing of it, the conventions surrounding it means that you can be slightly less prescriptive with rules.


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Professor Coleman: Many of the rules, after all, are not that prescriptive if you read them. It seemed necessary for the participants before they began to make sure they had dotted every “i” and crossed every “t”.

The Chairman: It was a sort of insurance policy, was it not?

Tim Gardam: The Chancellor’s debates, in my personal view, were some of the best television that took place in the entire election.

Baroness Fookes: But you would still attach importance to each leader being given a chance to put his viewpoint? One of the things that, as a politician, irritates me with some interviewers is that they do not give you a chance to say what you think before they jump in and question.

Tim Gardam: I think that was the great strength of these debates. They gave party leaders a chance to explain and set things out, and all the party leaders rose to the challenge. They did it within some quite tough timing constraints that had been laid down in the rules about how long they were allowed to speak for, and it worked well.

Baroness Fookes: That is good, because they cannot meander about then, can they?

Tim Gardam: It worked.

Q97 Lord St John of Bletso: If I could touch on the non-broadcast media, Mr Gardam, you spoke about the catalytic effect of social media and you also drew a distinction between public sector broadcasters, which you referred to as civic networks, and non-broadcast being social networks. From your research, to what extent did the public use non-broadcast social media during and after the debates?

Tim Gardam: Stephen will give most detail on that. It is important to recognise from the research that it is wrong to think of social media as somehow downstream from the debates themselves. There is essentially a circular relationship between the two. The debates seemed to go from a regulated space to an unregulated space and then back, for the subsequent debate, to a regulated space again, because the nature of the discussion that was emerging from the debates influenced the second debate and third debate as they took place. It was in this bridging of the two worlds that public service broadcasting suddenly got a new bite to it. That is why I think the interaction is so important.

I think it is impossible today for a broadcaster to conceive of a programme without thinking of the noise and conversation that would go around it. Indeed, I think this will be more the case in the next campaign than in the last one where you will have correspondents whose job will be to sift the chatter in the world beyond regulated broadcasting. There is the point that Stephen has already made where he said that if the last election was focused on the blogosphere, the next election will focus on Twitter. That is because back in 2010 Twitter was essentially still a celebrity medium. It is now a demotic medium, so I think you would get an increasingly varied conversation coming from the debates. The point I would make is that without the debates that conversation would not have the focus and would not have the energy that it has.

Professor Coleman: Social media are moving more and more towards instantaneity. In the 2010 election, social media was perhaps half a minute, one minute, behind what was happening on television. In a Twitter campaign, which is what will clearly happen next year, it will be a matter of split seconds behind what is going on. Indeed, people will be using split screens.


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In some respects what is taking place is a continuation of what communication theorists have recognised has always gone on with television. We often refer to a theory that we call the two-step flow. You watch television and then you talk to other people about what you have seen on it. That is what always went on in the 1960s and the 1970s, and people who had a lot of friends would be the people who, if you were a politician, you would most want to convince when you were speaking to them on television. Now two things have changed. People have much wider networks of people that they can immediately contact, and they know them less well, so trust is a problem. We have weaker links with people, but the essential circularity of networks is exactly the same now as it was in the 1960s. People tell their friends about what they are interested in and they do not talk to their friends about what they are not interested in.

Lord St John of Bletso: You speak about split screens, but how much greater use can be made of social media with the advances in technology for forthcoming debates?

Professor Coleman: I speak about split screens, but very few people are literally using split screens. Perhaps we’ve passed through that Bloomberg period where you had the very busy screen with everything going on at the same time. One of the things we have discovered is that unless you were dealing with millions of dollars on the financial market, it gave you a headache and so people do not do it. What actually happens is that people sit with their tablet, their iPad or whatever on their lap, and they are writing things as they watch television. People watch television in fundamentally different ways now from the way that they used to watch television. Very often they are watching it on their own or they are watching it ‘with’ other people who are not physically there. It is a very strange phenomenon, but what is happening is that a community of people will say, “We watched this programme together”, but in fact they were not in the same room or even necessarily in the same town.

Your question is: where could this go next? The answer I would be confident to give is that it will move on to mobile telephony. Probably next year there will be a number of apps for mobile phones that people will start to use during the debates and at other points in the campaign, and by the 2020 election perhaps people will be using their mobile phones politically rather more than they are using their computers.

Q98 The Chairman: Arising out of that, do you think there is a possibility, by using the techniques, data, that political parties can then introduce their specific messages through social media on to the general traffic that is going around?

Professor Coleman: I think they will try. The history of the internet is a history of every political party assuming that they can dominate it in a way that they could dominate the press at one point or broadcasting at another point, and failing. It always backfires. Social media’s main currency is authenticity. People like to know that things are coming from real people and from real motives, and at the moment there is an attempt to manipulate what is going on. I am absolutely certain that some political strategists will rather unwisely try to control Twitter during the next election campaign, and I am absolutely certain that they will fail.

Tim Gardam: I think it is worth recognising that the personal technology of the next election will be fundamentally different from the last. The tablet and 4G will change things a great deal. I believe that both will make it less likely that any attempt to manipulate social media will be successful.

Baroness Fookes: Is it likely to increase people’s powers of concentration?


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Professor Coleman: It depends on how you define people’s powers of concentration. If their powers of concentration are defined in terms of their ability to do one thing for a long time—in other words, if it is measured in traditional terms of attention—I would say that there has probably been a long-term trend away from focused attention. If one thinks about the capacity to concentrate on things while multi-tasking and multiple ways of approaching a single problem, perhaps people are getting rather more sophisticated as thinkers. It is a very complex question and how one answers it depends on which of those two definitions one employs.

Q99 Bishop of Norwich: We heard quite a bit about the way the US debates commission promotes awareness about the American debates and spreads knowledge of them, yet in Stewart Purvis’s evidence last week he said he thought that the broadcasters here had not promoted the debates very assiduously, that there was not much viewer education, and that there was no debates portal. Are there other ways other than social media in which the broadcasters themselves could extend the influence of the debates in relation to the campaign?

Professor Coleman: This is a very important question and was one of the most conspicuous gaps after the last election. I suspect that many people among the broadcasters were very nervous about these debates, perhaps wondering whether, after the expenses scandal, they were going to be taken seriously and whether they were going to be primarily for political insiders. They were a popular success. There is a tremendous opportunity for the public service broadcasters to get together now and use these debates to think very imaginatively and expansively about what the public needs around an election and the deliberation involved in the debate but also the information involved in voting itself.

I think there are a number of things that they could do. Websites are probably still the main source of good voter information. There is an opportunity to create opportunities for people to build Wiki-like aggregations of information and local knowledge. I think there are opportunities, and my university has been funded with the Open University to do this: to build platforms in which the claims made in the debates and the records of the debaters are open to public scrutiny. I think this is a very, very big one for the public service broadcaster, for all the broadcasters, to get together on and they probably need to start now.

Tim Gardam: I agree. I think that the potential for demonstrating democratic empowerment is probably the biggest potential gain that has come out of the debates if they happen next time. There is a huge opportunity for joined-up thinking between the public service broadcasters and Sky, and to learn from the fact that it was only by being joined up last time that they got the debates to happen at all. Given that both the BBC and Channel 4, the two publicly owned broadcasters, have education as part of their statutes, my point is that, if they have sufficiently worked through an education strategy generally, this must be core to what they should do.

It was terribly important that the debates were on ITV, because ITV and its reach are critical to the overall remarkably resilient public service portfolio in this country. The fact that Sky was involved was very important too, because Sky, after all, is not formally a public service broadcaster and yet represents all the best values and character of one. I think it is very important that the plurality of those broadcasters can be seen across the piece in one place, which both demonstrates plurality of the analysis and makes it easy to find.

If you think about it, only the broadcasters can do this, because the concept of political education is such a sinister one. You need the rock-solid sense of independence and impartiality that governs those broadcasters to bring this off.


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I think it also could have quite a significant impact on the longer-term thinking about partnerships in public service broadcasting, because one of the broader issues of PSB in the converged age is going to be whether you can find it, discover it and access it, and the costs of distribution grow all the time. To be able to create a common platform whereby material of real value in educative terms exists, and where you know where to find it, and maybe opening that platform to academic institutions too, will be an extraordinary educational gain.

Bishop of Norwich: Can all that be left to the broadcasters themselves to organise, or ought there to be some sort of body? I am not thinking particularly of a US debates commission but some sort of body set up by the broadcasters themselves to enable this to happen, because if we have fixed-term Parliaments things can be planned in an entirely different way than would have been the case in the past.

Tim Gardam: My personal view is you already have quite a complicated regulatory architecture around PSB of which provision of impartial news is absolutely core. To set up another body to make this happen would probably complicate things. The one thing one has to say the BBC has done extraordinarily well is to move online and become the central place for online information. For this to be a shared portal, though, would be very advantageous.

Q100 Earl of Selborne: You have shared some of your thoughts about the lessons learnt from the debates. If we were to recommend that the broadcasters should take a more concerted exercise to review the lessons learnt from each series of debates, what do you think this should involve?

Professor Coleman: I think the starting point should be surveys of the audience who watched the debates and heard about them in the news. This research should not simply be looking at people’s behaviour but at what people wanted from the debates. They should be taking a uses and gratification approach.

There is scope for running focus groups in real time so that we can observe people watching the debates and see what they are actually saying and doing during the debates. We would then have some ethnographic knowledge next time. We need to continue to monitor the media commentary on the debates very carefully and check whether the quality is kept up and the civic mix between game and substance is balanced.

We need, I think, to look at the debates themselves and the deliberativeness of the debates. There is, for example, an invention called the deliberative quality index, which incidentally has been applied to this House by some academics, to explore just how much people listen to each other and change their minds during the course of discussions. Probably we should be doing face-to-face interviews with the people who are involved in the debates to find out more about what they felt they were achieving and how they felt they had to prepare for them. That is the broad set of things that we should be trying to do next time around.

Tim Gardam: There are four things that I would like to know as a result of the debates if they happen and, if I were still a broadcaster, I would like to understand better. The first is to dig deeper into the ability of the debates to reach different parts of what is an increasingly diverse Britain. There is a danger that we do not think across the diversity of the country and the different means whereby political engagement takes place. We still tend to see this very much in mass terms, and I would very much like to know how the debates play in different ethnic communities and backgrounds in the United Kingdom.

Earl of Selborne: Could I just interrupt you there? Would you use focus groups for this? How would you set about it?


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Tim Gardam: I think it probably has to be surveys, both quantitative and qualitative, and I will leave that to Stephen, who is the expert in how to make sure those things are academically robust. After all, we are not only an increasingly multicultural society, we are also an increasingly multilingual society, so I would be interested to know, if the debates are going to be the core means by which voters engage and make up their minds, who they reach and how they reach them. I think we need to know more about that.

One would also be interested to know, as would broadcasters for their own self-interest, how viewers’ behaviour has changed since 2010. I mentioned just now the personal technology people use and how far that will change the needs of people’s engagement with political substance.

The third area that I would be interested in is the public policy issue of the plurality of news provision. Here are some central events that are broadcast to everybody, and yet the means whereby people pick up the debate and the stories that flow from the debates will be from all sorts of different news outlets. One of the areas that I think is of particular importance as media converge is how plural citizens’ sources are for news. The debate has been a very interesting model from which to explore that. Many people, after all, do not see the debates but they hear about them. How do they hear about them? From whence does the mediation come?

The final area is that now we know from last time that debates can be very impactful and popular forms of broadcasting, research should be done at the time of the next debates to get contemporaneous feedback of people’s views on how the format is working. Although my personal feeling is that the format should stay more or less the same the second time around and should not be fiddled with because that could disrupt something that worked well, my guess is that the format will have to evolve if it is going to continue to be a key part of the broadcasting electoral firmament. We should be hearing early and contemporaneously from viewers what they find frustrating or satisfying about the format as it is presented. That would give good guidance for all to work out, going forward, how one can agree on making changes to it.

Earl of Selborne: I posed the question of what the broadcasters should ensure was reviewed, but I suppose there is a case for others undertaking the work as well as the broadcasters. Do you think, for example, that there would be a case for the Economic and Social Research Council funding on behalf of the wider public as well?

Tim Gardam: One has a conflict of interest here, of course, working in an academic institution, because one is always pitching for grants. But, yes, the United Kingdom higher education institutes and universities have a lot of expertise in this type of research, and independent research into this area, such as the work that Stephen has done and the Reuters Institute does, gives one a critical distance from broadcasters. The broadcaster can learn from the research rather than debate among themselves what lessons they wish to learn from it. It is far better to commission research so that they can then hear the lessons that others think they should learn from it.

Q101 Baroness Bakewell: You mentioned diversity and you mentioned ethnicity. You do not mention whether there is a gender issue here. They were very male programmes and the public agenda has changed very much. There has been an extension of women appearing on television. Indeed, there has been a big issue about that. Could you comment on that?


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Tim Gardam: I think absolutely that it would be important to establish from the research whether there are clear differences in reaction according to gender. I am not sure, Stephen, what you found last time.

Professor Coleman: In the focus group study that we have conducted, for each demographic group we had a male and a female group and the responses were often starkly different. What was running through the female groups was exhaustion and frustration at what they saw as a form of aggressive bickering. It seems to me that politicians have an enormous amount to learn from this very basic qualitative research.

Baroness Bakewell: You do not need research, you just need a female moderator at least.

The Chairman: If the moderator was allowed to do anything, because, after all, the moderator at the moment is a very constrained role.

Baroness Bakewell: So that it does not look like a whole stream of white males.

Professor Coleman: I also think it comes back to the point about supplementary questions. Women very often have a style of questioning that is different from men, and it is often the case that a woman not getting the response to a question will be able to press the point in a way that I think the public would find attractive and appealing.

Baroness Bakewell: Is that a consequence of the way things are or is it going to change them?

Professor Coleman: I think it is a hopeless generalisation on my part, but I still think it is based on some degree of truth.

The Chairman: Talking about women making good questioners, Lady Healy.

Q102 Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: With the millions who watched these debates, which was a very good thing, could greater public value be achieved from the broadcasters being encouraged to co-ordinate their activity? I know you have spoken about them possibly coming together around the broadcast general election debates, for example in a one-stop shop online for information and education about the debates and potentially live streams and archival content so that everybody can go back and find them. I am interested in what you think their role would be with 3 million, at least, not on the electoral register. These people, young people particularly, are watching and then they find they cannot vote in the end. Would it be a civic duty perhaps for the broadcasters to encourage them to make sure they are on the electoral register in their trailers for the debates perhaps?

Tim Gardam: It is important to amplify the points we were discussing a little while ago, which is that the broadcasters were taken by surprise by the resonance of the debates last time. That was my impression. I think, talking to them, that they would say the same. There was a nervousness about how popular they would be, although no one doubted their significance. What one then makes of that material as a broadcaster needs careful thought. It is normally the way of broadcasters that they go off on their own to work out what they can do with it.

Coming back to the points that we were making just now, in pure terms of ease of access, discoverability and the clear incentive to build a common point of access and, as I said, to open it up for material beyond that of the broadcasters, this would be a very, very powerful educational tool. I do not know how much thinking has gone on there. I know that the BBC is talking about the need to make its educational strategy much more self-evident. It seems, going back to the point I made before, that in the area of politics few institutions have their


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independence and impartiality so enshrined as to make such a tool seen to be something for the public good as opposed to something that may have implications of control.

Professor Coleman: There is something rather unusual happening here, which is that for once the universities might have a bit more money than the broadcasters to do this sort of thing. We have been given quite a large pot of funding to produce a platform for public education after the debates, if they happen next year. What we cannot do as universities—the University of Leeds is working in collaboration with the Open University on this—is what the broadcasters can do well, and that is publicise it and bring to it some of the creative design energy that we academics do not always bring to things. I think there is a tremendous opportunity here and it is because one of the research councils was imaginative enough to support this idea that we are in a position to be able to do this.

Q103 The Chairman: Thank you. We are now getting towards the end. I was thinking as you were speaking that if I were the moderator of this particular debate I would have been a failure, as we have gone long over time and we have wandered away a bit from the points that we thought we were asking the questions about. Speaking personally, I do not think we are any the worse off for that, so thank you very much indeed.

Despite having been a bit discursive, which I think has been good, is there anything else either of you would like to say to us, either words of advice or warning, before we formally wrap up?

Professor Coleman: I would like to just underline something that Tim said at the beginning about confidence, because I think it was so important. One of the great opportunities of these debates is to help citizens to do what is actually very hard work. That is the work of informing themselves, talking to other people about their views, being open to changing their minds, and listening to other people. These are all things that, in the inner world of politics, are matters of habit. For most people they are not. I think insofar as these debates can focus upon working towards those sorts of opportunities to build public confidence, they will surely constitute a public good.

Tim Gardam: The only point I would add is that it is worth thinking about the debates in terms of the character of the way in which democracy operates in the United Kingdom, which clearly relates to the public value framework of our broadcasting. I think in the future it is likely that there will be a lot more political advertising online. We still have a framework that stops political advertising on linear licenced television. We have party election broadcasts instead. If one looks at the American model of attack advertising—it is a very different, more visceral model; in America they have the debates too; the ability of the debates to offer a point of concentration, a point of intention, whereby at the moment when political leaders are putting themselves up and asking for the voters’ choice as to who is going to form the next Government, to clear the space for that to be able to happen in a simply constructed, direct communication that still includes challenge and interrogation is incredibly important. It might act as at least a break on a move towards a different sort of politics that I think would be coarser and not part of our democratic society.

The Chairman: This would be a lodestar of even-handedness in the message, which you would not get through a number of other forms of communication.

Tim Gardam: Yes, that is just what I am trying to say.

The Chairman: Thank you both very, very much indeed. We are extremely grateful to you.

Commission on Presidential Debates – Oral evidence (QQ 20-31)

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Members present

Lord Inglewood (Chairman) Baroness Bakewell Lord Clement-Jones Lord Dubs Baroness Fookes Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill Lord Razzall Baroness Scotland of Asthal Earl of Selborne ________________

Examination of Witness

Janet Brown, Executive Director, Commission on Presidential Debates

Q20 The Chairman: Is that Janet Brown?

Janet Brown: Yes, it is.

The Chairman: It is? Good, terrific.

Janet Brown: Good morning.

The Chairman: Can you hear us?

Janet Brown: I can very clearly, thank you.

The Chairman: Good, thank you. I am Richard Inglewood, Chairman of the House of Lords Committee here. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to us. We appreciate it. This event is being recorded so a transcript will be taken. When we get into the first round of questioning, please explain who you are and identify yourself for the record. We have had a brief CV about your background and your involvement so I think we understand that. If you would like to make a brief opening statement that would be very nice, otherwise we can go bowling straight on into the formal evidence session, if you are happy.

Janet Brown: I would be very pleased to do that and I think the time is better spent going straight into the session. My name is Janet Brown and I am the Executive Director of the Commission on Presidential Debates.

Q21 The Chairman: Thank you very much. Perhaps I might start the questioning by asking you how the Commission on Presidential Debates came into being in 1987. Could you also outline how your system of debates works? As we understand it, you at the commission judge the eligibility of the candidates to participate in the debates, run the debates, produce the programmes and then make them available to the broadcasters after


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that. Also perhaps you could tell us a bit about how the commission succeeded in ensuring that the debates have taken place since 1987. You do not find that politicians these days just walk away, as took place after the first debates in 1960. Also please could you more generally—and there will be further questioning—tell us about the stability that the debates have engendered in terms of the way they operate?

Janet Brown: The way that the commission got started is that there were two formal studies in 1985 and 1986. One was by a panel that was held in Washington DC at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which was then part of Georgetown University. It was co-chaired by Melvin Laird and Robert Strauss, two leaders in the public policy field, and there was a panel of 40 leaders from public and private sectors that were involved in looking at a variety of election-related issues, including debates. There was almost complete agreement that, given the importance of general election debates, an entity should be created that was responsible only for the debates, with no other election-related tasks. That was followed by a study in 1986 at the Institute of Politics at Harvard. It was chaired by Newton Minow, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. That study focused only on debates and produced what was essentially a blueprint for the creation of the commission, which then took place in February 1987.

The way the commission was created is that it is largely a function of Federal Election Commission law, which has two requirements of general election debate sponsors. One is that they be either a media organisation or a not-for-profit. We are the latter. The second requirement is that the debate sponsor will have pre-published guidelines to indicate how participants in the general election will be invited to those debates.

The commission was started in early 1987 and it has sponsored and produced all the presidential and vice-presidential debates since then. As you mentioned, Mr Chairman, we are responsible for selecting the candidates and we are also responsible for all the aspects of putting the debates together. We are the production company. We have a production staff; we work with the television networks to select the dates for the debates; we select the sites; we raise the funding; we work with law enforcement agencies, starting at the federal level, on the security around the debates; and we do voter education activities to maximise their benefit. It is approximately a two-year process to plan for putting these together in a way that maximises the soundness of their production and the maximum level of their educational value to the American public.

The biggest plus that this country has is the expectation that debates will happen. As you know, they first started with the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960. There was a lapse until 1976 when they resumed, but since 1976 they have always taken place and there is an expectation in this country that they will take place. The commission’s job is not only to ensure that tradition but to try to work progressively to make sure that formats every cycle are refined so that the educational value of these 90-minute forums is the maximum for the huge audiences that watch these, not only in the United States but around the world. The audiences for US debates are second only to major sporting events. They are unlike anything else that happens in this country in terms of real-time appearances by the leading candidates answering the same questions in the same venue, so the audiences are enormous. They range from approximately 35 million to 70 million, which of course is an incomplete and imperfect way of measuring audiences now.

The answer to your final point is that when you have the expectation of the American public that these will take place, the most important role for the commission is to represent the trust of the public, that not only will they come off as planned and announced but they will be absolutely fair and neutral in their substance, in their moderation and in meeting the


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public’s expectation that they will learn from these sessions and that they will take away information regarding the issues and the candidates that is helpful in terms of how they decide to cast their votes.

Q22 The Chairman: That is an extremely helpful introduction of the subject. I was very interested in a comment you made towards the start of your remarks, which was that under federal election law there are two categories of people who might promote debates in an election. Since your organisation has been established, have you had any rivals, anybody suggesting they would rather do it than you, or have you effectively now won the day so that you are the obvious and accepted vehicle for carrying on this particular form of political discussion?

Janet Brown: There are always rivals. This is a very visible franchise and there is always a group or groups of people who believe that they could do this better. If someone comes along who clearly is better able to serve the public interest then they should try their hand at this. The thing you learn when you go into the debate business is that many forces conspire to try to make these fall apart.

I have been asked who it is that the commission represents, whether it is the candidates, the media or the public. The answer is that the candidates and their campaigns have significant resources to pursue their objectives, which are very important in terms of victory in their campaign. The media are commercial entities that also have legitimate interests in trying to garner the maximum audience, readers, listeners, for their product. This is a news event and they are there to cover but, again, they should protect their interests and go about the coverage of these debates in the way that advances their own mission. The commission is here to represent the public that wants to see and hear these debates and see and hear them in a manner that is educational. At the end of the day, if we cannot bring all of the forces that threaten to fly apart because of their own interests in this, then we will not have succeeded on the part of the public. That is what we are here to do and it is why it is so important to try to keep one’s eye on the ball and make sure that that is the single mission that we try to do.

To go back to the original question, I think that one reason the commission has succeeded is that we have not taken on any other activities or issues. We do not have any other conflicts in terms of our involvement in the campaign. We do not represent what the candidates stand for; we do not poll; we do not lobby; we do not have any other hand in the electoral process. We have gone out of our way to make sure that our production team is seen as being a set of professionals who have supreme skills in terms of their production experience. It will bring to this programme the highest quality of skills and expertise when it comes to the actual production itself so that no one walks away from this and says that the commission in any way was biased or unfair towards one candidate, one party or whatever. That would be extremely improper. So the neutrality, the fairness and the absolute first-class reputation of the effort becomes extremely important. If it were seen that we were not pursing that kind of route, that would be wrong.

The Chairman: Who decides that you are going to do the debates rather than somebody else?

Janet Brown: That is a very good question, because the fact is there is no law in this country that mandates debates. There is no requirement that candidates debate and therefore there is no entity that decides who will sponsor and produce the debates. The two studies I mentioned, in 1985 and 1986, were conducted by people who had extensive debate and campaign experience. It was their opinion that if there were an entity that was


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put together with only this mission in mind, and whose board reflected impeccable leadership by people who understood the complexity of this and would only stand for the highest quality of neutral and substantive discussion, that was the best way to go about this. Fortunately that proved quite wise.

The Chairman: That is very interesting.

Q23 Baroness Bakewell: Can you tell us something about the commission itself? How is it funded, how is the board constituted and how is it organised? Does it meet regularly? Does it network? Can you expand that, please?

Janet Brown: We are a private corporation, Lady Bakewell, headquartered in Washington DC. We not only have to be in conformance with Federal Election Commission law but since we are a not-for-profit we have what is referred to as a non-profit tax exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service. Otherwise we operate like a private corporation. We have a very small staff. You are looking at half of us at the moment. The production team is all brought on for the debates themselves and consists of about 65 professionals who come together to do the production aspects of the debate. We have outside legal and accounting counsel and we have an 11-person board of directors that is very hands on in terms of the decisions and policies that we pursue and execute.

We are funded privately. The contributions to the commission that support our work come from the debate venues where we put on the debates, from corporations, foundations and occasionally individuals. We partner with a variety of other not-for-profits for the work that we do and those depend on whether these projects focus on the US debates or whether they focus on our work internationally, which increasingly is a very busy part of our portfolio, helping particularly emerging democracies that want to start their own debates and come to the commission for assistance. All the work is privately funded.

Q24 Baroness Bakewell: Could you tell me something about the 11 members of the board and whether they ever run into conflict of interest because of their other professional interests?

Janet Brown: The board is fastidious about making sure that there are no other activities that they undertake that would pose a conflict to their serving on the board of the commission. If there are, we discuss those and see whether or not it makes sense for them to step away from their work for the commission. Obviously they are people who have had extensive experience in the realm of public policy and politics along with other activities such as education. We have the president of Notre Dame on our board and we have former members of the United States Senate. It is an extraordinary collection of people who take their commitment to the CPD extremely importantly in terms of acting as a unit, regardless of what their past political involvement or preferences might be. But part of what we pursue very aggressively is to make sure that there are no activities that they undertake that might prove to be a conflict, particularly as one enters a general election time.

Q25 Baroness Bakewell: Do you have an ongoing process of assessment of success?

Janet Brown: Assessing success?

Baroness Bakewell: Do you measure how well you have done?

Janet Brown: The success of the debates in very large part is governed by looking at two things: how many people watch them and how many people cite the debates in exit polls as helping them make their minds up. In this country even a poorly watched debate of 35


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million is an audience that is many times greater than almost any other kind of television programming. A big audience of 70 million is second only to Super Bowl or something of that nature. So these audiences are absolutely huge and, of course, that is significant in a time when people have many other choices. When we got going, if the major television networks were carrying the debates there was little other choice in terms of what someone could watch. Now, of course, there is endless choice. The second metric that is valuable is that for many cycles now exit poll data show that people cite the debates more than any other single factor in how they decide to vote. That is not to say they are changing minds. That is to say that the people polled find them extremely helpful in how they decide how to vote.

Baroness Bakewell: Thank you. That is extremely helpful.

Q26 Lord Clement-Jones: Janet, could I come on to the question of relationship with the broadcasters? There is a big difference between your model and ours as they stand in terms of the role of the broadcasters. Here broadcasters make the programmes whereas, as you have explained, you make the programmes and make it available to the broadcasters. Can you say why you think it might not be easier or preferable to have the broadcasters on board in the production process? Are there any pitfalls associated with the rather limited role of the broadcasters as part of your commission model?

Janet Brown: Let me clarify something that I am not 100% sure I have made clear. The commission serves as the sponsor and producer of the debates. The way they are carried is that members of the White House television pool, which is the major networks, basically draw to decide who will cover the conventions and the debates. This is a system that they use for major live events, including the State of the Union. It is logistical as much as anything. It is driven by the fact that obviously you cannot have cameras and equipment representing all the major broadcasters in small spaces like Congress or the debates or venues like that.

When the members of the White House pool draw for coverage of the conventions they also draw for coverage of the debates. That happens sometime in the spring of the election year. What that means is that the commission will go to a debate site and carry out its responsibilities regarding production and sponsorship, which includes building the set, providing the lights, the microphones, the power, everything that you visually see when you turn on one of our debates. The pool network, which will be the one that drew for that particular debate, provides the cameras, the cameramen, the pool truck—which is in the parking lot outside and is taking the feeds from those cameras—and the director, who is the one calling the shots. That is the truck that puts the signal up, which is then taken by other members of the pool or entities that have purchased the right to take the feed.

One of the points that was interesting in your advance documents to me was the editorial discretion that resides with the networks, which is something that we respect enormously, and it continues to reside in the pool model because it is a network executive who is sitting in the director’s chair during the debate. It is the commission’s executive producer who is working with the moderator during the debate. As you can well imagine, this is a live event and you do not want the moderator to be taking direction from multiple people. The reason you choose an independent journalist as the moderator is that they will have the independence to run this debate as they have planned it. As you are probably aware, in our case the moderators alone know the questions and are in charge of the entire proceedings during the debates.

That is the model by which our networks are involved with the actual airing of the debates. That is their function and it is done through the White House pool. It is common that you will have at least three, if not more, members of the White House pool that serve as the


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pool network for our four debates. It is a rotating function. That is the model by which we do it. We work very closely with the networks because this is a huge responsibility and we want to try to do these in a way that is respectful of their needs, especially during a time of year that is particularly crowded on the network schedule where they have other contractual obligations that they must honour. I am happy to say—and you will hear Bill Wheatley on this subject—that we believe that our relationship with the networks has been one that has been very positive and has worked well through the years.

Lord Clement-Jones: That is very clear indeed. You have a single broadcaster member of the pool for each of the individual debates and you have this production/direction split, which is also extremely clear. Do you ever feel that there are any difficulties about that production/direction split or about the responsiveness of your production values as far as engagement with the public is concerned? Are there any downsides to that split?

Janet Brown: I have to say, Sir, I think it works quite well. If the public found this unsatisfactory, if they believed that we had a thumb on the scale, they would vote with their remotes. They would turn these off and would find them untrustworthy. As you emphasise, it is a terribly important relationship, probably unlike any other. There are no contracts. This is something that we work on together as teammates and, to be completely honest, honour and trust need to be paramount.

Lord Clement-Jones: Thank you.

Q27 Lord Dubs: You will be aware that in this country the regulatory framework for broadcasting is rather different from that in the United States and that our broadcasters are expected to be impartial in the way they put things over. That being the case, would you like to comment on whether the commission model you have would apply in this country or whether our regulatory system suggests we ought to go down a different path?

Janet Brown: I do not feel qualified, Lord Dubs—as much as I tried to study your system—to comment on whether our model would work in the UK. I think that the most important thing that was done when the commission was created, and the best piece of advice I could give anyone else when they take this issue under consideration, is to try to understand that if the objective is to put on a series of fora that educate the public, how is that most efficiently achieved? Can it be done by simply trying to organise discussions between the parties, the media and whoever it is who will be responsible for putting this together? Is it helpful to have a neutral broker that takes on that role and that represents the public’s interest? What is the mechanism that works in the social, political and regulatory environment that exists in one country as opposed to another that will not only work but will be accepted and respected by the public? The thing to remember—and this sometimes surprises our friends in emerging democracies that we work with—is that everything continually conspires to pull these apart, because they are very visible events that take place in the last few weeks of the election. At the end of the day, if someone can find a reason to try to minimise the number of debates or their value because it serves their interest, that is what they will try to do. To be honest, that is a legitimate concern for campaigns or for members of the media or whatever.

It becomes terribly important to try to understand, assuming that one thinks there is educational value in these fora, using airtime that is terribly valuable, how that best comes together. How is it most efficient to try to bring these events to pass and once they come to pass that people walk away and say, “That was a good discussion, I learnt something and I hope there will be more”?


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Q28 Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: Ms Brown, obviously you are quite rightly proud of your record in voter education as demonstrated by the exit polls. That is very interesting. You say that the commission has an ongoing goal of educating voters beyond producing and sponsoring the presidential debates. Could you tell us about the activities you undertake in this respect and which are particularly impactful? Also, not disconnected with that, how do you ensure that your activities and judgments are sufficiently transparent, understood and accountable to the US public?

Janet Brown: Lady Healy, what we do around the debates is to try to use them as vehicles not only to educate voters about the candidates, the parties and the issues but particularly to get young people involved in understanding why this matters. One of the things that I do that is a lot of fun is to go around and talk to kids who are in high school, some of whom are eligible to register and vote and some of whom are just getting there. In this country if you are a member of the debate team it is assumed that you are a brainy member of your class who is already understanding the kinds of things that happen in debate, which to other kids may seem a little inaccessible. I like to remind them that as soon as they have tried to persuade a teacher that they need an extension on their term paper or tried to persuade dad that they should have the keys to the car this Saturday, they are debating. They are trying to persuade, they are trying to convince somebody else in a position of authority, or at least meaningfulness, that their position is the one that should prevail. So if you can try to help kids understand that debating is about something that we all do all the time, that the issues the candidates are discussing at every level of elections in this country will matter to them, that the people who are elected will make decisions that will affect them, then you can try to draw them into the process and find a way that they can take ownership of the debates and ancillary activities.

We have purposefully chosen to go to college and university campuses to do these debates. The ripple effect that the debates have in the communities are just extraordinary in terms of not only the curricular editions that the universities add to their own programmes and the speakers and similar one-off events, but then the work that they do within the county and the state to involve kids at a lower grade level in understanding why this is important—it is truly inspiring. We try to do many of those kinds of activities, not only around the presidential debates but also, for instance, this year, when there is a mid-term election where all members of the United States House are up for election, as are one third of our Senate, and there are a lot of mayor and governor races. We get a lot of inquiries from the sponsors of the debates that will be going on in these races to understand how they can maximise the educational value of this. It is very hard to quantify the impact of that, but I can tell you that there is very little downtime at the commission, given the inquiries that have to do with how you try to use these events in a way that will make people feel as though they belong to the public, and particularly to younger members of the public who should feel as though this matters to them too.

Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: Thank you very much. That is very helpful.

Q29 Lord Razzall: You may well have answered already, in your reply to Lord Dubs, the question that I wanted to ask, but perhaps I can press you a little bit on the differences. To some extent we are in a situation of two countries divided by a common language here because, as Lord Dubs indicated, we have a very different regulatory framework here for broadcasts. Given that we have explained that and obviously, as you rightly said, you perhaps do not know quite enough about our structure or would not wish to be an expert—although I think you are doing pretty well—your educational point we would, I suspect, say is dealt with by the way our broadcasts were dealt with last time, which of course was the


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first time. I think there is polling evidence that more young people voted as a result of watching those debates than would have done otherwise. We are in a 1961 situation here in that it is not yet decided whether or not there are going to be any further debates, so we are where you were all that time ago. Having heard what we have had to say, would you feel that it would be better for us to have a third-party commission on the lines that you have described to us rather than the way we run our debates? I know it is a hard question. You answered Lord Dubs that you perhaps did not know enough about our regulatory framework to judge, but what is your feeling, having heard what we had to say?

Janet Brown: There is much to commend having an objective, neutral, independent debate-sponsoring organisation. It certainly can look different than ours does, but I do think that if you step away from the commission’s model and you bear in mind the objective of debates, which is to educate the public, then in most environments it is possible to conceive of an entity that can be put together—perhaps built on something that already exists or perhaps from scratch—that can serve this function and facilitate bringing the other groups to the table. If I am right, there are at least two Members of your Committee that have extensive journalism experience and I think that they would be able, better than I, to understand how it is possible to meet the sensibilities of the media whose job it is to cover these events. Obviously all of you are in the business of public policy and politics and can understand the sensitivities of the parties and the candidates. It becomes easier to find how to bring these events about if you have an entity that can serve as the broker for these other totally legitimate, competing interests.

Lord Razzall: The three major free-to-air channels got together and made a proposal to the three main parties as to how the debate should be run. There were pretty heavy negotiations going on between the three main parties and the broadcasters as to the criteria and the rules for the debate. That is what happened with us last time and I think the three main free-to air-channels did operate as one in those discussions. One broadcaster did not try to pick another broadcaster off in the way that their debate was going to be shown. So in a way that function that you provide was provided by a collective agreement between the three main free-to-air channels. Whether that would happen again, who knows?

Q30 The Chairman: I see from the clock that the time is running on so we are drawing to a close, but before we finally do I would like to ask you three slightly disparate but nevertheless connected questions that arise from what is being said and what you have kindly told us. First, do you think it is conceivable in your country that you could have a presidential election without a series of election debates? Secondly, one of the points that has been put to us in the particular context of our system is about who takes the decision about which candidates might appear. We have three or four parties whose leaders will be making a pitch to appear in the potential prime ministerial debates. Do you think that being on the television, being included in the debates to some extent, is a precondition of being able to get the support that is necessary? I think in your country Ross Perot appeared in some of the debates some years ago but otherwise it has been the Democrats and the Republicans. Finally, am I right in assuming from what you have told us that in terms of running these debates successfully, regardless of what structure may surround their being put on, what is absolutely important above everything else is the fact that they are perceived as being honest, honourable and trustworthy?

Janet Brown: In answer to the first question, Mr Chairman, I think absent an extraordinary national security crisis or something similar, it is hard to envision circumstances in which no debates would take place during a general election period here.


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In terms of the argument that candidates must be included in order to get the kind of support that is necessary to be elected, that is an argument that we hear frequently here, that absent television time one cannot get the kind of public support that makes for a viable candidacy. In the United States in any given general election year there are roughly 160 people that register with the Federal Election Commission as candidates for President or Vice-President of the United States and a number of them believe that if they could get significant television time they would in fact have strong, viable candidacies. What is very clear is that, when you are a matter of weeks away from the election, what the public want to see is the small number of candidates from whom the next President will be chosen. Indeed, as you saw in 1980 in this country, when former Congressman Anderson was included as an independent candidate in the first debate, Mr Carter, then the incumbent President, declined to participate so that it was only his challenger, then Governor Reagan, who was in the debate with Anderson and they did not in fact have the incumbent. Mr Anderson was not included in the second debate, which featured the incumbent and his challenger. We did include Mr Perot in 1992, as you mentioned.

It is an extremely difficult issue and there are suggestions that perhaps there be fora earlier in the general election process, whether it is in this country or other places, that could include more of the independent and third-party candidates whose views would be aired at an earlier time during the election and give the public a chance to hear from those people. That is a separate question. That is not one that we are chartered to be responsible for.

I am sorry, I am not sure I heard the end of the third question.

The Chairman: The point I was putting to you was that, if you are going to have debates that are important in the presidential or general election campaign, the most important thing of all is that they are perceived by the public as being honest, honourable and trustworthy and that this is more important than the mechanics of how to put it together.

Janet Brown: Yes. Obviously if you put the debates together and the mechanics fail then you have dropped the ball. Perhaps the best example, without pointing any fingers, is that in 1976 in one of the Ford-Carter debates in Philadelphia there was a 27-minute silence when the power failed. That is obviously something that keeps production crews awake at night. It is the reason we have triple redundancy on every component that goes into the debate hall. That was a very bad situation that needless to say not only did not serve the public well but left the candidates—you can imagine, all of you, how painful it is to think about—standing in silence on a stage in front of millions of viewers for 27 minutes wondering what was going on.

So the mechanics of course are critical because you do not want to take 90-minute blocks of airtime during prime time a matter of weeks before an election and squander them. That is just wrong. But assuming that you can ensure the soundness of the production, the seriousness of the discussion, then I believe that the neutrality and fairness of the sponsoring organisation, the equal hand of the moderator in terms of asking questions that are not only fair but totally substantive and designed to focus attention on the candidates and not on the moderator, are central to walking away from these fora and feeling as though you have served the public, that you have done a respectable and dignified job in making sure that events that are unlike anything else that takes place during the general election were A-plus and that people will look back on those nights and say, “That was helpful”.

Q31 The Chairman: All I can say is I would like to think that the mechanics of this session have been in line with what you have just described. I am glad that nobody has been left with a blank screen for 25 or 45 minutes, whatever it was. A very big thank you for that.


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Finally, is there anything you would like to say to us that we have not touched on and you feel is important?

Janet Brown: I would like to say thank you. It is a great honour to talk to your group. We are very proud of what we do here and it is a particular honour to be talking to your group, representative of your Government. We are very grateful to be included in your inquiry. I would like to say that there are so many questions in the debate business that I wish somebody had been able to answer for us when we started the commission. It took a lot of aspirin and other remedies. If there is any way as you go forward that we can answer questions of any kind we would be privileged to do so.

The Chairman: You have been extremely kind and helpful. I am sure I am speaking for every Member of the Committee in the House of Lords here to say thank you very much indeed for what you have told us. We are most grateful. Thank you.

Memorandum by Professor Colin Davis

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Memorandum by Professor Colin Davis Professor of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol 1. During the 2010 General Election my colleagues and I conducted an experiment that has important implications for the broadcasting of televised election debates. This research was published in the open access journal PLoS One, and can be downloaded from the following address: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0018154 2. Our experiment concerned the so-called “worm” – the squiggly line that often accompanies televised election debates. This line is supposed to represent the views of undecided voters, moving up when a candidate says something the voters endorse, and down when a candidate says something they don't like. The worm was a prominent feature of ITV's coverage of the Leaders’ Debates during the last UK election; similar devices were used by the BBC and the Guardian. The worm is not unique to the UK – it has attracted considerable controversy in Australia and New Zealand, with some candidates arguing that the worm had been “rigged” to be biased against them. Even without any deliberate bias it's very unlikely that the worm provides an accurate indication of the views of undecided voters, given that it is based on such a small sample (20 people in the case of ITV's worm and a mere 12 voters in the case of the BBC worm). 3. We asked 150 people to watch the live broadcast of the final General Election debate in 2010 – a version that included the worm – and then answer a few questions. Unbeknownst to the participants, the worm that they saw was not based on a panel of undecided voters – it was manipulated by us. One group saw a worm that was biased in favour of Gordon Brown, while for another group it favoured Nick Clegg. Although the debate was identical in all other respects, the two groups had completely different ideas about who had won the debate. The group that saw a worm which favoured Gordon Brown thought that he had won the debate, whereas the group that saw the worm which favoured Nick Clegg overwhelmingly thought that he was the winner. More worryingly, we saw a similar effect when we asked people about their choice of preferred Prime Minister. If people had been voting immediately after this debate, it seems likely that our manipulation could have had a significant effect on how they voted. 4. On the basis of our findings we argue that there is a strong case against broadcasting the average responses of a small sample of undecided voters simultaneously with the General Election debates. Millions of voters who watch such broadcasts will be exposed to social influence processes that we know can be very powerful. If the final election result is very close it will be difficult to rule out the possibility that the outcome has been affected by the views of an unrepresentative sample. The public interest would be well served by ensuring that the arrangements governing the broadcast of the debates prohibit the simultaneous broadcast of the worm. 2 January 2014

http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0018154

Memorandum by the Electoral Commission

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Memorandum by the Electoral Commission 1. The Electoral Commission welcomes the opportunity to submit written evidence to the

Committee on the management and operation of broadcast general election debates in the UK.

The Electoral Commission’s current role in broadcast matters 2. Ofcom and the BBC Trust are responsible for regulating the respective broadcasters

that fall within their remit operate at election time as they do for all other periods. Each of the broadcasters also have duties requiring their impartiality and appropriate balance in the political programming they provide. However, the Electoral Commission does also have a role in relation to broadcasting during an election period.

3. With respect to the commercial broadcasters, Ofcom has a statutory duty under

section 93 of the Representation of the People Act 1983 (as amended)(“the RPA”) to adopt a code of practice with respect to the participation of candidates at a parliamentary or local government election in broadcast items about the constituency or electoral area in question. Before drawing up such a code of practice, Ofcom must have regard to any views expressed by the Electoral Commission.

4. The BBC is also required by law to adopt a code of practice at each election to govern

the participation of candidates in each constituency or electoral area. In doing so, the BBC is required to "have regard to any views expressed by the Electoral Commission".

5. We believe this system works well. For instance, it enables us to provide advice on how

the terminology and approach used by the BBC and Ofcom in their guidance and codes can be consistent with other areas of the electoral system. This helps ensure that it is better understood by those in the electoral community, such as political parties, who may need to look at it.

6. To help inform the advice that we provide in this area, we also attend as an observer at

the Broadcasters' Liaison Group36. This Group includes representation from the BBC and a range of commercial broadcasters and is used to discuss issues to do with Party Election Broadcasts.

Ofcom’s rules on party political and referendum broadcasts 7. In November 2012, Ofcom launched a consultation reviewing its rules on party political

and referendum broadcasts and their guidance for the broadcast coverage of elections37. In this consultation, Ofcom acknowledged that leadership debates are ‘now likely to become an established feature across the UK’ and the nature of the Committee’s inquiry reflects this. Ofcom also set out at that time its view that the editorial content of these is a matter for the broadcaster and if they do broadcast them they must comply with the rules on electoral area reports or discussions.

36 See - http://www.broadcastersliaisongroup.org.uk/about.html 37 See - http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/consultations/ppbs/summary/condoc.pdf

http://www.broadcastersliaisongroup.org.uk/about.html

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/consultations/ppbs/summary/condoc.pdf

Memorandum by the Electoral Commission

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8. The leadership debates at the 2010 UK general election were clearly seen as a very significant feature of the campaign ahead of that election. We agreed with Ofcom at the time of their consultation that the structure and format of any future debates – if there is agreement to hold them – should be considered by the broadcasters within their overall duty to ensure impartiality. As part of this there will be many issues to consider, including any related coverage parties receive that are not directly part of the main debates between party leaders.

9. The Electoral Commission does not have any fixed view about how such impartiality is

best achieved. However, given the significance likely to be attached to the debates, we suggested to Ofcom during its consultation that it might wish to discuss with the broadcasters it regulates whether or not additional guidance would help in advance of the 2015 UK general election.

The relationship between the Electoral Commission and any new ‘Debates Commission’ 10. In its Call for Evidence, the Committee specifically asks what the relationship should be

between any new ‘Debate Commission’ and the Electoral Commission. 11. As the Committee notes, there will be merit in exploring as part of the inquiry any

international evidence regarding the establishment of such bodies. However, if such a body was established, similar provisions to those outlined above requiring it to consult us on any relevant codes and guidance it was responsible for producing would seem sensible. We would not envisage our role stretching beyond this, but would recommend such a provision to provide consistency in our role between the commercial broadcasters, the BBC and any new Debates Commission.

January 2014

Tim Gardam and Professor Stephen Coleman – Oral evidence (QQ 86-103)

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Tim Gardam and Professor Stephen Coleman – Oral evidence (QQ 86-103) Transcript to be found under Professor Stephen Coleman

Phil Harding and Professor Stewart Purvis – oral evidence (QQ 70-85)

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Members present

Lord Inglewood (Chairman) Baroness Bakewell Lord Clement-Jones Baroness Deech Lord Dubs Baroness Fookes Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill Lord Razzall Earl of Selborne Lord Skelmersdale ________________


Professor Stewart Purvis, City University, London, and Phil Harding, media consultant and former Controller of Editorial Policy, BBC.

Q70 The Chairman: I extend a warm welcome to Phil Harding and Stewart Purvis. We have your CVs in front of us and, suffice to say, you are two very well qualified people to give us an overview of the topic we are discussing. Thank you very much for coming along. Perhaps the best place to start is to ask each of you, first of all, to just introduce yourselves and then, secondly, if you have any formal opening statement each or either of you would like to make, please feel free to do it; whoever wants to start.

Professor Purvis: Phil, do you want to introduce yourself?

Phil Harding: Yes. I am Phil Harding. I am a journalist and I am a broadcaster. My background is that I was, for a long time, at the BBC until 2007. I was a producer on just about every general election from 1970 onwards. Then, most recently at the BBC, I was chief political adviser, which means I was in charge of all political policy at the BBC as regards programmes.

Then I was controller of editorial policy, which also meant that I had an overview of political policy and, indeed, the chief political adviser worked for me. I was involved in two unsuccessful, aborted negotiations to get party leader debates to happen and since then I have worked in various capacities as a consultant on various boards and so on.

Professor Purvis: I am Stewart Purvis and I started at the BBC on the same day as Phil Harding, as two of the three first ever BBC news trainees. I then took the commercial shilling and joined ITN, where I went on to become a chief executive. When I retired from


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that post, I went to City University as a professor. I then spent two and a half years at Ofcom as the partner for content and standards.

I was the de facto regulator of British broadcasting content at the last election and so I will speak from some experience of some of the things that happened last time. I am now back at the university and writing and doing various research. I should say, if you do not already have it, I am also a non-executive director at Channel 4 but I am speaking in my own capacity.

The Chairman: Fine, thank you. You have also been an expert adviser to this Committee.

Professor Purvis: I have indeed—I am honoured—on the subject of BBC governance, to which the Committee may return at some point. Who can tell?

The Chairman: That is always a possibility.

Professor Purvis: Chairman, now that you have heard from British broadcasters and from American experts, I have taken the liberty to offer the Committee what I would describe as a two-minute summary of the two models you have had put to you.

The Chairman: Right, we will engage in a two-minute silence and you can—

Professor Purvis: Exactly, okay. First of all, obviously to take the UK 2010 model, it is best to understand that the three broadcasters decided to do certain things jointly. They decided which political parties to invite, they negotiated the rules with them and then they published the rules. The broadcasters then agreed the locations, the themes of the debates and which of them would produce each debate.

Then they did things individually. They chose one of their own anchors as the anchor or the moderator of their debate. They designed their own branding and their own sets around their own debate. They organised selection panels for audience questions and they provided all the production facilities and they paid for it all. Each transmitted its own debate. Not many in truth, but some transmitted each other’s debates. Of course, each broadcast had to comply with the due impartiality regulations and other regulations and what, in Ofcom’s case, are known as the special impartiality requirements relating to elections.

By comparison, the US 2012 model seems to me to have been that the Commission on Presidential Debates, as required by federal regulations, set what is called a “pre-established objective criteria” to determine which candidates they were going to invite to debate. They chose an average of at least 15% of popular support as measured by five different pollsters and two candidates met those criteria.

The commission themselves chose the times, the locations, the branding, the sets and the moderators who, we were told, had the final say on the questions. Commercial sponsors paid for all this. The commission announced what it called the debate’s format but then Time Magazine published a secret memorandum on further rules that had been agreed separately and only between party managers. Meanwhile, the broadcasters themselves would agree on who would provide the—

The Chairman: Can I stop you there? Those rules were agreed once it was clear who was going to take part.

Professor Purvis: Yes. I would say this document—if you have not seen it already—is an extremely interesting read because, to me, it says everything that is wrong about the commission’s system but we can return to that in due course. I thought the intriguing thing was that when the debates happened the candidates did not seem to obey the rules decided by their own party managers. Briefly to say, of course, the broadcasters, on what is called a pool basis, decided who would provide the technical facilities and they paid for the technical


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facilities. Of course, there are no requirements for due impartiality in the United States, so those kind of rules that we have in Britain did not apply. That is my two-minute summary for you, Chairman. I hope it is something that—

The Chairman: Thank you. Apologies for interrupting, I just wanted to check that one point.

Professor Purvis: Not at all.

The Chairman: It is helpful to have laid out that kind of skeleton picture. Would anybody like to ask any questions arising out of Stewart’s—

Q71 Baroness Bakewell: I keep asking you the question about how much it costs to make the programmes and you say that each company paid for the programme that it was doing. Did some put more money in than others and would it matter?

Professor Purvis: We are talking about the British model.

Baroness Bakewell: Yes.

Professor Purvis: I do not think it is in the public domain as to what the cost sharing—

Baroness Bakewell: You will know.

Professor Purvis: No, in fact, although I was one of the regulators at the time, it is not a question that we needed to ask. As I think Mr Dan Brooke made the point, the level of cost involved would be enough for those around the table to be able to afford it. Even the smallest network in size and audience, Sky News, as part of BSkyB, would be more than well-funded to provide it. I do not think there is a problem about that.

Baroness Bakewell: It is not relevant to the—

Professor Purvis: No, no.

Phil Harding: I would guess the costs are roughly comparable and if you are a broadcaster and you get a chance to do the party leader debates you are going to spend whatever it takes to do it anyway.

The Chairman: It is probably not very expensive television, is it?

Phil Harding: No, it is not. It is not compared with drama, no.

Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.

Q72 The Chairman: I shall ask you a very general question. All of the witnesses we have heard have said that they consider that last time’s debates were a success. Would you agree, each of you and what particular reasons would you have for your view?

Phil Harding: I would say, yes, they were a success. Part of the reason for the success was that they happened at all, which obviously was a big first in British broadcasting and electoral terms. It was in the public interest and it was good for viewers to be able to see the party leaders at length in comparison with each other and in debate, if a limited debate, with each other. That certainly was a good thing.

It certainly seems to have engaged viewers and voters and there may or may not be some evidence that it helped put the turnout rate up as well. It certainly seems to have excited more interest among younger voters and those sections of the population who are


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sometimes more reluctant to vote, but—and from my point of view there is a “but”—there was a downside to the debates as well. I do think that the debates came to dominate the campaign too much. They were always going to be the centrepiece of the campaign but they almost became the whole campaign.

It almost became the case that the party leaders spent all their time either debating or preparing for the debates and that was to the detriment of the rest of the campaign. Whether that will settle down if there is a second set of debates we have to see, but there is a danger that the television debates become the whole campaign and there is no other campaign. I do not think that would be in the public interest or healthy for democracy.

The Chairman: Do you know if it was partly to do with novelty?

Phil Harding: Yes, partly to do with novelty, which is why I say it will be interesting to see, if there is a second set of debates, what happens this time around. It will settle down. The experience from America obviously is that they remain a centrepiece of the debates but they do not become the whole campaign.

Lord Razzall: To some extent your point, which I share, is dictated by the timing of the debate. One of the problems last time was that you did not end with a debate in the last week. The campaign rather built up to a climax with the last debate and then the political parties were struggling with what to do for the last week or so. If the debates are going to dominate the landscape, if they happen, you could have one in the last week, which would mean that you would end with a bang.

Phil Harding: Yes. It is obviously going to be easier to schedule the debates this time around.

Lord Razzall: Because you know the dates, yes.

Phil Harding: We know when the election is. We know what the date is and the build-up and so on. It is going to be harder with the existence of four broadcasters for the reasons you were talking about earlier.

Baroness Bakewell: Who do you blame for that? Do you think the parties themselves become obsessed with getting ready for the debate?

Phil Harding: I do not think I would blame anybody. This was largely untested ground. It was obviously a very high-profile thing to be doing and no party leader wanted to be seen to be “losing” any of the debates. I am not sure “blame” is a word I would use.

Baroness Bakewell: No.

Professor Purvis: I agree with everything Phil said. The broadcasters certainly, and I am sure the parties, have taken on board this issue about what is the right gap between the debates and what is the right timing for them in terms of polling day. I have been involved in the coverage of elections off and on since about 1974 and this was, undoubtedly, the most exciting moment in British broadcasting of elections and I say it was the most important in terms of reaching viewers and voters. I put it as high as that.

One element that does not get mentioned very often is that the pace of the debates was important. Pace is one of those elements in television that does not get talked about in public so much, but keeping the viewer absorbed and interested and connected is terribly important. Some credit goes to Alastair Stewart of ITV who set a very strong pace in the first debate. It kept the party leaders tight in the sense that they knew they could not waffle. It was long enough for them to make some serious points without being forced to headlines.


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This was not written down in the format. That is just the way it turned out and it flowed through all three debates.

The Chairman: Did it give the candidates enough rope to be able to hang themselves, do you think?

Professor Purvis: It did but, of course, inevitably that takes us to the question of supplementary questions from either the moderator or from the audience. That is probably the most difficult issue to resolve easily without getting into quite difficult waters. Looking at the document I mentioned, the role of the moderators is clearly an issue that absorbed the American debate system. In the United States there was a bit of a row about one thing one moderator said.

Of course, what we should not forget is that certainly when I was at Ofcom there was almost a test case about one moderator in one of our debates—and it happened to be Adam Boulton of Sky News—who did ask a supplementary question that appeared, to some people, to be a breach of the rules and yet he was raising something that was in that morning’s newspapers that people might have reasonably expected to be raised. It is a good example if you want to look for an example of the rights and wrongs of supplementary questions.

On regulation, in my view Ofcom correctly decided that Ofcom and, I am sure, the BBC Trust did not regard their role as to enforce the rules. If something happens in the programme that is a breach of the rules between the broadcasters and the politicians and the parties, that is for them to sort out. It is not for regulators to do anything.

The Chairman: As long as it is within the framework for broadcasting of electoral debates.

Professor Purvis: Exactly, absolutely.

Q73 The Chairman: Another point that has been raised with people is there has been a general concern across society for some time that politics is becoming more presidential in this country. Do you think this phenomenon of debates is driving that process forward or do you think it is a function of it or do you think it is disconnected?

Professor Purvis: It is difficult to put a date on it from the top of my head. I think it is a reality from the time that Central Office and Transport House, as they used to be called, stopped Ministers making interesting speeches because they wanted only the party leader to make interesting speeches. In a sense, if you look at the coverage, it has never been the same since. The days when, certainly at ITN, we used to follow junior ministers and junior spokesmen around in the hope that they would say the wrong thing do not happen very often now. They had decided a long time ago that the prime ministerial or presidential style was the way to do it and this is almost a confirmation of that. I do not know what you think.

Phil Harding: It is a bit of both. It certainly does not reverse the trend towards it being a more presidential type of contest. That is part of the reason why I do think that something like the Chancellors’ debate would be very important in the public interest and there are these other occasions where you do see other frontbenchers. Although there has been a great centralisation of power towards the Prime Minister and, indeed, towards the leader of the opposition, who the whole Government is, who the Ministers are and their capabilities does matter a lot.

I thought “The Daily Politics”, for example, on the BBC did a good job of putting up the various party spokespeople against each other. Admittedly it was a bit of a minority sport compared with the party leaders’ debates, but I do think it is very important that there


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continues to be that breadth of campaign, which is why I said what I said about the danger of the party leader debates overshadowing everything else.

The Chairman: From what you have both said, I take it that you believe it is in everybody’s best interests that they should happen again in 2015.

Professor Purvis: Absolutely.

Phil Harding: Yes.

Q74 Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: I shall talk about the presidential aspect, and you have made clear that you do not favour the commission formula. It has been put to us that the regulatory framework in the UK is already something of a guarantor of the public interest when it comes to the broadcasting of general election debates and you have given some illustration of that. Could you describe how you understand the regulatory framework here to set the context in which the debates take place and ensure the public interest is served? In particular, what is your understanding of the way the regulatory framework over the BBC and the commercial broadcasters, respectively, shape the decisions about which parties can take part in the prime ministerial debates?

Professor Purvis: The latter point you make is particularly important. I do not think there is as much clarity about that as we might think. The obvious main regulatory points are that the Parliament set the statutory framework. It set up regulators. The regulators consulted on the codes. The broadcasters try to observe the codes. That is the overall public good that comes from it.

In Ofcom’s case, you then have section 5, which includes the normal due impartiality rules and they apply, just as in an election. In addition, under section 6, you get the special requirements. Probably the key one is, “Due weight must be given to the coverage of major parties during an election period.” It is worth noting that, in my experience, “due weight” does not equal “equal weight”. They are not the same things. For instance, on party election broadcasts a major party on the major party list does not necessarily get the same number of party election broadcasts as another party.

When there were challenges last time—in fact they entirely came from the SNP and Plaid Cymru—about the role of what we might call parties in the nations, it was not, frankly, too difficult for the regulators to say, “This is a UK-wide election. This is about party representation of UK-wide parties rather than nations’ parties”. Both those processes led to the SNP and Plaid Cymru being disappointed.

No one who runs a UK-wide party who was not at the table objected. I do not think we should assume that would be the case this time. I look back through all the literature and there are these certain imprecisions on the broadcasters’ part in the criteria for appearing. At various times it said, “The three men hoping to be the leader of the Government; the three individuals who could realistically aspire to become Prime Minister of the UK”.

I thought Ric Bailey, in his piece for the Reuters Institute, had an interesting extra line. He said, “An important principle for the corporation”, meaning the BBC, “was that, for a Westminster election, the participants should be the leaders of the three biggest parties in the House of Commons”. That is the clearest criteria I have ever seen, but that was a retrospective statement. There is no explanation of why it is three and not two or four or some other number.

The implication from your discussions is that if you are a major party you automatically get a seat at this table. I was a member of the Election Committee at Ofcom that looked at the


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SNP and Plaid appeals and we never said that. We never said, “If you are a major party in the UK you automatically get a seat”. There is an imprecision around that. The American model, as we discussed, had this pre-established objective criteria. In other words, the commission publishes their criteria; then they look at the polls and they see who has met the criteria. They do it before each debate.

In other words, if somebody surged up the polls and passed 15% they might appear in a later debate, even though they have not appeared in an earlier debate. We do not have anything like that. That is probably going too far. I suppose what I would suggest is that the moment the negotiations are finished and the rules are announced there should be absolute precision and clarity about why some people are there and why some people are not there.

Q75 The Chairman: Is there not a difference between imprecision before the decision as to the identities achieved and afterwards?

Professor Purvis: Absolutely, Chairman, which is why I have not gone as far as to support the American model on that clause because it might be seen as tying the hands of the broadcasters unreasonably, but I do think that the moment the process is finished—and I am almost speaking on behalf of the regulators at this point, not that they have asked me to—when they inevitably are going to look at appeals and challenges, they need to know what the criteria were that the broadcasters used, otherwise how can they judge?

The final point I would make on major parties—I think the point was made to you—is that that is an Ofcom term. It is not a term that the BBC Trust uses. It could not stand up in any court as affecting the BBC because they have never signed up for it.

Phil Harding: As somebody who has written the BBC’s election guidelines in the past, I would say that a certain amount of ambiguity is deliberately written into them. You do not want to absolutely have your hands tied and be too precise because you can then find yourself legislating in very difficult circumstances. A certain amount of ambiguity, certainly from the broadcasters’ point of view, is a very helpful thing. The BBC is pretty explicit. If you look at the current guidelines out for consultation on the European elections, they are pretty explicit about what the criteria are. They say, “Their performance at the last equivalent election, in terms of representation and share of the vote, performance in subsequent elections, where relevant, other evidence of current electoral support and the number of candidates they are fielding in the election.”

Obviously that is a multifactor set of criteria, but it does seem to me to be fairly explicit and then they lay out at considerable length where they are taking their data from and where they get all that from. At least the factors that are going to be taken into account, if not a precise formula, are pretty explicitly laid out.

There is one other point I would like to make, Chair, about impartiality and it partly relates to something you asked about in the last session as well, which you began to touch on, and it relates to this question of the commission and impartiality. I do not think, certainly in the UK context, you can box off impartiality about the debates into just the leaders’ debates. It is a continuum of coverage that a broadcaster has to be responsible for in terms of impartiality. Of course, you have to take into account the debates in the nations, which become an important part of the patchwork.

You also have to take into account other places where the party leaders can appear and where they get coverage. The idea that you could have boxed-off party leader debates and then you had one body being responsible for the impartiality there and then for the broadcasters having to pick up all the bits that were left behind by having the party leader


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debates would not be workable. The whole thing is a patchwork of impartiality. It is not just about the leader debates. I know you have talked about that, but I just wanted to lay that out a little more forcibly.

Q76 Baroness Fookes: Would you recommend the criteria that you have just read out for the European elections being adapted for the Westminster elections on the leaders’ arrangements?

Phil Harding: I would be very surprised if they are not extraordinarily similar when the criteria for the general election are laid out and they seem a pretty good set of criteria to me.

Professor Purvis: Sorry, can I interrupt for a second? I think we should clarify: meeting those criteria does not necessarily get you a seat at a prime ministerial debate, does it?

Phil Harding: No.

Professor Purvis: It gets you a party election broadcast and it gets you a certain amount of coverage in the campaign coverage, but it does not say anywhere that, as a result of meeting those criteria, you get a seat at the table.

Phil Harding: Nor indeed does it set thresholds as to what the levels of support will be and so on.

Baroness Fookes: Professor Purvis, what would you suggest?

Professor Purvis: This may lead into something else. I just feel that the broadcasters need to be a little bit more formal, a little bit more organised and a little bit clearer about some of the things they do, without losing the flexibility. I embrace some of the things that Channel 4 said about your needing to say at the front what exactly is the purpose of the debates and what they are trying to achieve from the debates. They need to be clearer about the criteria on which they finally decide to hold the debates and, for instance—they are other little bits of business but they matter—they need to be clear on this point of who else can join this group.

I regard it as a consortium if you take a consortium to be a group of different organisations who all have different purposes but have come together for a common purpose. I think that is probably what a consortium is in the best sense of the word. I think you need some rights and responsibilities of being in the consortium. You need to know if other people can join the consortium. You need to know the rules about passing on that material to other people and what they can and cannot do with it, the same way as when this House, many years ago, first established broadcasting. There were very clear rules for us as broadcasters about what could happen to the footage we were shooting. In terms of the whole message about the public engagement with elections, I think there is a role for the broadcasters and I think they should embrace that and grasp it.

Phil Harding: I agree with all of that. I just get worried if you start putting numbers against any of these criteria, as the Americans have done.

Baroness Fookes: Not all that broad but not desperately narrow and not related just to figures.

Professor Purvis: Yes.

The Chairman: Slightly more verbally explicit.

Professor Purvis: Yes, slightly more.


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Q77 Lord Clement-Jones: Can we just come to format? You heard from Channel 4 when we were taking evidence. They clearly feel that the 2010 debates were rather too constricted by the rules that were applied. I think they would prefer to see an overarching set of principles and then more freedom to determine different formats for the different broadcasters. What are your views on the format of the 2010 debates and how they can be improved to provide greater public value?

Phil Harding: Certainly, looking back at them again in the last week, they did look dreadfully stilted. It did look like a very set formula and I am not sure that is entirely in the public interest. I understand how they got there and why they had the formula and the 71 rules and all of that. I entirely understand how they got there, but I do think there needs to be a loosening up of the format. Above all, it did seem strange to me, for example, that the questioner, if the question was coming from the audience, never had the chance to come back with a follow-up question. It just seemed counter-intuitive, in a way, and that did seem to be difficult.

Now, of course, there are all sorts of issues about impartiality and everything, but the managers of the BBC’s programme ‘Question Time’ seem to manage that perfectly satisfactorily, about follow-up questions. More interaction with the audience I certainly would like to see, and I certainly think, although it does raise difficult issues but not impossible issues, some sort of interactivity through second screens and being able to raise questions online and through Twitter and all of that, yes.

Lord Clement-Jones: What about the diversity issue, from your point of view?

Phil Harding: Well, on one side you have—

Lord Clement-Jones: You have seen that we wrestle with that.

Phil Harding: You have the candidates and, therefore, you have who you have. On the other side, I think the broadcasters are going to have to look at that collectively. I do not know how they will do that as part of the consortium, but if it is four debates this time you cannot end up with four white men.

Lord Clement-Jones: As the interviewer, presenter or whatever?

Phil Harding: Yes. On the other hand, when you go through each individual broadcaster—I will not name names—you can see the difficulty each individual broadcaster is going to face with their key talent.

Lord Clement-Jones: We have toyed with the idea of a panel, though, of interviewers.

Phil Harding: When I have seen that in America that has, again, looked very stilted and it ends up being a press conference style of programming. My main argument would be to get the audience into it more than they have been so far.

Professor Purvis: On the issue of moderators, I think that maybe there is a possible solution and it is something the Committee might want to consider recommending for broadcasters. The way it seems to be done at the moment is that, as I said, some things are done jointly and some things are done separately. Though we do not have complete transparency on this, I think the choice of moderators is a matter for the individual broadcaster and Phil put his finger on it when he talked about key talent. In other words, you would not want to be the head of a network who called in your main anchor and told him they were not doing it. In the States, one of the advantages of the commission doing it is that they take an overview—


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Q78 Lord Clement-Jones: In parenthesis, we have seen the battle over who is going to do the election night coverage.

Professor Purvis: Exactly. I am not saying that the decision about moderation should be taken ahead of the broadcasters. I think the broadcasters themselves would be sensible to sit as a group and say, “Across our three or four programmes, how are we going to get some kind of diversity here?” They need to address that issue pretty urgently, frankly.

On the issue of the second screen, I am a bit of a purist about the signal leaving the truck, as they would say in the States, needing to be the clean feed. In other words, it needs to be the pure debate. I think anybody who wants to add bells and whistles to it should be free to do that. I just think we should preserve the fact that there is a feed coming out that has no bells and whistles on it, in terms of graphics like tweets and things like that.

Lord Clement-Jones: That is interesting. You mean, if people want to watch it in its pure form then that should be definitely offered by the broadcaster.

Professor Purvis: I think that should be the primary transmission, for lack of better terminology. Frankly, the technology, in terms of screens, already allows you to put Twitter up at the same time. That is either for the individuals to do or for channels to do, but I think there ought to be at least one place where you just see it clean of any other screen.

Lord Clement-Jones: If you have several channels, for instance, you put it on BBC One clean and BBC Four whatever it is.

Professor Purvis: If it is the BBC debate, the BBC One feed should be absolutely clean. Whether the BBC chooses, if it has channels left by that point—sorry, that was not a very good joke—to experiment on other channels, it is free to do, but the clean feed should be the clean feed.

Phil Harding: You could do an Olympic-style operation whereby you had some additional channels or something like that. In my answer I was not necessarily advocating putting the second screen on to the first screen, if I can put it that way.

Lord Clement-Jones: No, I absolutely understand.

Phil Harding: I was suggesting using it as a source of it because I think the dilemma with the second screen is that people are moving to it and people are using the second screen while they are watching the first screen, but part of the point about the leader debates is that they are unmediated and people should be allowed to see the leaders in as raw a form as possible in order to be able to form a judgment about their policies, their characters and their performance.

Lord Clement-Jones: Absolutely.

Q79 The Chairman: Just to go back to the beginning of this question, it seems to me that the rules last time were very much safety first: “We have never done any of this before. We do not want anything to go ghastly wrong so let us be cautious”. It may be different next time.

Professor Purvis: Yes. You could argue that the second time is the time to be relatively cautious as well. I think the reality is that the more it is the same as last time, the more difficult it is for a party to back out. The more you change the format, the more the opportunities arise for parties to back out but hopefully that would not be a recipe for a complete stalemate.


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Lord Clement-Jones: That is exactly why we asked that question of Channel 4 because we thought that their rather radical ideas might frighten the horses and we are not yet where we have a convention, virtually, established about the broadcasters.

Phil Harding: This time round there may well be a party or parties looking for an excuse not to do this.

Lord Skelmersdale: We are all talking as though it is inevitable that in 2015—well, we are.

Phil Harding: Well, I am not.

Professor Purvis: No, nor am I.

Lord Skelmersdale: You are not?

Professor Purvis: No, for the very reason I have just said. The history of this, as I am sure you are aware, is that normally it is the incumbent’s call. If the incumbent does not want to do it, they will find a way of not doing it. It just happened that Gordon Brown was persuaded that this was a gamble worth taking or it was the least worse option. We can never foresee what will be particularly in the incumbent’s mind at the time of an election and, therefore, one should never assume it is going to happen.

Phil Harding: There was one other factor that happened last time around, which was that one of the big problems in previous negotiations had always been what you do about the Lib Dems or Liberals before them. The two main parties, Labour and Conservative, did not want to let the Liberals in on the debate and the Liberals said that they would challenge that. Certainly the legal advice the BBC got at the time was that were they to mount such a challenge it could well be successful through judicial review.

Q80 The Chairman: Can I ask a question that flows from that? Is there more or less an non-rebuttable presumption that a political party that decides to pull out is doing it entirely from self-interest and thinking that it is a way of improving their electoral chances?

Professor Purvis: I think that is the reality now as a result of the success last time. If there had not been one last time I think it would not be as clear cut as that, but any party pulling out now when the status quo was on the table, say, would inevitably be seen to have backed out for some tactical reason.

Phil Harding: While you were asking Channel 4 the questions, I was just thinking in my own mind: could you possibly mount a debate if you were a broadcaster if one of the parties refused to come to the studio? Most of the law about elections is about candidates. Therefore, the question would then be for the regulators for the BBC Trust and Ofcom as to whether or not the broadcaster had been duly impartial in inviting all the parties to be present, even though one or more of the parties chose not to be present. It is the empty chair debate taken a stage further in a very high-profile way.

Professor Purvis: I completely agree. If I remember correctly, when John Ryley of Sky News, slightly acting out of the consortium, issued a challenge I think he said that if somebody did not turn up there would be an empty chair. As that never happened, that has never been tested. Under the Representation of the People Act changes, at a sort of constituency level, if somebody does not turn up that does not prevent the event going ahead.

Baroness Fookes: But it used to.

Professor Purvis: It used to.

Baroness Fookes: I remember being in that experience.


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Professor Purvis: It was changed because parties were using it as a tactic to stop those debates happening.

Lord Skelmersdale: You would agree with me that the prospect is more fragile than a lot of people believe, certainly within the broadcasting industry?

Professor Purvis: Yes.

Lord Skelmersdale: What demands could be realistically be made on broadcasters to open up to provide greater transparency around the debates without the threat of the thing falling apart, do you reckon?

Phil Harding: I think the Channel 4 idea of some principles at the beginning is a good one and that certainly would help with transparency. I am not sure, in fact, when you come to look at what might be written down, whether it was going to take you that much further, but I think it is a good idea in principle. I think, once you get into the nitty-gritty of the negotiations, they have to be in confidence. I cannot see how you can do that in a goldfish bowl. It is too sensitive. It is too high stakes.

No one is going to want to be seen to be giving way and there will be compromises and there will be tough talking. My own view is that has to take to place in private. You have to then be absolutely explicit about what has been agreed—no secret agreements, none of that. You have to publish everything you do, but I think the negotiations have to be private.

Professor Purvis: I would agree completely with that and I would say that what we have now discovered about the American model, as a result of Professor Wheatley’s evidence and the research that has followed that, is that the British model is more transparent than the American model, but it does not mean that it could not be a little clearer about certain things.

Q81 Lord Dubs: We have heard quite a lot about the work done by the US commission in spreading knowledge and awareness of the debates and reaching out to the public. Do you think British broadcasters should be encouraged to create such a wider understanding and awareness of the debates?

Professor Purvis: Absolutely and it seems to me to go to the heart of what public service broadcasting is all about. It seems to me that they have done excellent work in a number of other areas where there is some public good to be developed as a result of television programmes. I think the reality was that last time they were just trying to get the show on the air. This time, if they got themselves organised, they could probably do everything that the commission does and do it rather better.

I am slightly surprised that Channel 4 did not immediately jump on the idea of a shared site. In technology terms, that is quite simple. Everyone has their own site but you have a portal where, if you go through the portal, it then leads you to the individual sites. I think that could be done in a couple of days, to be frank.

Phil Harding: I think the four broadcasters are a consortium with a small “c”, if I can put it that way, at the moment. They are going to become a consortium with a capital “C” quite soon and they are going to have to start doing some things together. Voter education and that sort of thing is clearly one of those areas. I was impressed by what I read of the evidence about what is done in the United States with educating young voters and I would have thought the broadcasters, if they put their minds to it, could certainly do something very much along those lines. There is a model. For example, the Chris Evans show now does a short story competition for young people and that has attracted 90,000 entries. When


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they put their minds to it they could think of inventive ways of involving young people in this process and getting them involved in the process of debating and democracy.

When it comes to the distribution question, which I think Stewart raised, there is a real issue about being able to find these debates afterwards because catch-up is going to be quite an important factor in the next election, time-shifting and all of that. I think there is a strong argument for being able to find the debates anywhere and everywhere and there may well be an argument for putting all of the debates on each broadcaster’s website afterwards.

There is a further set of discussions also to be had about who has the ability to able to show these as live debates. There was quite a complicated set of arrangements, which I understand, but I think these are public events being staged in the public interest and there is a strong argument for them being available to anybody everywhere. They will have their own branding, of course, but I think there is a strong argument for being able to do that.

I was in Berlin last time for the first of the debates, trapped under the ash cloud, and I could not find the ITV debate because it was not available anywhere that I could watch it. I listened on the radio, which was an interesting experience as well.

Baroness Bakewell: But all this publicity, which I thoroughly endorse—it seems an extremely good thing for democracy—slightly moves against what you said at the beginning of the session, which was that the actual debates themselves dominated activity. I know it does not contradict it, but there is a paradox there, is there not?

Phil Harding: No. I think I am talking about voter education and involvement in—

Baroness Bakewell: But not focusing on the debate.

Phil Harding: Not necessarily focusing on the debates, but you could use the debates as the spur for that and the route into it.

Q82 Lord Razzall: Obviously in this inquiry we have extracted from broadcasters their feeling and their experiences from the debate, but I think it has struck a number of us that there was not an industry wash-up the last time as to where lessons were to be drawn. Do you think that is something that ought to happen next time and how could that work?

Phil Harding: I certainly do. I think it would be certainly good to have a debate about how they worked, where they worked and where they did not work. I am sure the broadcasters had them themselves, but they had them in private and I am not sure I have seen any results of that. Therefore, I think some sort of public session about it would be useful and would be valuable. Now, what form that takes I do not know. I do not have a view about that. Maybe a hearing like this could at least be one forum that you could think about for doing that.

Lord Razzall: We are having ours four years later.

Phil Harding: Yes, maybe a little faster next time.

Baroness Fookes: Following on from learning lessons, would it be useful if there were various broadcasters co-operating or co-ordinating so that you had a one-stop shop online for information and education about the debates?

Professor Purvis: Yes, I think that is an excellent idea and I think it could be done relatively easily. It may be that this area is seen, within broadcasters, as a bit of a niche and they think it is rather complicated. It involves people like chief political advisers and that sort of thing; not territory where the head of entertainment would like to go. I just think that perhaps broadcasters need to embrace these events rather more.


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I think we should be pushing against an open door here because all of us are seeing, in my case, teenage boys—we were frankly amazed how interested they were. Therefore, there is an opportunity for broadcasters to make programming, whether it is on television or online or simply other web content, that people will find interesting and want to explore. I just hope the broadcasters will show the imagination which they have done on so many other events—of which I suppose the Olympics is a classic example—and apply that to these debates. I think they have a winner, to be blunt.

Baroness Fookes: You can do it with documentaries. There is often a follow-up book or various other things based on a television series, just so that it was broadened out.

Professor Purvis: Yes, absolutely.

The Chairman: It is called “The Next Government”, is it not?

Professor Purvis: “The Nation Decides” is the usual cliché.

Phil Harding: Also, just being able to find these debates: I went searching for them in the last week and, thanks to YouTube, I can find them, but they are posted unofficially there from YouTube. It is very difficult to find them on any of the broadcasters’ websites still.

Baroness Fookes: Yes, that seems particularly unfortunate. Would there be some value in the broadcasters getting together after each debate to have a wash-up or rundown on how it had gone on or would it be best after they are all over?

Professor Purvis: We do not know whether they did that and, if it was done, it was probably done informally. I think that is probably the appropriate way to do that, remembering that certainly the Ofcom review of the complaint by the SNP and Plaid Cymru happened after the first debate. Therefore, the broadcasters would have been extremely nervous about saying anything about the first debate, other than it was wonderful, until the regulator had made a decision about it. I think that is an understandable caution on their behalf, but there are plenty of other things they could be doing after each debate to keep the momentum going.

Possibly this goes to Baroness Bakewell’s question: we should not forget that it was the newspaper press’s obsession with the debates that was as much a cause of this. I think Ric Bailey’s phrase was “sucking the air out of the debate”. It was partly that the broadcasters kept doing stories about the debate and it was partly that the politicians kept thinking about it but, in terms of the newspaper coverage, they were perhaps as obsessed with it as anybody. Therefore, probably the parties judged that it was not worth having policy initiatives of the kind they used to have because, frankly, everyone was so obsessed with the debates. That is just a personal view.

Q83 Baroness Bakewell: We are speaking now about the idea of greater co-ordination proceeding in the future. Do you think it will arrive at a more formalised grouping? Do you think something like a commission would be better or do you think it should just be a way of collaboration between individual or separate broadcasters?

Professor Purvis: They want to choose a word carefully. One of them informally used the word “collective” to me the other day, which I thought did sound rather 1960s and all that sort of stuff.

Lord Clement-Jones: “Solidarity” is one.

Professor Purvis: The reality is that they are acting in a co-ordinated way and they are acting in an individual way. That is why they would have been careful about expressing what they


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are. The Americans use this phrase “staging organisation”. I do not like it as well, but you know where they are coming from in that. They are saying, “These are the people”, and then they talk about sponsors. By that, they mean organisers. We think it means advertisers. You need to get the terminology right but, as long as you get the terminology right, I do not think the broadcasters should be frightened of being a bit more organised.

Phil Harding: If they work in co-ordination with each other, they have to be careful that each of them is responsible for what they publish because each of them is responsible for the impartiality of that programme. If you are ITV, you cannot be seen to be saying, “Well, BBC decided that. We did not decide that”. Everything has to be your decision. Sorry, I cut across you.

Professor Purvis: Sorry, can I just reinforce that point? When we talk about “regulatory framework”—I think I said this—each broadcaster is responsible to their regulator for what they broadcast, even if it came from another broadcaster. In other words, when BBC retransmitted, say, the Sky News debate on BBC News channel, as Phil says, it would have been no excuse to say, “Well, I got this from Sky, so it is okay”. They have to be seen to have met the regulatory requirements themselves.

Baroness Bakewell: Of course. It is like publishing a libel, is it not?

Professor Purvis: Yes, absolutely.

The Chairman: Has Ofcom ever had to deal with that problem?

Professor Purvis: I would not like to offer a view because there are so many cases at Ofcom. I am not aware of one.

The Chairman: You are not aware of this type of profile?

Professor Purvis: No. Certainly the broadcasters are aware, as you say, as in a libel, it is no defence to say somebody else made it. You have to do your own compliance on it.

Baroness Bakewell: What you say puts me in mind of the evidence we heard from America last time, which indicated that the political parties themselves took an interest in the outcomes and how it might be reconfigured and they seemed to have an inappropriate role in interfering. Do you think the political parties here might like to say, “Next time we would like it shifted this way”, or, “We would like it shifted that way”? Do they have a role?

Professor Purvis: It is one of my nervousnesses about the commission, knowing what we now know about the commission, that that might be an attractive option to the parties. The commission is a de facto, bipartisan structure that does not always necessarily work to the advantage of third parties, among its many other issues. I just think people need to be aware of that and not be necessarily seduced by what appear to be the advantages of the commission, which, as I say, if broadcasters were organised they could easily replicate and probably even improve on.

Q84 Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: Just talking about the use of social media in the future, I know that you are very keen on it and you are worried about them not having clean feeds. How should greater use be made of social media while avoiding the various pitfalls that you have mentioned? Also, what risk is there that the political parties could shift the debates entirely online, for instance, circumnavigating the broadcasters and the regulatory framework around them—so just doing it themselves?

Phil Harding: I think I answered where I think there is a role for social media in a previous answer. I do think there is a role for it and I think the broadcasters have to take account of


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the fact that this whole other debate is going on around the leaders’ debate at the same time. You cannot ignore it. I think you do have to put it there and the idea of being able to watch different versions of the debate is a very good idea as well.

To answer your second question, I think there is a possibility that they could take it. There is always a possibility, of course, that some other broadcaster will come along and offer a debate outside of the four main broadcasters. Channel 5 could suddenly sweep up the outside and say, “We are just doing it. Here it is. It is happening”. There is always that risk, but in the end they want to reach an audience with these debates. I think they would probably stick with the four main ones, just in practical terms.

Professor Purvis: I would agree with that. I notice that Channel 5 did organise a debate about “Benefits Street”, which is on Channel 4, that did rather well in the ratings, but I would be surprised if Channel 5 would want to organise a debate outside the framework. I think either Channel 5 would be inside or not, but it is an interesting point.

Again, in the American document, the parties do sign up to not taking part in any other debates, which is quite interesting, as if they are conscious of that issue.

Baroness Bakewell: That is interesting because you assume that it would be a bad thing if another broadcaster came from nowhere and started doing it. Would it?

Phil Harding: No, I do not assume necessarily it would be a bad thing, I am just saying it could happen, but if it was on Channel 5 far fewer people would watch it than if it was on the BBC or on ITV just because, even these days, that is still the nature of television networks.

Professor Purvis: I suppose it is also possible that, if the group of four did not agree themselves on the format with the parties, there might be a breakaway of one or two who might say, “Well, I am prepared to do it the way that the parties want to do it”—something like that. Again, we should just not assume that it would be the same again.

Phil Harding: Having done the abortive negotiations before, I think one of the keys to this one has been getting the broadcasters together this time. It means that you have one set of negotiations with each of the parties, rather than three sets of negotiations with three parties; in other words, nine sets of negotiations going on simultaneously in which everybody plays everybody else off against everybody else.

Baroness Bakewell: Suppose two of them said, “No, we are going off to do our own”, that is one for Ofcom, is it not?

Professor Purvis: I do not think it is, no. I think all Ofcom would say is, “Does the broadcast meet the broadcasting code?” Ofcom is not in the business of telling producers which shows they should make. Apart from meeting quotas and things, it is basically saying, “Do programmes meet the code?”

Q85 The Chairman: If you had a series of online offerings that you could download, they would be outside the scope of Ofcom, would they not?

Professor Purvis: Depending on how they were distributed. Normally they would be.

The Chairman: Would they be outside the scope of other electoral law? I am not sure.

Professor Purvis: Certainly one of the odder cases I have dealt with at Ofcom was a TV station that had transmitted a commercial for a political party in the UK. I did not know there were such things as commercials for political parties, but people are making 30-second spots and putting them online and a very small broadcaster had transmitted one. It was an


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interesting test case. I have to say that when the broadcaster was called in they were not aware that there were any rules about the election. It reminded me of the day that a man came in and said, “I do not know anything about this broadcasting code because my main business is double-glazing”. That does not apply to a major broadcaster, I should say.

The Chairman: Do you think that, over time, there is a risk that a lot of the electoral framework in this area could be just outflanked through various forms of non-broadcast communication?

Professor Purvis: It could arguably be outflanked, but it is just never going to achieve the mass audience that these programmes—

The Chairman: Not in the next four years?

Professor Purvis: I do not think that even the most optimistic forecasts for on-demand viewing have it overtaking linear viewing that I can see.

The Chairman: I am now going completely free. If political parties start producing very spectacular stuff that can be downloaded by anybody through their IPTV, we may be in a different world completely.

Phil Harding: You might be but it would tend to attract the people who would already be attracted to it and you end up preaching to the converted. You end up a little bit with like the ecology you have with American news networks where Fox News reaches people who agree with Fox News and MSNBC reaches its people—the great attraction of these debates so far on the mainstream channels has been that they reach out to people who are not committed party supporters.

The Chairman: A sort of Heineken phenomenon.

Phil Harding: Yes. As for the bigger question, it depends how quickly you think mainstream television will deteriorate. So far the evidence has been that it has deteriorated far slower than anybody has anticipated.

The Chairman: Anyway, I think we are drawing to the end of our session so thank you very much indeed. As one final swan song, is there anything either of you would like to say to us that we have not touched on and you think we ought to know about, please?

Phil Harding: I think I have made clear my scepticism about the debates commission idea for the reasons I have outlined. There are certainly ways the debates can be improved and I certainly think it is worth thinking about those, but, as Lord Skelmersdale said, at the moment, from what I hear, it is still a very fragile negotiation. Clearly you want to secure the debates, but not at any price. Clearly you may not get an ideal state of debates next time round as well.

Professor Purvis: I would agree with that and have nothing to add, Chairman. Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you both very much indeed—very helpful.

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Memorandum by ITV Introduction

1. The General Election debates of 2010 were judged by the vast majority of observers to be a great success.

2. 'The First Election Debate' broadcast on the ITV Network live from Manchester on 15

April 2010 was the most watched factual programme of any kind during that year, with more than nine million viewers throughout its 90 minute duration. Viewers saw the leaders of the three main UK parties engaging in debate on serious issues affecting the future of the country. The leaders dealt with eight separate questions, posed by members of the public, in detail, and with the opportunity to challenge each other's arguments.

3. The debates on Sky and the BBC followed in similar vein. Serious discussion of

serious issues, conducted in detail and at length on prime time television.

4. The public greatly appreciated these debates. Surveys showed that most people felt they had learned something new, that they were better informed as a result about the parties' policies, and that they talked about the debates afterwards with family, friends and colleagues. Young people in particular enjoyed the debates and said they had helped them decide whom to vote for, and encouraged their interest in the electoral process. They were widely discussed and overwhelmingly considered to have been in the public interest.

5. The debates were more than just a passive television experience. Hundreds of

thousands of people joined in a ‘curated conversation’ that ITV ran alongside its debate on social media. There were similar web debates run by the other broadcasters and other media.

6. The success of the debates established a widespread consensus that they would be

and should be a permanent part of UK General Elections. ITV is committed to providing a forum for a similar serious leaders’ debate prior to the next General Election presently scheduled for 2015.

Background

7. Many television programmes require discussion and negotiation before participants agree to take part. The election debates were not unique in this regard, although the discussions ahead of the debates were undoubtedly longer and more detailed than for most programmes.

8. Broadcasters had been pushing for debates for more than 50 years. That debates had

failed to ever reach our screens before was essentially a matter of political self-interest, i.e. a consequence of one or more of the major parties at any given election either not wishing to take part at all, or declining to agree terms with the broadcasters under which they would be content to take part. There is a fairly

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extensive literature on the history of previous failed attempts to get debate programmes on air in this country.

9. In 2010 by contrast, all three leaders of the UK major parties expressed a serious

intent to participate, and nothing in the 'administrative process' of agreeing the format and rules for the debates got in the way of that becoming a reality.

10. The three broadcasters (ITV, BBC and Sky) who were absolutely committed to the

debates at all stages agreed to work together to agree a common format with the parties. The three broadcasters believed that working together on a basic programme structure was more likely to produce a successful result than running multiple sets of programme format discussions in relation to each channel.

11. Within the context of agreeing one basic format, each broadcaster retained editorial

control of its programme, including the selection of the questions put to the party leaders. As the programme format agreed for the debates stated:

12. " ... the range of questions chosen will reflect the broadcasters' legal and compliance

responsibilities for due impartiality and fairness. The panel [selecting the questions] will use its editorial judgement to select questions and will take into account factors such as the prominence of certain issues in the campaign, the distinctiveness of the different parties' policies on election issues, voters' interest and issues relevant to the role of Prime Minister. Within these rules, the editorial independence of the panel shall be paramount, because each broadcaster is answerable to its regulator for its programme content."

13. The format for the programme and issues relating to audience selection, the role of

the audience, the role of the moderator and the themes the debates would deal with, were set out in a document negotiated jointly between the broadcasters and the political parties. But each broadcaster remained responsible for the compliance of its own programmes, and for dealing with related issues, such as their own post-debate news and discussion programming commenting on the issues raised by the debate, and the separate leader debates arranged for each of the nations (other than England) of the United Kingdom.

14. The broadcasters were determined that the debates would be informative for the

viewers, and scrupulously fair. They were of course conscious that the programmes, and associated programmes, could be reviewed by their respective regulators in the event of complaints as to their due impartiality and fairness, and that regulatory governance is in turn subject to judicial review.

15. The broadcasters convened the debates talks with the parties and ran the

administrative process. Over a period of months in late 2009 and 2010 they established a programme structure and rules around participation that all the major parties agreed to, and which the broadcasters believed met their own criteria for programmes that would serve the public interest and conform with their regulatory and legal obligations.

16. The process was thorough and included provisions for:

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• The independent selection of a politically diverse and representative audience by an opinion polling firm

• A procedure for selecting questions by separate editorial panels formed by each broadcaster

• The candidates’ acceptance of the authority of the chosen moderator to referee the rules on stage, and ensure a free flowing and fair debate.

• Once the agreement was reached, all of the details of the rules and format of the debates were published. They were therefore completely transparent and subject to public scrutiny.

The future

17. There is nothing inevitable about debates happening in future. There is certainly a public expectation that they will happen, and a public consensus that they should happen. At any future election it will, however, always require the party leaders to be willing participants. After the very obvious success of the debates of 2010 it seems probable that the party leaders will agree to take part in debates in 2015, but there should be no assumption that that will automatically happen. In the United States there was a 16 year gap between the first presidential debates of 1960 and the second set of debates in 1976.

18. ITV believes that the 2010 debates provided a successful template for future debates.

We believe the arrangements by which the broadcasters negotiated directly with the parties is the appropriate institutional arrangement, and the manner in which the broadcasters are already regulated ensures that the public interest is protected and advanced by the broadcast of the debates. Television, unlike the print press, is a very heavily regulated industry, with statutory controls over the editorial freedom of broadcasters. Whilst the Election Debates are first and foremost television programmes, their management and operation is determined from the start by the responsibilities imposed on broadcasters by parliament and regulated through independent bodies, namely Ofcom and the BBC Trust.

The parties

19. The public interest may not always be the parties' primary concern in considering participation in debates. Perfectly reasonably, they are quite likely to view their participation or non-participation with particular regard to whether they perceive it likely to further their electoral interests. The primary purpose of an election is to determine the make up of the next parliament and government, and the primary interest of all parties is to be elected. Moreover, electoral debates can only take place if the participants consent to take part, and clearly they can always decline to do so. None of this is to say that the wider public interest did not inform the decision of the parties to participate in 2010, and will not inform their willingness to take part in future.

20. Ultimately, however, a key role for the broadcasters, must be to pursue single-

mindedly the public interest objectives of the debate programmes themselves, within the detailed regulatory frameworks that govern such programming.

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ITV

21. The broadcasters have a responsibility to the public and to the public interest, deeply rooted in our industry’s history, and in ITV’s case in almost 60 years of public service broadcasting, and in the legislation underpinning the regulation of commercial television. This responsibility to serve the public interest is deeply embedded in the culture of news and current affairs on the channel, and at its core is the requirement to provide balanced and duly impartial reporting of public events and issues. A debate in prime time between the major UK parties meets our legal licence obligations and our audience expectations only if it does so fairly and in full accordance with broadcasting regulation. The debates may therefore be relatively new, but the framework in which a commercial Public Service Broadcaster (PSB) like ITV operates such forms of programming is not.

22. The process by which ITV went about constructing the first Election Debate was one

in which the public interest was always front and centre. ITV's actions were taken within a regulatory framework established by parliament and administered by Ofcom, whose decisions in turn are subject to judicial review. We constructed the debate, and the associated programming that ran immediately after the debate, in a manner designed to meet all our legal and regulatory responsibilities.

23. We refer below to the position of ITV and Sky, who are governed in this area by

Ofcom (for the BBC, the BBC Trust are of course the equivalent regulatory body and the Royal Charter and Agreement the underpinning legal framework).

24. At the heart of the regulatory framework for commercial television, established by

parliament, are public interest considerations. For the commercial broadcasters, compliance with the Ofcom Broadcasting Code (the Code) is fundamental to their continued possession of their broadcast licences, without which they cannot operate. Ofcom draws up its Code pursuant to requirements in the Communications Act 2003 (as amended) (“The Act”) and the Broadcasting Act 1996 (as amended) (“The 1996 Act”) to secure the objectives regarding standards set out in the legislation. Of particular relevance in this regard is the requirement to ensure the exclusion from programmes of all expressions of the views or opinions of the broadcaster providing a service (section 320(1)(a) of the Act); and the preservation of impartiality, in particular in relation to matters of major political or industrial controversy and major matters relating to current public policy (section 320(6) of the Act).

25. Section 5 of the Code is underpinned by the following principles:

• that news is reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality • that the ‘special impartiality” requirements of the Act are complied with

26. These special impartiality requirements apply to all programmes, and not just news,

that refer to matters of political or industrial controversy and those relating to current public policy. Such programmes must exclude the views of the broadcaster on such matters, and must preserve due impartiality either within the programme or over a series of editorially linked programmes. Where such controversial matters are deemed “major matters” under the Code in terms of their significance, an appropriately wide range of significant views must be included and given due weight

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in each programme or “clearly linked and timely” programmes. Section 6 of the Code, relating to Elections, specifies that an election is a “major matter”.

27. Section 6 also provides rules for the treatment and coverage of the views of “major

parties” as against other parties during an election period. “Due weight” must be given to the coverage of major parties, but broadcasters must consider giving appropriate coverage to other parties and independent candidates with significant views and perspectives. Ofcom determines which parties are “major parties” for this purpose, and have indicated that going forward they will review which parties are “major” for the purpose of each election having regard to “relevant evidence, such as changes in the electoral landscape, across a range of elections”.

28. The key editorial decisions underlying the debate programmes, whilst necessarily

remaining in the hands of the broadcasters, who retain ultimate responsibility for them, are therefore governed and underpinned by stringent Code obligations. Ofcom’s powers to punish failures to comply with the Code include heavy financial penalties and even withdrawal of the licence. Operating within this framework therefore establishes the public interest in a fair and impartial debate as the primary and overriding consideration.

29. In 2010 ITV’s “First Election Debate” debate programme was reviewed by Ofcom’s

Election Committee shortly after transmission, following complaints brought by both the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Plaid Cymru, on somewhat differing grounds. Both complained that ITV was in breach of its impartiality obligations by having failed to invite their respective leaders to take part. Both had differing subsidiary arguments. For example, the SNP complained that they had been excluded from the negotiations prior to the debate taking place, that the programme had misled viewers in Scotland in relation to devolved policy areas, and that ITV failed to provide appropriate coverage for the SNP in linked programmes. Plaid Cymru cited a rise in Liberal Democrat support following the debate as evidence of the unfairness of the decision to “exclude” them, and said that the debate programme unfairly presented the election as a “three horse race”.

30. Ofcom found that none of these complaints had merit and declined to uphold them.

The significance of these adjudications is not to be underestimated:

• the regulatory system in place found the Debate programme and the surrounding programming to have preserved due impartiality;

• Ofcom accepted the Debate was clearly presented as an opportunity to hear the

three leaders of the major parties with a realistic prospect of forming the next UK government; due impartiality did not require the inclusion of any party not properly considered as a major party across the UK as a whole, even though they were “major parties” in their own nations, and viewers in Scotland and Wales (as well as England) had a legitimate interest in hearing from these leaders in this manner;

• these complaints were adjudicated upon urgently and very rapidly, requiring a

detailed response within a very short time frame. Had any failing been found in the programme, the broadcaster could and no doubt would have been directed

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by Ofcom to take further steps to address and mitigate any failing in impartiality before polling day.

31. Therefore the basic structure, format and organisation of the First Election Debate

programme and its associated programming was tested in 2010 and found by the regulator to have been in keeping with the public interest tests established in the Code.

Transparency

32. In the discussions prior to the debates with participants and potential participants we believe that a degree of confidentiality is acceptable and indeed desirable. For debates to happen at all broadcasters and the relevant parties need to reach agreement on basic arrangements. Conducting that discussion in public is unlikely to encourage candid and spontaneous discussion leading to changes of mind and sensible compromises, and more likely to lead to positions becoming fixed and inflexible.

33. Once agreement has been reached, however, ITV is in favour of that agreement

being transparent and published for all to see, as the broadcasters did in 2010.

34. The guarantee of the public interest in this process is the regulatory framework and the scrutiny of the end result, namely the programme itself, that Ofcom can already exercise of its own volition or in response to complaint after transmission.

A Debates Commission

35. ITV is not persuaded that a 'Debates Commission' would add anything useful to the future of debates and their arrangement.

36. If it is felt that an outside body that is politically independent, and with sufficient

authority, is required to ensure that the broadcasters adhere to a framework for debates that ensures the public interest is at their heart, we suggest that these bodies already exist, and already have that ultimate authority i.e. Ofcom and the BBC Trust. The broadcasters, appropriately regulated in their responsibilities to act fairly and with due impartiality, succeeded in 2010 in producing three debates that delivered a very substantial public good. The regulators received formal challenges to the conduct of the debates from other political parties and adjudicated in the broadcaster’s favour.

37. It is not clear to us what a separate Commission could helpfully add to the process.

Previous negotiations in 2009/2010 required no moderator to succeed. Such a Commission would need to work with both the broadcasters and the parties on the format and conduct of the debates, but ultimately such participation would remain a voluntary exercise. Any format approved by a Commission would still need to be consistent with existing broadcasting law and regulation and therefore would still be subject to the jurisdiction of Ofcom or the BBC Trust, absent further primary legislation.

38. In 2010 ITV met its obligations of due impartiality not only within the debate

programme itself but by scheduling associated programming around the debate. The

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three major UK parties took part in the debate programme itself and a range of views from other parties were also heard in related programming scheduled on the same evening after the main debate. In addition, separate debates were also organised in Wales by ITV, in Scotland by STV, and in Northern Ireland by UTV. If a Commission's remit was to ensure due impartiality, it would presumably be obliged to look beyond the debate itself and to these programmes, to ensure that the broadcaster’s output met its public interest responsibilities. We suggest this would constitute a wholly unreasonable interference with the broadcasters’ editorial decision making, freedom of expression, and the duties of the existing regulators.

39. In a process that already has more than enough potential difficulties, a Commission

would in our view only add more further complexity to the process of agreement, making the chance of debates happening at any given election less rather than more likely. Short of a legal prohibition established by primary legislation, or at least requiring a successful injunction application, there would in any event be nothing to stop one or more broadcasters organising their own debates separate from any Commission-sanctioned process.

40. There is of course a risk that a Debates Commission, instead of being perceived as

politically neutral, would come to be perceived as itself a political body in which all parties would compete for influence. Some leading commentators see the US Debates Commission as being just that; a body dominated by the major parties, delivering to the public, debate formats that they determine with reference to their own perceived party interests.

41. ITV therefore believes that a Debates Commission is an answer to a problem that

for now at least does not exist. Conclusion

42. ITV, the BBC and Sky, working together, succeeded in negotiating with the major UK parties an agreement to participate in debates in 2010. Those debates were a great success and served the public interest. The rules of the debates were transparent and the broadcasters were subject to scrutiny by their regulators and could have been subject to Judicial Review if they had not met their clear obligations under existing Broadcasting and Electoral law.

43. ITV intends to provide a forum for a General Election debate in 2015. The success of

working with the BBC and Sky in 2010 to make the debates happen demonstrates the benefits of co-operation with other broadcasters. We will seek to work co-operatively with other broadcasters in the run up to 2015, with the intention of securing a series of debates that will serve the electorate well.

44. The 2010 debates established a new form of election broadcasting in the UK, which

ITV believes should and can be repeated at future elections. A major party could always derail that debate by refusing to take part. A Debates Commission would have no greater ability to persuade a party to take part than the broadcasters, unless one envisages such a Commission having draconian powers wholly inimical to our political tradition and legal framework.

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45. The broadcasters -- appropriately regulated -- working with the major parties achieved a desirable public good in 2010, and should be left to seek to achieve a similar result in future.

SUMMARY OF OUR RESPONSES TO THE SELECT COMMITTEE’S QUESTIONS We hope that the submission above provides sufficiently clear responses to the main questions posed in the Select Committee’s Call for Evidence, but for avoidance of doubt we respond briefly to them below. What would be the best institutional arrangements for determining the format and style of the debates? As we suggest above, we consider the existing arrangements for determining the form and style of the debates are appropriate and fit for purpose. More broadly, how can we ensure that the public interest is the primary concern in determining any administrative matters on topics such as: Who should take part? And on what basis? This should be a matter for the broadcasters to determine, having regard to the requirements of due impartiality and fairness imposed by their respective regulatory Codes and Editorial Standards. How many debates should there be? This should be a matter for the broadcasters to determine, with appropriate consultation with the participants. But the starting point should be the 2010 debates, as a template of what proved to be a successful series of debates. When and where should each of the debates be held, not least taking into account the potential need for different debates at the UK-wide level and at the level of the nations? This is a matter for the relevant broadcasters (including the Channel 3 broadcasters for Scotland and Northern Ireland as regards the nation level debates) and the relevant participants to determine. What should their format be? This is a matter for the broadcasters to determine, with appropriate consultation with the participants. But the starting point should be the 2010 debates, as a template of what proved to be a successful series of debates. Revisions to the format should be for the broadcasters and participants to agree, subject to the requirements of fairness and due impartiality. In what ways does the interaction between existing broadcast regulation, case law, and the potential for judicial review set the parameters for decisions relating to each of these topics?

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See paragraphs above. What is the appropriate level of openness and transparency in which these questions should be addressed? See paragraphs above. Are such matters best left to the broadcasters and political parties to determine? Yes. If so, how can it be guaranteed that the public interest plays a decisive role in their negotiations? See paragraphs above. Would such a body ie a debates commission represent the best way of ensuring the public interest is paramount in such matters? No. What would be the arguments for the establishment of such a body? None are evident to us. What would be the arguments against the establishment of such a body? See paragraphs above. How should a new independent body be established? See above as to why we are not in favour of such a body. How could it ensure that the relevant broadcasters and political parties would participate and to do so according to its rules and guidance? We do not consider it is appropriate for any body to seek to enforce the participation of political parties in television programming. It is a matter for them. What principles should guide the body responsible for this system in determining its view on some of the thorny questions it would face e.g. which political parties should participate? It is a matter for the broadcasters to decide which political parties should be invited to participate, both in the debate itself, and in any related programming. Any party that felt itself unreasonably excluded can complain to the relevant regulator, and thereafter to the courts.

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What relationship should the new body have, if any, with the Electoral Commission? We see no rationale for involvement in this process by the Electoral Commission. On any one of these questions, what lessons can the UK learn from other democracies with an established tradition of election debates eg. Australia, Canada, Sweden, Norway, USA etc? Given the very different traditions of broadcast regulation of these other territories, we take the view that there are relatively limited lessons to be drawn. January 2014

ITV, BBC and BSkyB – Oral evidence (QQ 1-19)

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ITV, BBC and BSkyB – Oral evidence (QQ 1-19) Transcript to be found under BBC

Memorandum by David Muir

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Memorandum by David Muir Written evidence from David Muir, Labour Party chief negotiator on TV debates (2010) 1) In response to your call for evidence I am submitting a paper on what, if anything, we can

learn from the experience of the 2010 leaders debates. I do this on an individual basis. In preparation for this submission I received the assistance from a media agency (Mindshare) to help me with the audience analysis. I would like to thank the team for their help.

Background to debates 2) In my role as director of political strategy in Number 10, I was tasked to lead the

negotiations with support from Justin Forsyth (the then Director of Strategic Communications in Number 10).

3) I was minded to support the TV debates for three reasons:

a) First, you can not underestimate the damage done to our democracy by the disgraceful expenses crisis of 2009. At a time when our country was in acute pain from the global financial crisis, the British public looked on with disgust as they saw, in their opinion, a political class living a life far removed from theirs. It was therefore imperative that we found a way to re-engage voters in the forthcoming election;

b) Second, all elections matter, but this one mattered more than most. In 2010 the

economy was recovering robustly38 and there were two very clear choices the public faced: the Labour Party argued that the deficit was best reduced by fostering growth now, and once that growth took hold finances should be tightened; the Conservative Party argued that the only way to reduce the deficit was with cuts now. These were finely balanced arguments, and in my view best made without the mediation of partisan press; and

c) Third, after 13 years in office The Labour Party could not afford to run campaigns in

the way that they had done in the past. Resources were tight and we faced a press that was uniformly hostile to the party. It therefore made sense to make our case directly to the British people.

4) Once we had made the decision to start the negotiations I decided to meet privately

with David Cameron’s director of communications, Andy Coulson. Mr. Coulson was a trusted aide of Prime Minister Cameron’s and could speak to his interests. In my discussions with Mr. Coulson it became clear to me that there was enough common ground to start a formal process of negotiation with the broadcasters.

5) Going into these formal negotiations as a team we agreed a set of basic principles to

guide our negotiating strategy. They were as follows:

38 According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS) 2010 Q1 GDP growth was 0.2%, Q2 growth that year was

0.7%.


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a) More not fewer: By this we meant that we favoured a series of debates rather than a

one-off. This we believed would allow for the public to make a considered choice on a finely balanced election;

b) Longer than shorter: We always favoured a longer format. Prime Minister Cameron

was a formidable communicator, but did not stand-up to sustained examination. We as a result favoured a longer programme length; and

c) Unmediated not mediated: There is a glut of political programming with high profile

TV presenters, but all record low-TV ratings. We wanted a format that put the leaders directly in front of the public to take questions and cross-examine each other. We did not want the debate to be dominated by a puffed-up presenter luxuriating in his or her day in the sun.

Results 6) The TV debates were a success on a number of measures:

a) First, electoral turnout was noticeably higher than in 2001 and 2005. In 2005 turnout was 61.4%, in 2010 it had risen to 65.4%. The TV debates caused debate in homes and offices throughout the country and played a significant role in increasing turnout;

b) Second, the TV debates generated large audiences which have not been seen for an election in modern times. They were noticeably higher than the average rating for political TV programmes like Question Time and Newsnight.

Exhibit one – TV audience for TV debates


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c) Third, due to these higher viewing figures the programmes were particularly successful in engaging voters who were undecided. The TV debates were particularly successful with women, who make up a large proportion of undecided voters;

Exhibit Two – Demographic analysis of TV debates

d) Fourth, these debates held the audience’s attention. We knew from qualitative

research work and from British Audience Research Bureau (BARB) data that the British public found them engrossing. Unlike most TV programmes, there was little in the way of viewing attrition; and in the case of Sky audience actually built over the broadcast


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Exhibit Three – ITV audience ratings

Exhibit Four – Sky audience ratings


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Exhibit Five – BBC audience ratings

Lessons learned

7) There are a number of lessons learned from this experience:

a) First, the format by which these debates were negotiated was thorough, business-like, and delivered an outcome that was beneficial to our democracy. I therefore see no need to change that;

b) Second, there should be more than one debate. As the audience data shows, these

debates delivered significant audiences that engaged the public. There is a clear public appetite for more debates, not fewer;

c) Third, the 90 minute format held the viewers attention and should be continued; d) Fourth, the debates took place across the country and this created real local pride.

This should continue, as too much of our political debate is already focused on London SW1;

e) Fifth, the broadcasters approached negotiation and production with great

professionalism and impartiality. Sky should get particular credit for delivering a young audience. That said, I believe that Channel Four/ ITN’s pursuit of mannered iconoclasm resulted in them not hosting a debate. Something I regret – a feeling I believe they share;

f) Sixth, from the start it was clear that the Lib Dems should be included although their

leader could never be the next Prime Minister. The Lib Dems since the 1980s had registered a significant and steadily growing vote share, it was therefore right that


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they should be included. Going forward I believe that there should be an established vote share threshold for participation in the debate.

g) Seventh, based upon my experience from the UK and recent experience in the US I

am fundamentally un-persuaded for the need for the creation of a “Debates Commission”. Unlike in the US, our broadcasters are governed by the commitments of the “Representation of the People Act” and hence have a statutory obligation to make sure that political programmes, like the debates are fair and impartial. Moreover, I fear that a Debates Commission which does not have the buy-in of parties or broadcasters makes it more likely that debates will not happen.

20 January 2013

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Memorandum by Ralph Negrine This submission to the Committee is an individual submission and reflects my own views. 1. Platform and Windows: Broadcasting’s Role in Election Campaigns. 2. Over 40 years ago, Elihu Katz published a paper in which he argued strongly that the challenge for broadcasting organizations “is to help make broadcasting less of a platform for election rhetoric and more of a window through which the voter can get a true view of the political arena.” 3. What he meant by this was quite simple: broadcasters should consider what the viewer/ voter wanted from political television and should create those formats that deliver those objectives. Drawing on then current research, he set out some of what the public wanted, including “to be able to identify the candidates and the issues; to have the issues clearly and interestingly explained; to know where the parties stand with respect to the issues, and how their stands are likely to affect him.” Presciently, he continued: “If you ask him whether he knows where to get what he wants, he will tell you: in direct confrontation. The voter wants to see the candidates in action under stress, responding to challenge. He wants ‘debates’.” 4. How to achieve these objectives troubled Katz but it was obvious to him that political leaders be placed in the spotlight, that they should be interrogated by ‘impartial’ commentators - “the intervention of the professional broadcaster” – and that the public should, in some way, be brought into the conversation. [Perhaps the use of the paper’s title of ‘platforms and windows’ is no longer apt in the digital age since it is too suggestive of the public playing the role of spectators. It does not fully capture the spirit of engagement – digitally or otherwise – that may be more of a requirement today.] 5. These considerations should continue to be central to all contemporary discussions of how best to serve the public. They were of importance in the construction of the formats for the 2010 debates and they should be centre stage for the 2015 debates. Indeed, if Katz’s paper has a purchase on today’s events and the House of Lords’ inquiry it is because it places the viewer/ citizen at the heart of the discussion and it is argues for formats to be designed with the public’s interests paramount in the minds of those charged to do so. 6. If we take our starting point the centrality of the public interest in discussions about the 2015 ‘debates’, a number of things immediately follow on from this: 7. First, that they should take place and that the political parties should not have the power or the opportunity to prevent them from taking place. If the aim is to create vehicles of communication to serve and enlighten the public, political parties should acknowledge their subservience to this greater ‘good’ and give up their powers of veto. 8. Second, that rules must be agreed to ensure that all major contestants are treated ‘fairly’. Interestingly, in 1972 Katz also noted that the Liberal Party – as it was then – complicated the British political landscape when it came to considerations of ‘debates’ and it


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continues to do so, but it should not be outside the imagination of a group of people charged with the task of creating appropriate formats to devise a ‘fair’ formula. Whether this should be a newly established body of ‘the great and the good’ or a group of broadcasters and politicians (as essentially now) may be of little import if it is accepted that the discussion is merely about the how and not anything else. Drawing on Ric Bailey’s account and some current reports in the press, it does appear that primary considerations to date have been about either political parties gaining advantage or not losing out. The focus should be on how to serve the public and not about sectional political party interests. This might sound naïve but if the political establishment wishes to gain the trust and confidence of the public, it needs to show some humility and acknowledge its part in its own downfall. 9. Third, the success of the 2010 debates suggests that there is an appetite for seeing the leaders of the political parties in a format where they answer questions posed by others, including political rivals. Such a format fulfils a number of objectives from seeing the leaders ‘in action’ to examining their abilities to deal with controversial topics and, more generally, to set out their ambitions and visions for the country. As a minimum, then, it is important to design a format where the leaders appear and are given opportunities to speak unchallenged but where they are also subsequently challenged. The format in 2010 allowed much of this to take place. It might be possible to tweak elements, for example, giving extra time for an introduction or more time for questions from ‘impartial’ commentators or members of the public, but the basic principle of leaders on stage remains a good one. It allows for comparisons in a way that single interview programmes do not and in an age of comparison sites, the prospect of a www.comparetheleaders.com is not without merit. 10. Fourth, as in the past the real problems relate to the questions of inclusion and exclusion: who to include in the debates and, conversely, who to exclude? Should the LibDems be included as a separate entity from the Conservative Party and, if so, on what grounds? What of UKIP or the Green Party? Decisions regarding the allocation of time for political broadcasts have always been based on many considerations, including the numbers of candidates standing and past election results, and it should be possible to do the same in this case. As there are likely to be many possibilities and as whatever compromise is reached will inevitably displease someone, the guiding principle should be – as above – what does the public see as desirable? An educated guess would be that they would like to see the three main party leaders, as in 2010, but also others [possibly UKIP if the European Parliament election results are in their favour]. It may also be the case that the public really does not care about these [tactical] questions as long as they can get the debates. Another way of resolving this question is to look at it from the point of view of the ‘ordinary’ voter. He/she would most probably want to see those party leaders who dominate media coverage and the political agenda – Cameron, Miliband, Clegg, Farage – and if they are dominant in the media, why should there be any doubts about their presence in debates? One could, therefore, create two events with the three main party leaders and a third with all the leaders, including of UKIP, focusing on the single topic of Europe. 11. Fifth, as it is unlikely that any one submission would contain a template for setting out the arrangements for the debates, specific questions about arrangements may not be worth dealing with here at length. However, it is probable that three debates across the three- or four-week election period is a sensible figure. Fewer than three would not allow leaders to ‘recover’ from ‘disasters’ or ‘confirm’ their superiority. More than three seems excessive (given also that there will be other election broadcasting / communication during the period).


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12. Sixth, as for location, the debates could be held almost anywhere though there has been a tendency to seek to ‘represent’ the regions. So, London (once), Manchester (once) Birmingham (once) seems sensible but there are clear alternatives, say, Newcastle or somewhere in the South West. In a way it does not matter since the audience is most likely to be selected in a representative way, in which case regional differences may make little difference. More challenging would be the selection of an audience based on particular interest, e.g. the young, the unemployed, the ‘grey’ vote, and so on. 13. Seventh, national public service broadcasters, especially the BBC, should produce and broadcast these but not exclusively so. It is not about them but about the public and the requirements of meeting the needs and interests of the public. The addition of Sky and ITV should therefore be welcomed. 14. Lastly, how should the public play a greater part in this process? It is usual to offer opportunities for members of the public to pose questions. What might be more challenging would be to offer those members of the public who might be granted the opportunity to ask questions to be given the chance to research their questions before posing them. This would give them material for supplementary questions if the need arises. So, instead of ‘professionals’ testing leaders informed citizens could play that role. 15. The above are merely suggestions but they are underpinned by on-going considerations relating to the role of the public in the processes of political communication. Indeed, they place the public at the heart of the discussions that will need to take place. At a time when disenchantment with the world of formal politics is high, it is crucial that the political parties engage with the public in an intelligent way. 13 January 2014

Memorandum by Ofcom

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Memorandum by Ofcom Introduction 1.1 Ofcom is the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK

communications industries. 1.2 Under the Communications Act 2003, Ofcom is required to set standards for

programmes on television and radio in order to secure a range of objectives, such that news on television and radio services is presented with due impartiality and due accuracy and that broadcasters preserve due impartiality on matters of political or industrial controversy and matters relating to current public policy.

1.3 Ofcom is also required under the Act to put these standards in a code. In 2005,

Ofcom published the first version of the Ofcom Broadcasting Code which sets out these standards in the form of rules that broadcasters must abide by. This Code applies to all broadcasters licensed by Ofcom. A copy of the current version of our Broadcasting Code (dated 21 March 2013) can be found on our website39.

Ofcom’s role during elections 1.4 Ofcom has a clearly defined set of duties in relation to elections in the UK. In

summary, these are in the following two areas: Party Election Broadcasts 1.5 Under section 333 of the Act, Ofcom is required to make rules40 determining the

political parties on whose behalf party political and referendum broadcasts may be made, including party election broadcasts, which are broadcasts allocated to registered parties during election campaigns. The television and radio channels obliged to carry party election broadcasts are Channels 3, 4 and 5, Classic FM, Talksport and Absolute AM. The BBC and S4C also allocate party political and referendum broadcasts on a similar basis. However, the Ofcom rules on Party Political and Referendum Broadcasts do not apply to the BBC or S4C.

1.6 The Ofcom rules on Party Political and Referendum Broadcasts contain minimum

requirements set by Ofcom which broadcasters must abide by in deciding the allocation, length, frequency and scheduling of party election broadcasts. Ofcom applies the Ofcom rules on party political and referendum broadcasts in determining any disputes in relation to party election broadcasts referred to it by a political party or broadcaster.

1.7 The current version of the Ofcom rules on Party Political and Referendum

Broadcasts was published on 21 March 201341 following a public consultation. In its 39 See http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/broadcasting/broadcast-codes/broadcast-code/ 40 http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/guidance/ppbrules.pdf 41 Ibid.

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/broadcasting/broadcast-codes/broadcast-code/

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/guidance/ppbrules.pdf

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consultation, Ofcom in particular sought views on changing the rules to ensure they cover the new local television services42 that are beginning to launch43 throughout the UK.

Broadcasters’ editorial coverage during elections 1.8 There is no obligation on any broadcaster to transmit any of its own broadcast

coverage of election campaigns. However, if a broadcaster chooses to do so, it must ensure that the programming complies with the Broadcasting Code. Broadcasters will typically cover election campaigns in the form of news and current affairs programmes. This coverage must comply with the following two sections of the Broadcasting Code in particular:

Section Five (due impartiality)44 1.9 Section Five of the Broadcasting Code requires broadcasters to ensure that they

reflect alternative viewpoints in their output when they are dealing with “matters of political or industrial controversy and matters of current public policy”.

Section Six (elections)45 1.10 Due to their importance, elections are automatically regarded under the

Broadcasting Code (see Rule 6.1) as “matters of major political or industrial controversy and major matters of current public policy [emphasis added]”. As a result, as well as the rules in Section Five applying, special rules laid out in Section Six of the Code also apply during election periods. In summary, these rules affect two types of broadcast content about elections:

• coverage of an election in general. The first half of Section Six of the Code

contains rules underlining the requirement on broadcasters to report elections with due impartiality. In particular, broadcasters are required to give “due weight” to the coverage of the “major parties” (see below) during election periods. For example, Ofcom’s published Guidance46 on Section Six of the Broadcasting Code states that: “UK-based election programming (for example, UK leadership debates) can focus on the major parties that have a realistic prospect of forming the UK Government following the election in question. However, in line with Rule 6.247, broadcasters must ensure that adequate

42 The Government made clear its policy preference for the new local television services to carry PEBs, as reflected

in the Local Digital Television Programme Services Order 2012 (See http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2012/292/pdfs/uksi_20120292_en.pdf (made 13 February 2012).

43 The first local television service to launch, Estuary TV located in Grimsby, commenced broadcasting in late 2013. 44 See http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/831190/section5.pdf Ofcom’s published Guidance to

Section Five of the Code can be found at http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/guidance/831193/section5.pdf

45 See http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/831190/section6.pdf Ofcom’s published Guidance to Section Six of the Code can be found at http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/guidance/831193/section6.pdf Section Six applies to all elections taking place within the UK down to and including Local Government Elections, Mayoral Elections and Police and Crime Commissioner Elections.

46 See http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/guidance/831193/section6.pdf 47 Rule 6.2 of the Code states: “Due weight must be given to the coverage of major parties during the election

period. Broadcasters must also consider giving appropriate coverage to other parties and independent candidates with significant views and perspectives”.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2012/292/pdfs/uksi_20120292_en.pdf

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/831190/section5.pdf

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/guidance/831193/section5.pdf

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/831190/section6.pdf



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coverage is given to other major parties as appropriate, in the same programming, or in linked programming, as appropriate”; and

• constituency/electoral area coverage. The second half of Section Six of the

Broadcasting Code contains special rules that only apply if a broadcaster broadcasts an item that includes candidates standing in a constituency or electoral area during an election period. In summary, in these circumstances, broadcasters must ensure that they offer the opportunity to take part in the same broadcast item to all the candidates of the “major parties” and also to all candidates of other parties (and independent candidates) with previous significant electoral support or where there is evidence of significant current support.

Major parties 1.11 Both the Broadcasting Code and the Ofcom rules on Party Political and Referendum

Broadcasts afford a special status to the major political parties. The Ofcom list of major parties reflects the fact that some political parties have a significant level of electoral support, and number of elected representatives, across a range of elections within the UK or the devolved nations. Until March 2013, the list of major parties was listed in both the Ofcom rules on Party Political and Referendum Broadcasts and Section Six of the Broadcasting Code. However, following our consultation48 revising the Ofcom rules on Party Political and Referendum Broadcasts, and in response to stakeholder concerns that the existing list of major parties was too inflexible, we removed the list of major parties from the Ofcom rules on Party Political and Referendum Broadcasts and Section Six of the Code. Instead we placed the list in a standalone annex to both documents49, so that it can be reviewed periodically in an efficient way.

1.12 As a result, we have been conducting our first consultation since March 201350 on

possible changes to the list of major parties ahead of the European Parliamentary elections due to take place on 22 May 2014. We intend to publish any new list of major parties by early March 2014.

The Ofcom Election Committee 1.13 In carrying out its duty to regulate broadcast content related to elections, Ofcom

may convene its Election Committee51. This is a delegated committee of the Ofcom Board whose role is to consider and adjudicate on complaints received with regard to: the allocation by Ofcom licensed broadcasters of party election broadcasts; the scheduling of party election broadcasts, or their duration; and, due impartiality in programmes transmitted by Ofcom licensed broadcasters during an election period.

The Broadcasting Code and General Election debate cases

48 See paragraph 1.7. 49 See http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/guidance/major-parties.pdf and Annex 1. 50 See http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/consultations/parties2014/summary/condoc.pdf 51 See http://www.ofcom.org.uk/about/how-ofcom-is-run/committees/election-committee/

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/broadcast/guidance/major-parties.pdf

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/consultations/parties2014/summary/condoc.pdf

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/about/how-ofcom-is-run/committees/election-committee/

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1.14 Since the Broadcasting Code was introduced in 2005, Ofcom has recorded a number of breaches of the rules in Sections Five and Six of the Code. Details of our decisions can be found in our fortnightly Broadcast Bulletin52. Although these breaches of the rules were concerned with a variety of issues, they were all principally concerned with a lack of due impartiality in certain broadcast editorial coverage of elections, and contraventions of the rather technical rules in Section Six about constituency/electoral area reporting.

1.15 It should be underlined that Ofcom is a post-broadcast regulator. This means that

Ofcom has no role in determining the structure, format and style of any broadcast General Election debates that might take place in future. Rather, our concern would be whether any election debates comply with the rules in relation to due impartiality and elections in Sections Five and Six of the Code once they have been broadcast. It is worth noting that in the 2010 General Election, Ofcom was required to reach and publish decisions in relation to two53 of the Election debates that took place.

1.16 The ITV 1 Debate: Ofcom received separate complaints from the Scottish National

Party (“the SNP”) and Plaid Cymru concerning the ITV1 Debate, broadcast on 15 April 2010. In summary, the two parties each considered that ITV1 had breached the Code rules on due impartiality by not including the SNP and Plaid Cymru in this Election Debate. In response to these complaints, Ofcom convened its Election Committee. In summary, the Election Committee decided that the SNP54 and Plaid Cymru’s55 complaints should not be upheld. This was because principally this Election Debate was presented as an opportunity to hear from the three major UK political parties, one or more of which had a realistic prospect of forming the next UK Government. In addition, ITV1 signalled to the audience for the Election Debate that viewers in the devolved nations could see separate televised debates between leading figures of the major parties in those nations (including the SNP and Plaid Cymru as appropriate) on issues of policy most relevant to those nations.

1.17 The Sky News Debate: Ofcom received 671 complaints about the Sky News Debate,

broadcast on 22 April 2010. In particular complainants objected to a reference, by the Sky News debate moderator Adam Boulton to a critical newspaper story about Nick Clegg. Complainants considered that Adam Boulton’s comment showed bias against the Liberal Democrats, because he made no such personal references to David Cameron or Gordon Brown. Others complained about alleged breaches of the agreement governing the format of the Election Debates, drawn up between broadcasters and the political parties participating in the Debates, and aspects of the presentation and format of the Sky News Debate. On 5 July 2010, Ofcom published its decision56 in relation to the Sky News Debate. In summary, Ofcom did not uphold any of the complaints it had received concerning this Debate. This was for the following reasons:

52 See http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/enforcement/broadcast-bulletins/ 53 It should be noted that Sections Five and Six do not apply to BBC services funded by the licence fee, which are

regulated on these matters by the BBC Trust. Therefore, Ofcom could not pursue any due impartiality and election complaints relating to the 2010 Debate broadcast on the BBC.

54 See http://licensing.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/tv/updates/election10_snp.pdf 55 See http://licensing.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/tv/updates/election10_pc.pdf 56 See http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/enforcement/broadcast-bulletins/obb161/issue161.pdf, pages 8, 9, 12

and 13.

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/enforcement/broadcast-bulletins/

http://licensing.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/tv/updates/election10_snp.pdf

http://licensing.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/tv/updates/election10_pc.pdf

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/enforcement/broadcast-bulletins/obb161/issue161.pdf

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• whether or not there were breaches of the agreement governing the format of the Election debates, drawn up between broadcasters and the political parties participating in the debates, was not a matter for Ofcom. Rather, Ofcom’s regulatory remit was purely concerned with the Broadcasting Code and, in this case, whether there had been a breach of the due impartiality requirements. Ofcom considered the Sky News debate afforded all the three leaders numerous opportunities for each of them to make their points on a range of subjects, and to cross-examine each other on those subjects. Given this, it was clear that the programme was presented with due impartiality with all the politicians facing questions from each other and the audience. In addition one brief comment by a presenter during a 90-minute programme (to which Nick Clegg had an immediate opportunity to respond) could not in itself reasonably cause the programme to breach Ofcom’s due impartiality rules; and

• the format and presentation of the Election debate did not raise issues under the

Broadcasting Code. In summary, the manner in which a broadcaster presents a programme to the audience is an editorial matter for the broadcaster as long as it complies with Ofcom rules. In this case, Ofcom considered it unreasonable to infer any bias or slant in the debate’s approach to due impartiality through, for example, the choice of set for this particular programme.

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Annex – Ofcom list of major parties A1.1 This document sets out the definition of “major parties” as applies to Section Six of

the Ofcom Broadcasting Code and the Ofcom rules on Party Political and Referendum Broadcasts.

A1.2 Ofcom will periodically review the definition of “major parties”, taking account of relevant evidence, such as changes in the electoral landscape, across a range of elections.

A1.3 At present in Great Britain, major parties are defined as: the Conservative Party; the Labour Party; and the Liberal Democrats.

A1.4 In addition, major parties in Scotland and Wales respectively are the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru.

A1.5 The major parties in Northern Ireland are: the Alliance Party; the Democratic Unionist Party; Sinn Fein; the Social Democratic and Labour Party; and the Ulster Unionist Party.

January 2014

Memorandum by Plaid Cymru

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1. Plaid Cymru – the Party of Wales was founded in 1925. Between 2007 and 2011 we were part of the One Wales coalition government in Wales. Our first Member of Parliament was elected in 1966 and we have had unbroken representation in the House of Commons for forty years, since 1974. Currently, Plaid Cymru has 11 members of the National Assembly for Wales, three Members of Parliament, a member of the European Parliament, members of the House of Lords and is the second largest political group of councillors in Wales. Plaid Cymru is considered a major party in Wales by the Electoral Commission.

2. In the 2010 Westminster election, three debates were broadcast across the UK on

three different broadcasters, featuring the leaders of the Labour party, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

3. Plaid Cymru believes that broadcasting these programmes in Wales without a Plaid

Cymru presence gave viewers in Wales a misleading impression of the political landscape in Wales and of issues debated in so far as they relate directly to Wales. This was not in the public interest.

4. Not only was one of Wales’ major parties absent from the debate, but many issues

which are said to be reserved to Westminster are the subject of overlapping interests and responsibilities. During the election, for example, highly misleading political adverts were run by one party which suggested that a vote for their candidates at a Westminster election would affect education policy across the UK. However, education is a devolved responsibility. Again, this is not in the public interest.

5. At the 2010 election, viewers in Wales were presented with a false perspective of

the choices they faced at the ballot box. In continuing to exclude Plaid Cymru from the main debates in future elections, viewers in Wales will again be presented with a debate that gives an imbalanced, inappropriate and misleading presentation of the factual position in the country where they live.

6. The associated press and media coverage of the main debates is as significant, if not

more so, than the debates themselves, giving disproportionate coverage and a misleading picture.

7. This imbalance cannot be sufficiently corrected merely by the introduction of a

Welsh-level debate which provides equivalent coverage for all four major political parties in Wales, often appears in off-peak television slots and subsequently receive substantially fewer viewers and third-party media interest.

8. In terms of ensuring fair treatment for all parties, it is understood that there are

legitimate differences in interpretation and application for different programmes and formats on different broadcasters. Each outlet, however, should ensure, for democratic balance, that its coverage is proportionate between the parties.


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9. In the case of the BBC, their guidelines and Code of Practice clearly state that balance, a requirement of the principle of due impartiality, may be achieved through the medium of a series of programmes. Plaid Cymru should therefore have a proportionate and equivalent broadcast opportunity on the main UK networks to that which is being offered to the other major parties.

10. Surveys on the impact of the debates showed that more than half of viewers’ election

choice was impacted by the series of debates, rising to over two-thirds of younger people (aged 18-24). Three-quarters of young viewers claimed that they had learnt something about party policies during the debates. 43% of the total population, as surveyed by YouGov, claim to have ‘learned a lot’. A further survey suggested that 90% of those who viewed the programme later discussed its contents with friends and others, suggesting a second-hand influencing factor that again mitigates in favour of participating parties as opposed to non-participating.

11. It would appear that the lack of a Plaid Cymru representative in these debates

impacted upon the viewers’ ability to positively choose to support Plaid Cymru candidates in this election.

12. It is Plaid Cymru’s position that our party leader should be a participant in all debates

that may be viewed by electors in Wales, with a fair and equal voice in all discussions.

13. Debates which may be viewed by electors in Wales should not include topics for which responsibilities are devolved to the National Assembly for Wales and this has the potential to mislead electors in Welsh constituencies as to the issues at stake in the election. This is a deficiency on the part of the constitutional settlement that should not be allowed to influence outcomes.

14. With regards to future organisation of the debates, we propose in the public interest

that the Electoral Commission has a statutory responsibility to oversee a specific code of conduct for broadcasters in relation to the debates, in line with their present responsibility for monitoring electoral behaviour.

January 2014

Professor Stewart Purvis and Phil Harding – oral evidence (QQ 70-85)

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Professor Stewart Purvis and Phil Harding – oral evidence (QQ 70-85) Transcript to be found under Phil Harding

Memorandum by Professor Alan Schroeder, Northeastern University

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Memorandum by Professor Alan Schroeder, Northeastern University SUMMARY In this report I will briefly describe models of sponsorship for national electoral debates around the world, noting the pros and cons of each of the various institutional arrangements. I will also discuss the role of voters in general election debates and make recommendations for accommodating the public interest in planning and executing these events. BIOGRAPHICAL I am the author of Presidential Debates: 50 Years of High-Risk TV (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), a history of American presidential debates that will soon go into its third edition. Beyond my extensive scholarship about primary and general election debates in the USA, I also research and write about electoral debates around the world, including the 2010 debates between party leaders in the United Kingdom, the presidential debates of France and Spain, and various other candidate debates in Europe and Latin America. I am a professor in the School of Journalism at Northeastern University in Boston, a frequent media commentator, and a former television producer. NOTE I am making this submission as an individual. INTRODUCTION (1) More than 50 years have passed since the original Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960,

and in the decades since, an estimated 75 countries have incorporated televised debates into their national elections. Yet many of the same challenges that vexed debate planners in the era of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon continue to vex planners of contemporary debates. Chief among them: how to balance the interests of voters with the interests of candidates in organizing and executing these high-profile, high-risk events.

(2) The experience of 1960 presaged the difficulty that would lie ahead, not only in the

United States but around the world. That year a consortium of American television networks sponsored the four Kennedy-Nixon debates, yet it was representatives from the two campaigns who negotiated and determined such key points as format, schedule, number of events, in what manner questions would be posed, and by whom. Although the broadcasters had set up the pre-debate discussions, when it came time to hammer out details, campaign aides literally asked them to leave the room. To varying degrees this dismissive treatment of debate sponsors has persisted as the norm, with political handlers seizing the reins of an exercise whose live, unscripted nature strikes terror in the hearts of candidates and their advisors.


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(3) It is understandable that the political pros would seek to carve out as much pre-debate influence as they can for themselves. Campaigns, especially those conducted at a national level, are risk-averse in the extreme. No matter the country, candidates and their staffs strive to control every aspect of political campaigns: photo ops, rhetoric, rallies, media relations, advertising, scheduling, and the like. By contrast, a live debate cannot be foreordained—which makes campaign advisors strive all the harder to establish safety nets.

(4) Where does this obsessive pursuit of control leave voters? As we look around the

world for examples, we find that in too many instances the voice of the people goes unheard during the planning of debates. A central question about campaign debates ought to be: to whom do they belong? The answer, obvious though it may be, often gets overlooked. Debates belong not to the candidates who take part in them, nor to the media who stage and report them. Debates belong to the voters.

(5) So what is the proper mechanism for ensuring that voters’ interests are appropriately

represented in pre-debate planning, not to mention the programs themselves? Let us focus on the matter of sponsorship. Debate sponsors, at least in theory, present a counterbalance to the self-interested priorities of the candidates and their staffs. This imbues sponsors with the vital responsibility of representing and advocating for the electorate.

SPONSORSHIP OF ELECTORAL DEBATES AROUND THE WORLD (6) Internationally we can identify several models for debate sponsorship. These include:

• News organizations, either individually or collectively. • Taxpayer-funded organizations. • Non-governmental organizations. • Independent commissions. • Academic institutions. • Other independent organizations.

(7) NEWS ORGANIZATIONS: The most common type of debate sponsorship

involves professional news organizations. Such was the case in the United Kingdom in 2010, in the United States in 1960, in party leader debates in Canada and Scandinavia, and in Germany’s chancellor debates. A frequent debate sponsor in Latin America has been the Spanish-language TV news network CNN en español, which partners with local broadcast entities to sponsor, produce, and televise candidate forums in the host country.

(8) The advantages of news media sponsorship are evident. For starters, debates are a

form of television programming, and broadcast professionals know this turf better than anyone else. Media companies have a built-in incentive to connect with their audiences, not to mention an understanding of what those audiences need and want. Furthermore, news organizations are likely to enjoy a high level of institutional clout vis-à-vis political parties; this clout constitutes an important asset for any sponsor hoping to bring debates to fruition.

(9) But disadvantages exist as well. In their eagerness to “land” debates, media

organizations may be overly acquiescent to the political professionals who seek to


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shape these events to their own advantage. Media outlets may view debates primarily as promotional vehicles for themselves, and only secondarily as vehicles for voter enlightenment. And television networks may see debates as an opportunity to showcase specific on-camera presenters; occasionally these individuals forget that it is the candidates, not the questioners, who are the rightful stars of the show.

(10) For these reasons a consortium of media outlets may be preferable to a single media

sponsor. A consortium spreads responsibility among various players, enhances sponsorship clout, and reduces the possibility than any single network or personality will overwhelm the process. In Australia some leadership debates have been sponsored by the National Press Club, a journalistic association whose membership embraces both print and electronic media. This inclusion of journalists from a range of media further broadens the field of participants.

(11) TAXPAYER-FUNDED ORGANIZATIONS: Presidential debates in Mexico are

sponsored by the Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE), an autonomous agency funded by the national government and charged with overseeing various aspects of federal elections. IFE debates have not been without controversy: following a presidential debate in 2012, the agency had to issue an apology for featuring a scantily clad former Playboy model who became a social media sensation when she appeared onstage and handed out cards assigning the candidates their speaking order. IFE debates have also been criticized for their restrictive rules and lack of spontaneity.

(12) Debate sponsorship by taxpayer-funded governmental agencies remains an essentially

Latin American phenomenon. In addition to Mexico, the autonomous Jurado Nacional de Elecciones (National Jury of Elections) mounted a 2011 presidential debate in Peru. In Costa Rica the 2014 presidential debates took place under the auspices of the Tribunal Supremo Electoral (Supreme Electoral Tribunal). Sponsorship of this type can be successful, as long as the agency in question has legitimacy in the eyes of the public, the campaigns, and the media.

(13) NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS: In the United States the

presidential debates of 1976, 1980, 1984 and the first debate of 1988 were sponsored by the League of Women Voters, a highly regarded, non-partisan civic organization with chapters throughout the country. Although the League did an admirable job navigating the tricky shoals of debate planning, the group lacked the power to stand up to demands by the campaigns. Prior to the first Reagan-Mondale debate of 1984, for instance, the two campaigns rejected 83 journalists proposed as panelists by the League of Women Voters, leading League officials to call a news conference denouncing the political handlers’ high-handedness. The lesson here is that civic organizations, however well intentioned, may simply lack the street-fighting skills required to deal with hard-bitten campaign professionals.

(14) In Latin America it is not unusual for presidential debates to be sponsored by business

groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, in partnership with local media outlets. In Romania the non-governmental Institute for Public Policy sponsored presidential debates in 2009. Such arrangements may not be practical in larger countries.

(15) INDEPENDENT COMMISSIONS: In 1988 the Commission on Presidential

Debates (CPD) began sponsoring general-election presidential debates in the United


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States, taking over from the beleaguered League of Women Voters. The CPD has produced every American presidential and vice presidential debate since--25 in all--with generally positive results. The original status of the CPD as a bi-partisan organization has changed; it now defines itself as non-partisan and therefore independent of party influence.

(16) With every election cycle, the CPD has bolstered its standing, gaining over time

enough institutional clout to command respect and cooperation from the political establishment. In the past two rounds of debates, the candidates and their handlers have accepted most of the schedules, formats, and venues proposed in advance by the CPD. This favorable trend notwithstanding, the campaigns still negotiate among themselves, apart from the commission, and occasionally they demand changes that the CPD has little choice but to grant. The political pros also continue to seek alternatives to the commission as sole sponsor of American presidential debates, fearing that it has become too powerful.

(17) The CPD, a non-governmental agency that receives no taxpayer funds, has been

criticized for being excessively beholden to the corporate interests who finance day-to-day operations and foot the bill for the quadrennial presidential and vice presidential debates. Although this criticism is not without validity, it should be noted that the CPD’s corporate affiliations have not adversely affected the debates themselves. And the commission has been transparent in disclosing the identities of its contributors.

(18) To its credit, the CPD has also heavily involved itself in voter education efforts, using

presidential debates as a springboard for numerous election-related discussions and events across the U.S. Because American debates are usually held on college campuses, the CPD has actively involved students and faculty in the debate discussion. The CPD has also done a creditable job sharing its expertise with individuals in countries around the world in which electoral debates are being organized; the CPD’s work on this front has been of particular value in emerging democracies.

(19) Beyond the U.S., another example of an independent debate commission can be found

in Jamaica, where the Jamaica Debates Commission (JDC) has done an excellent job laying the groundwork for party leaders’ debates in that country. The Jamaica Debates Commission, a partnership between the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce and an association of national media outlets, produced televised leadership debates in 2002, 2007, and 2011. A noteworthy byproduct of the JDC is a written manual for producing general election debates. Entitled “Facing the Electorate,” this detailed document perceptively and thoughtfully addresses the key issues surrounding the planning and execution of candidate debates.

(20) ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONS: Academic sponsorship of national electoral debates

has been attempted primarily in Asia, with high-ranking university officials on occasion serving as moderators. Debates have also been staged by universities in Latin America and Europe, sometimes with a youth-oriented theme. Although these efforts are laudable, academic institutions typically lack the political gravitas to stand up to high-profile national political candidates. Furthermore, a university setting may orient debates too narrowly to younger voters, when the real focus needs to be on the wider electorate. Finally, academic institutions are not generally equipped to handle the technological challenges of delivering a live debate to a broad national audience.


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(21) OTHER INDEPENDENT ORGANIZATIONS: An interesting example in this

category of sponsorship comes from Spain, where the Academia de las Ciencias y las Artes de Televisión (Academy of Television Arts and Sciences) has successfully produced the last two rounds of Spanish presidential debates in 2008 and 2011. Headed by a former journalist who moderated one of Spain’s original presidential debates in 1993, the Academia has done an especially good job of institutionalizing televised debates as a standard feature of Spanish national elections. Nonetheless, the political parties maintain an iron grip on such key debate details as format and topic areas, leaving little room for innovation or flexibility.

INVOLVING VOTERS IN ELECTORAL DEBATES (22) The popularity of electoral debates resonates worldwide. The United Kingdom’s first-

ever party leaders’ debate in 2010 attracted nearly ten million viewers. In the United States presidential debates are usually the second highest-rated television programs of the year, outranked only by the powerhouse of Super Bowl football. The first Obama-Romney debate of 2012, for instance, drew an audience of more than 67 million. That same year’s face-à-face between French presidential contenders Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande attracted some 20 million viewers—nearly one third of France’s entire population. These numbers suggest that voters the world over find compelling reasons to watch debates.

(23) But the voting public deserves better than being relegated to spectator status,

particularly in an age of participatory media. To best serve the needs of the electorate, debates must be organized and executed in a way that honors their importance to voters. This requires sponsors who acknowledge that televised debates belong first and foremost to the millions of individuals who go to the polls to elect national leaders.

(24) While it may not be practical to include voter representatives in pre-debate planning

discussions, sponsors can find other ways of accommodating the public interest. For example:

(25) • Soliciting public input. In advance of negotiations, debate sponsors should seek

input from interested members of the public on such points as subject matter, format, number and timing of debates. These details are too important to be entrusted solely to the politicians.

(26) • Creating an advisory board made up of voters. Beyond general public input,

sponsors should consider a more established mechanism for citizen involvement in debates. An advisory board would formalize the relationship between debate sponsors and the voters they ostensibly serve.

(27) • Taking advantage of debate scholarship. Throughout the world an impressive

body of research has been collected about the relationship between voters and debates. Although much of this scholarship is country-specific, many of the lessons transcend national borders. Debate planners should acquaint themselves with this research and seek appropriate guidance from international experts in the field.


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(28) • Keeping the public informed about behind-the-scenes negotiations. At minimum voters ought to be aware of the mechanics of any pre-debate discussions. In 2010 the public release of the infamous 76 rules governing the British prime ministerial debates provoked ridicule in the press, but it did allow viewers to know the rules before the game commenced. In other countries—the U.S., for example—the agreements that emerge from pre-debate negotiations are usually kept under wraps.

(29) • Choosing voter-friendly formats. One of the best methods of ensuring voter

involvement in debates is to include voters in the questioning. The town hall format favored in the 2010 UK debates proved to be an effective way of incorporating citizen participation in an otherwise candidate-centric exercise. The so-called YouTube format, tested in the USA and New Zealand, puts a technological twist on the town hall by allowing voters to submit questions recorded on video. Sponsors should explore other innovative formats that accentuate public participation.

(30) • Developing voter education efforts in connection with debates. Sponsors of

electoral debates should approach the events as a starting point for political engagement, rather than an end unto themselves. Debate reporting in the press is likely to emphasize theatrical moments and candidate performances, but sponsors and their affiliates can use the opportunity to involve voters in more substantive conversations before, during, and after each telecast. The rise of social media creates a perfect opportunity to apply innovative approaches to such discussions.

CONCLUSION (31) No ideal system exists for producing televised electoral debates. Inevitably the high-

minded goals of voter enlightenment come up against hard political reality, making these events singularly difficult to execute. Nonetheless, history shows that debates function best when a strong, independent sponsorship model is in place.

(32) Debate sponsors face a daunting challenge, for they must answer to a triple

constituency: the public, the press, and the political establishment. For this reason a freestanding commission may offer the most advantageous model. The U.S.’s Commission on Presidential Debates stands as a positive, time-tested example, not only because it operates independently of political parties and the media, but because it places voter education as its central objective.

(33) It should be noted that while the CPD acts as sponsor of American presidential

debates, the production of the actual telecasts is assigned on a rotating basis to the major commercial news networks. The television networks provide personnel, equipment, and technical expertise, and the CPD provides content. In this partnership we find another potential model for sponsorship: a hybrid between an independent commission and established broadcast networks. Each side has something to offer the other; together they gain clout.

(34) In the final analysis no sponsor can expect to achieve instant credibility or to fully

wrest control away from the candidates and their protectors. The CPD has been producing American presidential debates since 1988, and only in the past couple of election cycles has it been able to proactively set terms. Realistically, any institution


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designed to represent the public interest in debate planning will need time to earn the trust of voters—not to mention journalists and campaign professionals.

(35) In the United Kingdom, where only a single round of leadership debates has taken

place, the institutionalization of debates in national elections has only just begun. The House of Lords Communications Committee is to be commended for initiating this discussion at a moment when the organization of general election debates remains very much a work in progress. As one of the last leading democracies to stage debates, the U.K. is well positioned to benefit from the experience of other countries in which debates have long been part of the landscape. The fundamental question being posed here—how to ensure that the public interest is of primary concern in setting up general debates?—is absolutely the right thing to be asking.

7 January 2014

Professor Alan Schroeder – Oral evidence (QQ 42-56)

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Members present



Professor Alan Schroeder, School of Journalism, Northeastern University

Q42 The Chairman: Is that Professor Schroeder?

Professor Schroeder: Yes.

The Chairman: It is? Good. Welcome.

Professor Schroeder: Thank you.

The Chairman: I am very glad we managed to get through. It is good of you to come and talk to us. We are very grateful for that. The meeting is being broadcast and a transcript is going to be taken. When I ask you the opening question, perhaps you could preface your remarks by saying who you are for the record. If you want to make an opening statement ahead of the question and answer session, we would be very happy if you did. It is over to you on that count.

Professor Schroeder: My name is Alan Schroeder and I am a Professor in the School of Journalism at Northeastern University in Boston. I have to apologise for my voice. I am suffering from laryngitis. I feel perfectly fine, but I hope you can hear me and if you cannot I will hold the microphone a bit closer. I am the author of a couple of books on presidential debates here in the United States. I have written and lectured about electoral debates around the world. I am also a former television producer, so I come at it slightly from that perspective as well.

I do not have an opening statement per se, but I will just preface my remarks very quickly by saying that I think this is a very important topic. I think you are absolutely on the right track in pursuing this question of debate sponsorship. I analogise electoral debates to job interviews and I think, as such, it is extremely important that the public have a seat at the table in the planning and execution of the debates and that the debates belong to the public rather than to any of the other constituencies.


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It is quite vital that we have these conversations and I hope that, in spite of the horror of my larynx today, I am able to bring something to the table for you here. Fire away.

Q43 The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. I just hope we are not going to put your larynx under too much pressure and if we seem to, please say so.

I think you may have been following some of the session online but, in any event, we have been hearing from Janet Brown and Bill Wheatley and I expect you know their views pretty clearly. We would like to start by asking: is there anything you would like to add to what you would have expected them to say about the positive lessons that we can perhaps learn in this country from the United States experience? In particular, what do you think the commission model has to teach us here in the UK?

Professor Schroeder: On the whole, the commission model has been extremely successful. As I look at the debates that have been held in about 75 countries around the world with all manner of sponsorship, this seems to be, if not the most effective, certainly one of the most effective ways to organise, plan and execute debates.

In addition to what Janet said, I think one of the advantages here is that it is good, when you have a series of debates, to conceive of them as an organic series, not as a group of individual one-offs but rather to look at them organically as an ongoing conversation. I think it is easier to do that under the auspices of a commission model, even something as basic and as simple as the visual look of the debates. As I watched the three debates from 2010 in the UK, each of them was so different in appearance and, even though the format was the same, I think there was not a great deal of thematic consistency.

Also, a single sponsor gives you the ability to introduce more diversity into the moderating of the debates. For your three debates in 2010 you had three white male journalists. There is nothing wrong with that—I am a white male journalist myself—but I do think there is some value in bringing diversity of voices into the moderating process. It may be easier to do that when you are conceiving of these things in group form as opposed to individually.

I think another advantage in commission sponsorship is that the commission can take a lot of the heat for all of the things that come up. Debates become very controversial: the planning, the sponsorship and the execution. If you have a central place for all of those concerns to be expressed and dealt with, that is not a bad thing. As has probably been mentioned, a commission or an independent sponsor gives you the ability to play the role of arbiter in deciding who belongs in the debates and in establishing standards like who decides how people are included in the debates. I think there is that as well.

I would also make the point that I think we need to take the long view of debates. Yes, they are extraordinarily important at the moment and in the context in which they take place, but they are also historic documents that have an afterlife. Almost 60 years after Kennedy and Nixon we are still talking about them. We are still learning from their lessons. One of the advantages of a debates commission is the ability to act as a central repository for all of the debates from history and the educational component of those.

For instance, the debates commission in the United States maintains a wonderful website that you can just pop on and look at any of the debates from any of the years. There is a lot of ancillary educational information. I find, as a professor, that in these wider debates there is a great deal of interest on the part of the public and particularly on the part of students who want to learn about the history of debates and the history of what has happened in these debates. You need get that history up for people and I think an independent commission has a vested interest in the afterlife of debates.


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I do not want to dwell too heavily on this point but just as a little example of what I am talking about, I logged on last night to review the UK debates. I very easily found two of them but the third one I could not find at all. I am sure if I had spent more time I could have, or I could at least have found excerpts, but I do think there is some value in considering the debates as an organic series of things that takes place not only in the moment, in the election year in which they are taking place, but in a greater, broader historical context for the generations that follow and for the students who are going to be writing their papers and wanting to learn more about these things 20, 30 or 40 years hence. That is how I would respond to the question about the pros of an independent commission.

Q44 The Chairman: What you have been telling us is very interesting. Just to be absolutely clear, you think that a shortcoming of the debates in this country in the last general election is that they were too homogenous, too similar to each other. You think they should have been pitched in a rather more differentiated way.

Professor Schroeder: I do, and I think too homogenous in the format as well. I know the history of this, that that is a function primarily of the timing and the fact that there was not a great deal of room for manoeuvre, this having been the first time and so on, but I think that viewers and voters learn different things from different formats. It strikes me that the ideal is a combination of different formats that might open the window in a slightly different way in each case, allowing voters to learn things and see things that the same format replicated or run over again might not provide.

Similarly, there should be a diversity of questioners, whether that be journalists or members of the audience. You get different kinds of questions from different kinds of interrogators and I think it is valuable for the politicians to have to deal with things coming at them from a lot of different directions in a lot of different ways. Yes, a diversity of formats and a diversity of questioners. It seems to me the more variety, the more informational value the debates can have.

The Chairman: Thank you. That is very interesting.

Q45 Baroness Fookes: Professor, could I effectively reverse the original question that you were asked? Do you see any drawbacks or reservations about the commission model in the US being applied in the UK?

Professor Schroeder: I do think that the commission in the United States made an enormous mistake by initially calling themselves a bipartisan commission and by identifying themselves so closely, as they did, with the political parties. Of course, as was explained, I am sure they are now a non-partisan commission, but they paid the price for 25 years for having originally been a bipartisan commission. There is a great deal of confusion even now on the part of journalists who write about debates. There is a great deal of confusion on the part of the public who still view debates as a creature of the political parties.

Back to my original point that debates belong to the people, you ought to be in no doubt whatsoever that the integrity of these debates is as full and 100% as it can be and, therefore, distancing them from the parties to the extent possible is important. Another potential drawback is that the broadcasters, by definition, have to be involved anyway and, as Janet undoubtedly explained, in the relationship between the debates commission and the American television networks, the American television networks ultimately are the ones who come in in the technical piece of this. I suppose there is an argument that could be made that would say: why do you need a middleman? You just go directly to the


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broadcasters. They stage the debates. They produce them and you do not have this middleman standing between the programme and the producers of the programme.

Another potential drawback is the question of funding, as Professor Wheatley just talked about a little bit. There has been perhaps a little less transparency on that point than there ought to be. Debates are expensive. Someone has to pay for them. Who does pay for them? If the broadcasters are doing it, they are the ones who are footing the bill but, in the absence of that, you are left with the commission that has to go around with its little tin cup soliciting donations, and that can be a tricky business and it can raise questions.

Having said that, I should add that I do not think there has ever been any impropriety in the relationship between the funders and the debates themselves. Certainly I do not think you can make an argument that just because Anheuser-Busch, America’s largest brewery, is a sponsor of the debates, that in any way affects the outcome of the debates. There may not be any correlation but the point remains that the debates must be funded and so an independent commission requires that in a way that the broadcasters would not.

The last point I would make is that the Commission on Presidential Debates, as wonderful as it is at this moment, has had to spend a great deal of time getting to this point. It takes many years to achieve the trust of the public, the press and the politicians and, therefore, the question of institutionalisation is something that is an incremental process that takes a great deal of time. If you are looking at the year 2015, I think it would be extraordinarily difficult for a debates commission to be established and put in place in time for the next series of debates in the United Kingdom. That is something for you to keep in mind as you look at this question of independent sponsorship versus broadcaster sponsorship.

Baroness Fookes: Thank you very much. You certainly tested your larynx with that answer.

Q46 Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: Professor, we are going to call on your expertise because we know that you have been studying other models. In comparative terms, what do you see to be the merits of the way in which the UK general election debates were set up and run in 2010 compared to alternative models around the world? In particular, what do you think is the role of public expectations? How should they be taken into account? Are they enough, in the absence of institutional compulsion, to ensure that debates do happen around Europe?

Professor Schroeder: Yes. First of all, let me say that I think that broadcasters in the United Kingdom did a remarkably fine job with the 2010 debates. I teach this topic all over the world and I hold the UK 2010 debates up as a role model of how these things can work in an extremely positive way. I think the broadcasters were excellent stewards of the debates and I know that the result could have been quite different. I read the 76 rules and I wrote a column for the Guardian in which I was quite critical of that document. I was very wary of that and did not have great expectations for what would happen, but I think in the event it turned out well and that is a real testament to the broadcasters and also, frankly, to the people in those audiences who asked the questions in a very intelligent way.

Another advantage for the broadcasters is that they know this turf extraordinarily well. This is what they do all the time. They know how to put on television programmes and how to connect with the audience, and I think that is very important. As we look around the world, more often than not it is broadcasters who sponsor the electoral debates at the national level and so there is a lot of experience you can draw upon but it is not all positive experience.


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I think too often what happens is that the broadcasters begin to take a bit of a proprietary interest in the debates and they forget that the debates belong to the voting public not to themselves. Therefore, it can become a bit of a promotional vehicle for the broadcasters and, again, I do not think that happened in the UK. I did not get the sense of each broadcaster using it as a way to promote its own ends, but I do think that potential exists and it is something that one must be vigilant against.

Q47 The Chairman: In looking around the world, as you obviously do thinking about these things, can you think of any instances where debates have taken place and which subsequently have not taken place and people are not bothered? Is there an expectation generally, in the world we are living in now where television is omnipresent, that there should be televised debates between the candidates? I am obviously talking about what I call real democracies.

Professor Schroeder: Yes. Some of your question cut out there but I think I caught the gist of it. Once the genie is out of the bottle it is very difficult to get it back in. We have the example in the United States, as was discussed, of the 16-year gap. The other parallel to that is Spain. Spain held its first series of presidential debates in 1993 and, just as in the United States, it was a terrifying experience for the politicians and they avoided having to do it again for another 15 years. So we did not see debates in Spain again until 2008, a gap of a decade and a half, which is a shame.

I hope I do not offend any of you by saying this, but if the politicians had their way they would not debate. It is not a pleasant thing to have to do and nobody wants to have to go into the job interview if you can get the job in spite of the interview. However, the public responds with such enthusiasm and so favourably to debates that there is a great deal of investment on the part of the public. The public, once it is out there, does begin to expect that debates become part of the ritual and part of the election. For instance, here in America I absolutely cannot conceive of a case in which even an incumbent President with a high approval rating could get out of a debate. He may not have to take part in all three of the scheduled debates, but there is absolutely no way that any candidate could do it without severe risk to his or her credibility.

I think this question of institutionalisation is extremely important and, for the United Kingdom, it is extraordinarily important to hold debates in 2015 because once you have done it for a couple of cycles there is no turning back. Once the public gets accustomed to the idea of debates and begins to realise that this is something that is ours and that we can learn from and we win this by virtue of the dramatically high ratings for debates, people respond. People love these things. Even voters who do not care about politics, this is the one moment where they decide, “Well, even though I do not follow the news and I do not care about politics, here is the point where I want to pay attention for 90 minutes or 90 minutes three times. I owe my country this much”. Yes, people are highly invested in it and it is quite important to institutionalise them. Once they are institutionalised the toothpaste cannot be put back into the tube. There you have it.

Q48 Earl of Selborne: Professor, could I take you back again to the United Kingdom 2010 general election debates and, particularly on the lessons learned, what we can learn from that exercise for future years? I think you have already said that you thought there was perhaps a shortage of diversity of questions and formats, that they were too homogenised. You also thought that the broadcasters acquitted themselves well. Would you like to give a general view on any other aspects that you feel we could learn from those debates?


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Professor Schroeder: Yes. One of the things that I will identify as a weakness of the UK prime ministerial debates in 2010 has to do with the question of universal access. I can remember being in my hotel room in London the night of the first debate, very excited and flipping around on the different channels expecting to see the debate on every single channel, because that is what I was used to in the United States, yet it was only carried on ITV.

As I began to inquire later and learn about what happened with that, it became a question of each of the individual broadcasters having its proprietary interest in broadcasting its debate and wanting to generate the audience for itself. Believe me, as a former television producer I get that. I understand that, but I do not think it serves the public as well as it could. I was also in France in 2012 for the debates between Sarkozy and Hollande and, although it is not carried on as many different channels, it is a much bigger deal.

I think debate night needs to be a night in which the entire country stops everything else it is doing and sits down and for 90 minutes just pays rapt attention to the debates. Therefore, whoever is staging the debates or sponsoring them needs to facilitate that to the greatest extent possible. In my opinion, the debates should be made available to absolutely anyone who wants to show them, be it radio, tablets, the internet, television and so on. Of course, it is impossible to supplant every other type of programming on television with just debates and you are always going to have people who would rather be watching “I Love Lucy” or something that night, which they can find somewhere.

In the United States, for instance, all of the major broadcasters, cable news networks and public television networks are carrying the debates and that is, in part, what accounts for these extraordinary audiences of 70 million people. It is not just that they do not have the alternative, but they understand that something very important is happening and there is some collective thing that is happening in the country. In our multi-channel universe we do not have very many collective national experiences and the debates have always been that. The largest ratings they ever received were back when Kennedy and Nixon debated and that is because there was literally nothing else on that night, but it also engendered the habit of looking at debates as this thing that you do for your country, that you do with all of your fellow citizens or subjects and that if you do not do it you somehow cannot take part in the national conversation. When you go to work the next morning you are not in on the conversation the way that everyone else is.

I would think that a goal in the future for the British prime ministerial debates is to be as pervasive, as inescapable and as universal in access as they possibly can be so that you almost shame people into watching them. One other point slightly related to that is you obviously have millions of British subjects who live outside the United Kingdom who may or may not be able to see it on the internet, but you need to make it as easy for them as well because, after all, they are voters who are going to be casting a ballot and who need to be able to make informed decisions in their own right. I think this idea of universal access is just something that ought to be pursued as vigorously as you can.

Q49 Earl of Selborne: There was a time when party-political broadcasts in this country were shown on all channels at the same time and there was a great deal of resentment that people had no alternative. Now, of course, there is any number of channels that you can receive and there is no possible way that every channel could cover these debates. Indeed, I imagine that is the case in the States at the moment. Although they are available on most of the main channels, there are plenty of other options. Indeed, I think Janet Brown told us that it was not so easy any more to capture the audience, although the viewing figures were


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impressive. Do you not accept that there is a contrary argument that people should not be forbidden to watch anything else while debates are going on?

Professor Schroeder: We live in democracies and, of course, everyone should have the freedom of choice to do whatever he or she wants, but I also think it is not asking too much of the public to give up three, three and a half or four hours of time every few years to look at the men and women who lead them. As I say, this is a job interview and we are the boss. Just as I would not hire someone to work for me in a professional capacity without first having done my due diligence, I think this is the due diligence that the public has to undertake.

Of course, you cannot hold a gun to people’s heads and force them to watch it, but by making it so widely available you make it almost something that they end up having to do. They have to eat their peas whether they intended to or not just by virtue of the prevalence and the persistence of those peas, if I can club this analogy to death.

Q50 The Chairman: In the United States where you have this very wide availability of the presidential debates and there are other things people can watch if they want to, have you any idea what percentage of the television-watching public watches the debates as opposed to absolute figures of numbers in terms of millions?

Professor Schroeder: I do not off the top of my head. I can certainly get that information for you. It is a somewhat imprecise science, but off the top of my head I cannot give you that.

Related to this conversation, however, is another interesting facet that has changed even since your debates of 2010 and that is the notion of dual viewership. In 2012 in the US presidential debates we saw for the first time this phenomenon of increasing numbers of people watching on the television screen but also on a mobile device or a pad and monitoring the social media real-time reaction to the debates even as they were watching the debates. I think this is an interesting challenge going forward for those who stage the debates, certainly for the participants in the debates and for the media that covers the debates.

Always before there was the sense that you had to wait until after the debate to have a sense of how things were going and with these new technological developments the reactions are occurring in real time, rapid fire and having implications for the results of the debates, the performances and the way the media cover the debates. Here again is this question of universal access. The more ways in which people can access the debates and the more places they can see the debates, the more I think you are going to see this engagement of the dual-screen phenomenon as a function of debate watching.

Q51 The Chairman: Do you think there is any risk, or indeed possibility, of the political parties getting themselves organised to then effectively issue a tornado of complimentary thinking about their own candidate and abuse and denigration of the other candidate or do you think, in the real world, you cannot rig it like that?

Professor Schroeder: I am sorry, I missed some of the question.

The Chairman: When you have the dual screen and the relationship between the social media and the televised medium, do you think it is possible that the political parties can so organise themselves that they can effectively rig the way people are thinking by having a tornado of comment both for and against different candidates?


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Professor Schroeder: Yes. It is a great question. I will give you a specific example. In 2012 Mitt Romney was talking about reducing the size of the US military and made the point that we have X number fewer ships in the Navy today than we had 100 years ago. President Obama came back with a very memorable quip about how that is right but we also have fewer horses and bayonets. That was a line that the Democrats knew the President was going to say. They had their social media people ready to start tweeting at that moment with the hashtag “#horsesandbayonets”. They did so and it caught on. There is potentially manipulation in that regard but, on the other hand, there is a lot of organic reaction.

I will give you another example from 2012 in the US. Mitt Romney talked about wanting to defund public broadcasting and mentioned Big Bird, the character on “Sesame Street”, which instantly and vociferously became this Twitter phenomenon without any manipulation. I should not say without any manipulation. I am sure the Obama people goosed it along, but it was a natural reaction on the part of the audience to hear that and think it was funny or worth commenting on and, therefore, to jump right on it.

Of more concern to me than manipulation by the political parties is the trivialisation of the debates by viewers who get a little bit distracted by the comedic moments or the misstatements or the obviously planted zingers in the debates. If there is a downside to dual-screen viewership it is that it allows viewers to not have their own experience exclusively but rather to be greatly influenced by the experiences of others.

I will say, in relation to that, that journalists were quite guilty, particularly the Washington press corps, of reacting to each other’s Twitter feeds. Mitt Romney was declared the winner of the first 2012 debate within the first half hour of the debate by universal acclaim, meaning the universal acclaim of the Washington press corps. Once that is out there it is very difficult to retract or to overcome it. I think you run the risk of viewers deciding, “This thing is over. The winner has been declared. I do not need to watch any more”, and not have the full breadth and experience of the entirety of the debate.

Q52 Baroness Fookes: You did tell us in written evidence that there is no ideal system, but it always useful to look at good models. Is there a country where we could potentially learn a great deal about improving our own system?

Professor Schroeder: It is very difficult to analogise country to country because of the different electoral systems and legal frameworks. For instance, in reading the testimony of the other witnesses before this panel, I was struck by the sheer complexity of British communications law. I am glad I do not have to know any more about it than I do. I think it is very hard to take one country’s debate experience and attempt to apply it to another.

Just looking at countries like Canada and Australia that do have similar electoral systems to the UK, Canada has had a great deal more success in debates with its consortium of national media that are the sponsors of the debates and that seem to have figured out a fairly effective way to stage the debates. They are not the liveliest debates that we could think of as we go around the world certainly and Canada is not a country of the same size or, dare I say, stature as the United Kingdom. I am not sure there is a 100% correlation, but you might look a little more closely at Canada as an example of a country that has been doing debates since the 1970s with success and it seems to have figured a way to balance the various interests involved.

As a negative role model, you might look at Australia. Nothing against it, it is a wonderful country, but in terms of the debates sponsorship what has happened, it seems to me, is that the political parties have used their power to play the broadcasters off each other to find the


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best deal they can and the most favourable formats for themselves. There has not been a consistent application of a sponsorship structure or model that works in a way that has benefited the voting public in Australia. Therefore, you have, in the English-speaking world, a positive and negative example.

In terms of looking at formats, New Zealand has come up with some very interesting format ideas. One of the things that they did—I believe this was in 2008—was a debate among primary candidates that was conducted entirely via questions submitted on YouTube. One of the advantages of that was that a fairly large percentage of the New Zealand electorate lives outside of New Zealand and so they were very careful to integrate questions from New Zealanders living in the exterior into that debate and make sure that those points of view were being represented.

Finally, I would say that I do think the United States debates commission model has a lot of positive application for the United Kingdom and for other countries in spite of some of the problems that we have talked about. On the whole it has been successful and I think they have recognised very seriously who their constituency is and that they are serving as the voice of the people here. Furthermore, I think their voter education efforts, both within the United States and around the world, have been quite helpful in this.

I look at small countries, particularly emerging democracies around the world, who are staging debates for the first time. It makes me feel good that we have something in the United States that we have been able to export and that is a positive role model for countries around the world. I think the UK, as one of the world’s leading countries with such a long tradition of democracy and with such a history of reaching out to the world in so many different ways, has an opportunity here to use your debates not just as a means to an end domestically but as role models for the rest of the world. The debates that were conducted in 2010 stand in that capacity very strongly as something that other countries ought to be looking at and emulating as a positive way of holding these exercises that have become, to an increasing degree, a ratification of democracy around the world.

Q53 The Chairman: That is interesting. You did touch on other European Union countries. Are there any there that you think one should either emulate or be cautious about?

Professor Schroeder: Sure. Let us do a positive and a negative. Positive: France. I am a big fan of their format. It gets a little ridiculous on one point and that is that they are absolutely hell bent on each of the two candidates receiving precisely the same amount of time. What happens is that at what should be the end of the debate, candidate A wants to say one more thing and so candidate B has to say one more thing of equal length, and suddenly it is 1.00 am and they are still talking. Apart from that, it is a format that is extraordinarily successful because it is a direct engagement just between the two candidates with very little moderation. That said, I go back to my previous point. I do think there is value in a variety of formats and what is missing from the French experience is the voice of the French people. I think there could be improvements in that regard.

On the negative role model side, I would offer the example of Germany. The German Chancellor debates are sponsored by a consortium of the major German television networks and what happens is that each of those television networks has a representative in each of the debates. It is a panel of journalists asking questions and you just go down the line with each journalist asking his or her question. It becomes this very stilted, rigorously observed structure in which there is very little opportunity for give and take and in which the end result seems to be showcasing the journalists from the various television networks


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as much as eliciting information and voter enlightenment. I would hold that up as something to be cautious of.

Q54 Baroness Fookes: Could I just ask about timing? You spoke about the French going on and on. Is there an ideal time? You mentioned the 90 minutes. Do you think that is about right?

Professor Schroeder: I do, and I base that on what I see as the audience’s tolerance for these things but also we so often forget the human dimension here. These are candidates who are being asked to perform at extremely high capacity, under pressure that most of us cannot even imagine, for a great length of time. It is a little bit like an athletic competition. To ask anyone to withstand the rigours of being in tip-top physical and, might I add, vocal condition for 90 minutes is asking an awful lot. I do think you need to limit it just in terms of the sheer human physical capacity for what you can accomplish and 90 minutes strikes me as ideal.

The first Kennedy-Nixon debates were 60 minutes each in length with a panel of journalists asking questions and they flew by quite quickly. As we go around the world there are other countries where the debates go on for one reason or another—I am thinking of Costa Rica where the supreme court decided that all the candidates, no matter how fringe, had to be included in the debates. The debate was something like 18, 19 or 20 people on the stage and it went on for hours and hours and hours because everybody had to have a turn. You do not want that extreme. I think 90 minutes is right.

Q55 The Chairman: Do you have any views about how, in an election where you may have a number of candidates who are probably not likely to be the winners, candidates should be accommodated? Democracy demands that people have an entitlement both to present their case and for that case to be heard, but in the real world quite a lot of candidates in elections are never going to win. Do you have any view about how these issues should be dealt with?

Professor Schroeder: I do. First of all, no matter what standard you set, there is going to be a lot of grumbling. You are going to hear a lot of complaining about the rules no matter what. After trial and error, the Commission on Presidential Debates, with its requirement for 15% standing on an aggregate of five independent national polls, has about found the sweet spot here that makes for a legitimate candidate who could conceivably win national office. The reality is that by the time the debates roll around you are in the final stages of the process. A debate is not a place for someone to prove his or her validity as a candidate. There are plenty of other mechanisms to achieve that, particularly in today’s media world in which a politician with a clever message has instant access to a large platform. The debates are something a little more specific and a little more special than that. I think that 15% is a number that is achievable by a non-traditional candidate and yet is not so low that you are going to get the sort of people whose platform is building a lunar colony and exporting half of its citizenry up there. I would recommend 15%.

Q56 The Chairman: You have explained how the debates can go on too long and you expose the candidates to too much pressure for too long. I think your larynx has had its fair share of an outing this afternoon and our time is coming to an end. As well as saying thank you very much, is there anything you would like to say to us that we have not touched on that you think is important?


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Professor Schroeder: There is one very quick thing, based on my reading of the transcript of your session with the broadcasters. There was some discussion of the worm and I have looked at this question of a worm around the world. It is used all the time in Australia with some fairly negative results. It is used occasionally in the United States. I think it is ridiculous. First of all, I think social media, particularly Twitter, has supplanted the worm. The real-time, real reaction of the audience is now measurable in ways that make the worm obsolete. A worm is a wonderful thing to find at the bottom of a tequila bottle but not so much at the bottom of the television screen. With that, I will leave you and say thank you very much. I enjoyed this. My only regret is that I was not able to speak to you in a human voice. Maybe you can read the transcript and get whatever you can out of it.

The Chairman: I am sure you will appear completely human in the transcript. Thank you. I am very grateful to you for coming. Thank you so much. I speak for everybody.

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Memorandum by Patrick Seyd (1) Televised debates involving party leaders provide an important means of enhancing

public understanding and knowledge of political issues and are an opportunity for the public to hold those leaders accountable. The debates also enable those standing for public office to express their views directly to the public. Their importance is such that rather than the debates being arranged by a small group of party professionals and broadcasters, as at the moment, an institution should be specifically created which is responsible for the debates and is open to public accountability and scrutiny.

(2) The Electoral Commission’s responsibility is ‘to support well-run elections and

referendums in the UK …’ and it would therefore seem appropriate that this body be accorded responsibility for the administration and format of future televised leaders’ debates. A specific sub-committee of the Electoral Commission should be established with the responsibility of overseeing all matters pertaining to the debates. The sub-committee would be required to produce a report on all matters relating to the party leaders’ debates within a clearly specified period of time after the General Election and this report should be used to generate public debate and comment.

(3) With regard to the Select Committee on Communications concern that the public

interest is of primary importance in determining the administration of the debates: (4) Participation in the debates should be based upon a clear formula. For example,

participation could be determined on the basis of a formula comprising a party’s percentage support in the previous General Election plus a party’s average percentage support in opinion polls in the 12 months immediately preceding the forthcoming General Election.

(5) The duration of the debates should be determined in such a way as to maximise

serious discussion and minimise mere sound bites. For example, in the past two French presidential debates the major TV channels (TV1/TV2) devoted 3 hours to the debates giving adequate time for discussion of the most significant domestic and international issues. Once the duration has been decided the number/length of debates would be determined in discussion with the broadcasters.

(6) The location of the debates should be determined by the fact that the purpose of a

General Election is to elect MPs to the UK Parliament. In other words, the debate or debates should be organised wherever in the UK is thought to be most appropriate. Specific leaders’ debates in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland should not be part of the General Election format (these would be appropriate for the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland Assembly elections).

(7) The organising principles for the leaders’ debates should be based upon the Question

Time/Any Questions formats, namely a senior broadcaster should chair the debates, preselected questions submitted by the public should be chosen for debate (with guidance on the general subject topics to be chosen coming from the ranking of ‘most important issues’ in the pre-election opinion polls), and the debates should take place before a selected public audience.

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(8) Section 333 of the Communications Act 2003 requires OFCOM to ensure that Party Political Broadcasts/Party Election Broadcasts are included in every licensed public service television channel and every national radio service. A similar obligation should be statutorily required to transmit the leaders’ debates. Satellite broadcasters, such as SKY, should be invited to participate in the leaders’ debates but would be under no obligation to do so.

January 2014

Memorandum by Sky News

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1. Introduction

1.1. Sky welcomes the opportunity to respond to the Committee’s inquiry into Broadcast General Election Debates. We have not answered all of the questions raised by the Committee but have focused on our areas of expertise and experience. We also refer the Committee to our recent response to the Review of Ofcom’s list of major political parties for elections taking place on 22 May 2014 in appendix 1.

1.2. Sky News has done much to transform news in the UK. In 1989 Sky introduced the UK’s first 24 hour rolling news channel, and now provides news online via skynews.com, on the radio, on mobile phones and tablets, on desktops and on out-of-home screens, in addition to its broadcast television channel available on all major platforms. Sky News reaches more than 107 million homes across 117 countries around the world.

1.3. Sky has invested more that £1 billion in news provision over the last twenty years and is proud of its reputation for delivering high-quality, award-winning news coverage to millions of people. Sky News is valued for its for fairness, balance and objectivity by viewers and regulators. We have earned our reputation for reporting live news – first.

1.4. Our 2009 General Election debate campaign is one of Sky News’ proudest achievements. We remain convinced of the value of these debates in re-engaging voters and especially young people.

2. Sky’s role in the 2010 leaders’ debates

2.1. Previous bids to bring the party leaders together on TV had come to nothing, usually because one or other of the potential participants felt they had little to gain. On September 2 2009, Head of Sky News, John Ryley, wrote to the three main party leaders inviting them to take part in a live debate, arguing that the democratic process needed reinvigoration. This was accompanied by a Times article57, threatening to “empty chair” unwilling participants.

2.2. On launching the campaign we set-up a dedicated leaders’ debate section on our website: 43,000 people visited it in the first few days and we also received a hand-written letter from Frank Green, a then 76-year-old viewer who lived in Barnoldswick, Lancashire and didn’t own a computer. He wanted the party leaders to explain why his pension is taxed.

3. Organisation of debates

3.1. During the organisation of the debates in 2010 and reflection upon their success it has been debated whether there is an appropriate role for the establishment of an “independent” body to oversee the debates.

57 ‘Who’ll show up for the TV election showdown?’, The Times, 2 September 2009


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3.2. In 2009 there were suggestions from both Labour and the Conservatives that they

favoured the appointment of a neutral group or chair, separate from both politicians and broadcasters, to oversee the negotiations. The idea was clearly drawn from America, where the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) has sponsored debates since 1988.

3.3. From the very start, we felt that calls for a neutral party in negotiation did not reflect the very different broadcasting environment in the UK and risked adding an extra layer of complexity to an already convoluted process. The US’ particular structure is a response to a specific legal restriction on the way broadcasters cover presidential elections and operates as a way of distancing them from the organisation of the debates. No comparative constraint exists in the UK.

3.4. Rather, broadcasters in the UK are bound by an extensive network of regulation designed to guarantee political impartiality. Furthermore, Sky News is proud of our unmatched reputation for journalistic integrity and history of editorial independence. Sky News, the BBC and ITV recognise our responsibilities to both our audience and our respective regulators.

3.5. Furthermore, as a result of a number of challenges to the debates made by parties whose leaders were not one of the three featured leaders, there is now a body of guidance and decisions covering the application of broadcast regulation to the debates.58 These precedents provide a firm foundation for the regulation of future debates, giving certainty to broadcasters and parties alike, in the public interest.

3.6. The confidential nature of discussions prior to agreement was a factor in their success. Privacy allowed for a critical level of trust to develop between all parties and enabled those involved to ignore speculative stories in the press and avoid discussions becoming derailed by party politics.

4. Format for 2010 debates

4.1. In autumn 2009 all the major broadcasters in the UK convened a meeting to discuss the debates. Channel 4 and Five were both present at the meeting. Both broadcasters, however, decided to end their participation in discussions of their own accord.

4.2. Subsequently, in October 2009, Sky News, BBC and ITV wrote to the leaders of the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties with a joint proposal for three live televised debates during the general election campaign.

4.3. The broadcasters elected to invite to talks only representatives of the three parties competing to form the next Westminster government; all of whom already held significant representation in Parliament. Independently, Sky News decided to explore the possibility of holding separate debates in the devolved nations.

58 Ofcom has distilled these decisions into its “Guidance Notes: Section 6”, whilst the BBC Trust also published its

findings in relation the BBC’s debates: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/our_work/complaints_and_appeals/snp_pl_cymru.html and http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/our_work/complaints_and_appeals/sld.html


http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/our_work/complaints_and_appeals/snp_pl_cymru.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/our_work/complaints_and_appeals/sld.html


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4.4. On December 21 2009 all three parties agreed to the basic format put forward by

the broadcasters. By 1 March 2010 the 12 negotiators agreed a 76 point programme plan, which stipulated how the studio audience should be selected, the structure of the programme, role of the moderator and audience cutaways.

4.5. While some detractors expressed concern that the “76 rules” setting out the terms of the debates would stifle spontaneity in debate, they did provide a valuable framework for the process.

4.6. The key elements of the format included: three 90-minute debates, to be broadcast by ITV, Sky and the BBC on consecutive Thursdays during the campaign, focusing on domestic, international and economic affairs respectively. The order of debate and their theme was decided by each broadcaster drawing lots.

4.7. Half of each debate centred on the chosen theme, with the second half reverting to more general lines of questioning.

4.8. A demographically and politically balanced audience submitted questions in advance to each broadcaster, from which a range were approved for audience members to ask of the leaders, with an opportunity for viewers to email in questions of their own.

4.9. Opening and closing statements were rotated over the course of all three debates allowing each participant to go first and last once. The three leaders had a minute to answer each question and a further minute to rebut their opponents’ answers. There followed four minutes of free debate time. The moderator’s role was effectively restricted to ensuring equal treatment of all participants, and seeking factual clarifications.

5. Sky’s leaders’ debate

5.1. Sky’s debate was held at Bristol’s Arnolfini Centre for Contemporary Arts on 22 April 2010. Sky News Political Editor, Adam Boulton chaired the 90 minute debate on international affairs.

5.2. ICM was appointed as an external recruitment agency for the audience and the methods of recruitment were based on their advice. In broad terms, the audience of 150 was recruited within a 30 mile radius of the host city, according to gender, age, ethnicity and social class to best reflect the broader voting-age population. Guests also included a number of Sky News viewers who had submitted their own questions for the party leaders via the website: www.skynews.com/debatequestion.

5.3. It was agreed by all parties that the debates should be geographically spread around the UK. Sky News chose Bristol to host the debate as a key battleground for the forthcoming General Election: all three parties held local constituencies in 2010.

5.4. From the launch of our campaign, Sky News always considered the leaders’ debates an opportunity to enhance engagement in the political process and as such made full

http://www.skynews.com/debatequestion


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use of all our platforms – rolling TV news-channel, online and mobile – to maximise coverage around the debate itself.

5.5. Once the debate had been agreed Sky News established a dedicated production team who spent the months prior to the event in extensive rehearsal. This included the construction of a replica set and rehearsals with debate moderator, Adam Boulton. This represented a significant and unique investment of time and talent in preparation for the night itself.

5.6. For the two days around the actual event the whole rolling news channel decamped to Bristol from where Sky News’ programming was dedicated to the debate. There was complementary coverage on all our other platforms. The debate itself attracted Sky News’ biggest ever audience and a cumulative audience of 4.1 million.

5.7. Sky was the only commercial broadcaster to make its debate available to carry live to all other broadcasters and news organisations, on any platform, anywhere in the world without charge. The BBC carried the debate live on its news channel and later rebroadcast it in full on BBC 2. It was also aired live on LBC 97.3FM and was carried internationally by British Forces Broadcasting Service, Al-Jazeera English and C-Span in the USA.

5.8. Engagement of young people was a Sky News priority. We worked with the Debate Mate charity, hosting three student debates at schools across the UK, mirroring the TV leaders debates themselves. The debates took place in some of the country’s most deprived areas and focused on developing the students’ communication and leadership skills, empowering them to engage with issues that affect them and their world. The highlights of these debates were carried on Sky News and www.skynews.com in the run up to the Sky News debate.

5.9. Sky News was encouraged that its debate coverage – along with the ITV and BBC debates – appeared to contribute to greater political engagement. According to Professor Michael Thrasher of Plymouth University’s Election Centre, the debates helped boost turnout by around 5 per cent, whilst Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism59 found the debates successfully attracted first-time voters and those previously uninterested in politics. Research by the consultancy firm Deloitte60 found that among those who said the debate had an impact on the way they chose to vote, 12 per cent said they had changed their vote as a result, and 7 per cent decided to vote when previously they had planned to abstain.

6. Sky News’ devolved debates

6.1. Sky News hosted The Scotland Debate between representatives of the major political parties in Scotland in April 2010. The 90-minute event was screened live from The Hub in Edinburgh and was moderated by Sky News Political Editor Adam Boulton.

59 Leaders in the Living Room, The Prime Ministerial Debates of 2010: Evidence, Evaluation and Some

Recommendations, published by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford 60 On TV: perspectives on television in words and numbers, Deloitte

http://www.skynews.com/


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6.2. First Minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National Party, Alex Salmond; Jim Murphy, Secretary of State for Scotland; David Mundell, Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland and Alistair Carmichael, Liberal Democrat Spokesman on Scotland, debated questions posed by Sky News viewers and Skynews.com readers.

6.3. The format gave each participant the opportunity to respond to individual questions, followed by a session of open debate. There was a 'quick-fire' round of questions, and each politician made a 90-second closing statement.

6.4. Questions were submitted via the Sky News website and those people whose questions had been chosen were invited to join the audience and pose their question directly to the politicians.

6.5. The invited audience of 160 people consisted of 80 Scottish residents reflecting the demographics of the country, and 20 supporters from each of the four political parties.

6.6. Sky News Political Editor Adam Boulton also hosted the Wales Debate ahead of the second contest between the national leaders. The contributors included: Ieuan Wyn Jones, the leader of Plaid Cymru and Deputy First Minister of Wales; Peter Hain, the Welsh Secretary, for Labour; Kirsty Williams, Leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats; and Cheryl Gillan, the Conservative Shadow Welsh Secretary.

6.7. Sky News Presenter Dermot Murnaghan presented a debate programme from Belfast on the final weekend of the election campaign with representatives of the main parties: Shaun Woodward, the Northern Ireland Secretary, Gerry Kelly, Sinn Fein, Peter Weir, DUP, Ian Parsley, UCUNF, and Margaret Richie, SDLP.

7. Debates in 2015

7.1. While there is disagreement between parties on the details of debates in 2015, Sky News received explicit commitments from all three major party leaders live on air that they would participate in a series of televised debates during the next election campaign.

7.2. We remain convinced that participants in a 2015 debate should be limited to the three UK political parties that have significant representation in Parliament and will be competing to form the next UK government. Though, of course, should the electoral landscape shift appreciably in the future we would expect participation to change accordingly.

7.3. Thanks to new legislation fixing the timing of the general election, there should be little problem organising the debates to allow ample time for more traditional campaigning. Unlike last time, we know that the 2015 polling day will be May 7 with Parliament dissolved six weeks earlier — on March 30.

7.4. At Sky News we have proposed holding the three debates at two-week intervals starting on Thursday, April 2. This should give politicians enough time to launch their campaigns effectively, and prevent the debates from overshadowing other important pre-election activities. This timetable also gives the parties another clear seven-day


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run-in to polling day itself, with the debates behind them and the electorate fully engaged.

7.5. It has been suggested that a more adventurous format for the debates can be agreed upon for 2015.

7.6. The 76 rules worked well last time and represent an effective starting point for all parties to return to discussions in advance of the forthcoming election.

7.7. We support the consensus that in some cases the rigid format defined in the rules discouraged an element of spontaneity. We are ready to discuss how we might be able to use the opportunity afforded by the certainty of fixed-term parliaments to innovate this time round.

7.8. It should be recognised that a balance will need to be struck between attempts at innovation and the introduction of complicating factors. A key principal of the negotiation process was equality of all broadcasters and the 3 participating political parties. Having a range of formats would certainly be less simple, raising the risk of disagreement – but it would not be impossible to organise, given political will and existing relationship between broadcasters.

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APPENDIX 1: Sky News’ response to the Review of Ofcom list of major political parties for elections taking place on 22 May 2014

12 May 2014

By Email and Post Graham Howell Ofcom Riverside House 2a Southwark Bridge Road London SE1 9HA

Dear Graham,

Review of Ofcom list of major political parties

Ofcom is consulting on proposals relating to the list of major parties for the 2014 European Parliamentary elections in England, Wales and Scotland (‘the European Elections’). Ofcom has put forward two different methodologies for analysing evidence of past and current electoral support, and a further method combining both.

The outcome of all three methodologies is that the UK Independence Party (‘UKIP’) is added to the list of major parties in respect of the European Elections, albeit excluding Scotland under one methodology.

As a commercial news broadcaster, Sky News makes no comment on which methodology ought to be used or the outcome in respect of the European Elections. The key issue for Sky News as a broadcaster, is adequate certainty as to its coverage of the May 2014 elections, and in relation the General Election in 2015. It is essential that the list is settled well in advance of the official ‘election period’. Ofcom’s current review is therefore timely, however, it is as important to have certainty in planning future coverage.

Ofcom ought to state now whether and when it expects to review the list prior to the 2015 elections. It should also acknowledge in its statement that the timing of any further changes may impact on the manner in which broadcasters’ give ‘due weight’ to any additional ‘major party’.

Should Ofcom’s preliminary view regarding the list of major parties change from that set out in the consultation, Sky News would expect there to be a further opportunity to comment.

Yours sincerely,

John Ryley Head of Sky News British Sky Broadcasting

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Memorandum by UKIP INTRODUCTION UKIP welcomes the opportunity to respond to the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications’ consultation into Broadcast General Election Debates in the United Kingdom (UK). UKIP was originally established as a political party in 1993, with the express intention of campaigning to take the UK out of the European Union. Today, the party campaigns on political issues right across the board and has seen strong and unprecedented success in recent UK parliamentary by-elections and local elections. A recent poll has shown that UKIP is the most trusted party on immigration, with 22% of voters trusting UKIP on the issue, with 17% trusting Labour and 11% trusting the Conservatives.61 UKIP is a national party and its membership currently stands at just over 33,000 members, an increase of some 10,500 since March 2013. Some indication of the growth of the party’s support may be taken from the size of its recent vote share:

• 1999 Euros: 7%. • 2001 General Election: 1.5% (saved deposit in one seat). • 2004 Euros: 16%. • 2005 General Election: 2.3% (saved deposit in 38 seats). • 2009 Euros: 16.5%. • 2010 General Election: 3.1% (saved deposit in 100 seats).

When UKIP contested its first European Parliamentary elections in 1994, it received just over 150,000 votes and failed to win a single seat. In the Euro elections held on 4 June 2009, UKIP won 13 seats, coming second to the Conservative Party, with 2,498,226 votes (16.6%). The party fielded 572 candidates in the 2010 General Election and attracted 919,471 votes. In the election for 35 councils in England and Wales held on 2 May 2013, UKIP fielded 1,700 candidates, gaining 147 seats and averaged 25% of the vote in the wards where it stood. The concentration of the seats gained may be seen at Annex A. In late 2013, UKIP was regularly polling between 10-18% (Annexes B and C). According to The Times of 2 January 2014, UKIP’s councillors have the best attendance record of all the political parties (UKIP 92.4%; Conservative 88.6%; Labour 88.4%; Liberal Democrat 87.7% and Green 79.6%). UKIP is currently aiming to field a candidate in each one of the 632 mainland parliamentary constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales in the 2015 General Election. On 30 December 2013, the Daily Mirror predicted UKIP would top the polls in the Euros also being held on 22 May 2014. In December 2013, the pollster Survation predicted the outcome of the Euros as: Conservative 24%; Labour 32%; Liberal Democrats 8%; UKIP 25%; Green Party 6% and Other Parties 6%.

61 Harris poll conducted for the Daily Mail (22 November 2013).

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SUMMARY UKIP is recommending: ► That UKIP Party Leader Nigel Farage be permitted to participate in the televised leaders’ debates, in the run-up to any national election. ► That the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications may wish to consider the appointment of an independent committee, with a remit similar to that of the American Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) to handle the issues of format and of which leaders should be given the right to appear in the debates. ► That like the US system, those parties demonstrating a level of support of at least 15% of the national electorate, as determined by five selected national public opinion polling organisations, should be permitted to take part in the leaders’ debates. ► That any such independent committee considers extending the existing broadcast remit beyond purely terrestrial television, to include online platforms, such as YouTube. RESPONSES IN FULL

1. The first party leaders’ debate in 2010 attracted 9.4 million viewers and two-thirds of them said they learnt something new. Half of the 18-24 age group said they were more interested in the campaign as a result of watching the debates. Voter turn-out in 2010 rose on 2005, which in turn, was an increase on 2001, thus challenging well-worn claims about inexorable voter disengagement.62

2. A key argument in favour of the broadcasts was that they reached a wider audience

than is usual for politically-related content and that, after watching them, normally apolitical debate-watchers might be better informed about election issues; more likely to discuss policies with their friends and families; and more likely to vote, than those who were not exposed to the debates. As Ric Bailey, the BBC’s Chief Political Adviser put it in his 2012 analysis of the 2010 General Election leaders’ debates Squeezing out the Oxygen – Or Reviving Democracy? they ‘had a seismic impact on the election campaign’.

3. In May 2010, Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP’s then leader) was in correspondence

with Sky TV, Sir Michael Lyons of the BBC Trust and Mark Thompson, the BBC’s then Director General on the subject of UKIP representation at the televised leaders’ debates in the run-up to the 2010 General Election. Mr Thompson wrote to Lord Pearson on 15 January 2010, conveying his decision not to include UKIP: ‘The basis on which judgements are made about relative levels of coverage rests on past and current electoral support. For the election to the House of Commons in 2010, the starting point is the last General Election, in 2005. Similarly, the starting point for coverage of the 2009 European election was the previous European election of 2004. This means that UKIP – on the basis of its strong performance in 2004 – was given the same level of coverage in the 2009 election as the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. In 2005, however, at the last General Election

62 The Guardian 31 December 2013.

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(notwithstanding its performance at the European election less than a year before), UKIP attracted just over 2% of the vote and won no representation at Westminster.’ ‘It is, therefore, appropriate and consistent for the BBC – and other broadcasters – to offer the opportunity to take part in the Prime Ministerial debates only to those parties which have substantial electoral support in the context of Westminster. There will be additional opportunities across the BBC for other parties to receive appropriate coverage responding to the Prime Ministerial debate.’ It should be noted that despite those reassurances, no such ‘additional opportunities’ subsequently materialised. As matters transpired, between them, the three main parties got coverage in the order of some five hours and UKIP got less than ten minutes.

4. During the course of his correspondence with the BBC, Lord Pearson drew

attention to the terms of the BBC’s Charter and the following provisions in the BBC’s own election guidelines, which states: ‘Previous electoral support in equivalent elections is the starting-point for making judgments about the proportionate level of coverage between parties. However, other factors can be taken into account where appropriate, including evidence of variation in levels of support in more recent elections, changed political circumstances (e.g. new parties or party splits), as well as other evidence of current support. The number of candidates a party is standing may also be a factor.’ Those guidelines were endorsed by Jenny Watson, Chairman of the Electoral Commission, in a letter dated 11 January 2010 to Ric Bailey, the BBC’s Chief Political Adviser, in which, she also stated: ‘In addition, we are satisfied with the draft Election Guidelines, and the approach taken regarding the participation of candidates in constituency items during the election period’.

5. Prime Minister David Cameron is on record as having stated that UKIP Party Leader

Nigel Farage should not take part in the leaders’ debates and that they should only involve people who ‘have a prospect of becoming prime minister.’63 In a 2013 interview with Parliament’s The House magazine, Mr Cameron made it clear that he believed Mr Farage should be excluded from any TV debates at the next general election. ‘Obviously we have to decide on this nearer the time, but the TV debates should be about, you know, the parties that are going to form the government, in my view.’64

6. However, there is a diverse body of evidence in the public domain, which strongly

suggests the opposite: On 9 January 2013, a ComRes poll for the Daily Express spelled out that Britons did want the prime minister to debate with Mr Farage, before the next general election. 54 percent of those polled said they wanted to see Mr Farage in the line-up against the Conservative Prime Minister. Their answers made it clear that the majority of people thought Nigel Farage should be included in any debates which are certain to include Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg and Labour leader Ed Miliband. Two-thirds of voters in the poll of 2,000 adults said Mr Cameron would ‘look like a coward’ if he failed to take part in a re-run of the live debates, which electrified the 2010 General Election. Mr Farage stated: ‘With UKIP’s growing popularity and the centrality of the issues on which we campaign, it is pretty obvious from these figures that I agree with the majority of the people of Britain.’ Only 20 percent said that Mr Farage should be excluded from the debates. Andrew Hawkins,

63 The Huffington Post UK 29 September 2013. 64 The House Magazine 17 January 2013.

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the chairman of ComRes offered the pollster’s point-of-view on the issue: ‘By agreeing to the debates in 2010 the main parties created an expectation among voters for future clashes, which could backfire badly if they try to wriggle out of them. This genie is well and truly out of the bottle.’ Other noteworthy trends from the ComRes poll included the fact that 14 percent more men than women wanted the UKIP leader in the debates and 12 percent fewer public sector workers felt the same way as their private sector counterparts on the topic. In the poll, 41 percent in the age group 25-34 want to see Mr Farage go toe-to-toe in the leaders’ debates, a figure which rose to 66 percent for those aged 65+ (i.e., those most likely to vote in a general election). The leaders’ debates will help being the election campaign to life, according to the poll. More than half (52%) said they ‘make the General Election campaign more interesting’, with 28% disagreeing, although 50% also believe that the debates ‘don't tell us anything about the party leaders and their policies that we don't already know.’

7. A YouGov poll on the issue of UKIP’s inclusion in the leaders’ debates was

conducted for The Times newspaper in early October 2013.65 It posed three options and the responses were as follows:

• ‘Straight debates between David Cameron and Ed Miliband, as they are the only two

leaders who stand any realistic chance of becoming Prime Minister’ (14%).

• ‘Three-way debates, like last time, between the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaders, as these are the only three parties with MPs from all parts of Britain’ (23%).

• ‘Four-way debates, to include Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, as

UKIP is now more popular than the Lib Dems and plans to fight the great majority of seats in 2015’ (49%).

• ‘Don’t know’ (14%).

8. Their Lordships may also wish to be aware of the e-petition, which appeared on HM

Government Website (closed on 13 December 2013) which read: ‘We believe that if The UK Independence Party or 'UKIP' beat either of the coalition parties (Liberal Democrats or Conservative Party) at the European Elections 2014, then their leader should be allowed to participate and speak as part of any televised leaders’ debate ahead of the general election.’ The Cabinet Office response to the petition read: ‘This is not a matter for Government. The arrangement for party political broadcast and debates are for the parties themselves.’ (However, the Cabinet Office offered no explanation as to why the petition had been hosted on the government’s website for a year, if it was ‘not a matter for government’). The petition received 30,074 signatures in support.

9. On 7 January 2014, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg told the Daily Telegraph that

he was ready to ‘sign up now’ with broadcasters, for the same format of debates that took place before the last election and he challenged David Cameron to do the same. Mr Clegg's pledge came after Labour asked to open formal negations with

65 http://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/10/07/who-should-take-part-tv-election-debates/

http://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/10/07/who-should-take-part-tv-election-debates/

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broadcasters, to set in motion plans for similar television debates between the three main party leaders that were broadcast in the run up to the 2010 election. Although he agreed with Labour that on balance, he favoured a ‘333’ formula - three debates between the three leaders of the main parties over three consecutive weeks, Liberal Democrat sources said that the Deputy Prime Minister did not want Mr Cameron to ‘wriggle out’ of the debates, using the excuse that Nigel Farage and UKIP could possibly be involved. Mr Clegg said: ‘So the only major party leader of the major party who is represented in the House of Commons who still needs to need, if you like, to still sign on the dotted line is David Cameron and the Conservatives.’ He added that he did not want ‘anxieties about UKIP and Nigel Farage’ to be used as an ‘excuse’ to not take part and that he would relish the prospect of debating the UKIP leader, if the opportunity presented itself. He added: ‘I think it would be a real step backward if we were, if any party leader were to sort of use an excuse to not do these leader debates again. The key thing is to get agreement from the three party leaders of three main parties represented in the House of Commons, then you can have a debate. I personally have no problem debating with Nigel Farage, I’d probably relish it actually, but the first thing you have to do is to get the Labour and a Liberal Democrat and Conservative leaders to agree to do this again, I’m prepared to do it, I hope that David Cameron will do it again.’ The previous week, Douglas Alexander, Labour’s election co-ordinator, told The Guardian that Labour was about to commence talks on the issue with the TV companies.66 He said: ‘The starting point for Labour in the talks is that the format should be the same as the election when TV debates were introduced and seen as important to stimulating public interest.’ He added: ‘Farage potentially taking part is not a deal-breaker for Labour, but it appears that it might be for David Cameron. The priority for us is to ensure that there is a debate between the two prospective prime ministers of the country – Ed Miliband and David Cameron. The other issues about format are a matter for negotiation.’

10. In the House of Commons on 7 January 2014, Peter Bone, MP (Conservative,

Wellingborough) asked Cabinet Office Minister Greg Clark: ‘Mr Speaker, surely the way to stop a decline in individual registration is to make politics interesting. Therefore is it not essential that we continue with the leader’s debates and that they should include the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the leader of the UK Independence Party and does the Minister agree that afterwards, it will not be ‘I agree with Nick’ but ‘I agree with Nige’?’ Mr Clark replied: ‘All I want to say is that my Honourable Friend is a personal example of someone who makes politics interesting and I think there’s a good case for him being included in those debates, for that reason.’

11. UKIP’s claim to a place in the leaders’ debates is reinforced by the fact that the party

is presently out-polling one of the two parties in the present Coalition Government (see Annex C) and has been tipped by a number of psephologists and political commentators as the front-runner to win most British seats in the May 2014 European Elections.67 UKIP intends to stand a candidate in every mainland constituency in the British General Election in 2015. However, we believe that any decision as to whether UKIP should be included in the leaders’ debates should reflect not only its share of the vote in the European elections and current polling

66 The Guardian 31 December 2013. 67 http://www.neurope.eu/article/poll-suggests-ukip-could-win-uk-euro-elections and

http://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/01/16/european-elections-ukip-closes-first-place/

http://www.neurope.eu/article/poll-suggests-ukip-could-win-uk-euro-elections

http://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/01/16/european-elections-ukip-closes-first-place/

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information, but also its track-record in council elections - as well as the party’s representation in Parliament. However, it should be noted that if Prime Minister Cameron had honoured the pledge made in the 2010 Coalition Agreement that: ‘Lords appointments will be made with the objective of creating a second chamber that is reflective of the share of the vote secured by the political parties in the last general election’ – UKIP would now have 24 peers in the House of Lords.

12. As suggested in the Committee’s ‘Call for Evidence’, an independent ‘debates

commission’ may well be the way forward and it is worth examining the American experience of the issue: Their first televised debates were held in 1960 between Senator John F Kennedy and Vice-President Richard Nixon. Sixteen years then elapsed before agreement was reached to hold any further debates. Now they are a permanent fixture, and the decision about who should take part, is taken by an independent body, the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). It was founded in 1987 and applies a generally accepted set of rules. It includes candidates who, (in the words of the CPD’s rules):

(a) are constitutionally eligible to hold the office of President of the United States;

(b) have achieved ballot access in a sufficient number of states to win a theoretical Electoral College majority in the general election; and (c) have demonstrated a level of support of at least 15% of the national electorate, as determined by five selected national public opinion polling organisations, using the average of those organisations' most recent publicly-reported results. The 15% rule meant that businessman and philanthropist Ross Perot, an independent candidate, took part in the debates in 1992; at all other recent elections, debates have been confined to Democrat and Republican candidates only.

13. The challenges of translating the above three options into the British democratic process should not be insuperable and it may well be the wisest choice to hand the decision to an independent organisation – for example, an all-party group convened by the Speaker of the House of Commons; or a freshly-appointed body, created by Parliament, or operating under the auspices of an existing all-party organisation, such as the Hansard Society.

14. It is suggested that Their Lordships may wish to consider extending the existing

broadcast remit to include online platforms, such as YouTube. The 2010 leaders’ debates saw unprecedented levels of interaction through social networking sites and on a weekly basis, there are thousands of Tweets regarding the content of BBC TV’s Question Time programme. With digital and social media becoming increasingly important and large numbers of people online, we suggest that there should be online debates, or at least, debates with an interactive element, to cater for the growing appetite to interact with the political process. One model on which to base such an online or interactive debate could be the 2007 CNN and YouTube Presidential Debate, a series of televised events, in which, the United States presidential hopefuls fielded questions, submitted through the video-sharing site YouTube. Furthermore, such a debate would also help to encourage younger and first-time voters to think about politics and interact with the political process. Additionally, a Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism study revealed that the

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2010 Election Debates successfully attracted first-time voters and got them talking about politics68. That research, based on YouGov survey data, showed that among 18 - to 24-year-olds ‘a special relationship [was formed] with the TV debates compared with more jaded older people.’ More than half of those surveyed in the 18-24 age group said they had become more interested in the election, compared with a quarter of people aged 55 and over. UKIP’s own experience of social and digital media would attest to the importance of the medium, as well as reinforcing our claim that UKIP should have a presence at any the debates. UKIP is regularly a trending topic on Twitter in the UK, particularly after BBC TV Question Time programmes featuring a UKIP spokesperson and in 2013, UKIP was the most popular topic of political conversation on Twitter.69 UKIP currently has over 50,000 ‘Likes’ on Facebook, 35,000 ‘Followers’ on Twitter and Nigel Farage has more than 100,000 ‘Followers’ on Twitter, in addition to the many more who interact with both UKIP and him online, each day, all of which, suggests that there is a growing increase of usage of social media and interest in UKIP and its leader.

15. It would be helpful if the decision as to who appears in the leaders’ debates is not

party political, given the unprecedented rise of UKIP, which has not yet gained any seats in the House of Commons. Leaving the decision to the main political parties and the broadcasters on the question of format and who should be included in the leaders’ debates, will probably produce an outcome that side-lines the public interest. We live in a society in which, democratic participation has been in decline for more than a generation and the current situation presents a powerful opportunity to revive it and should not be discarded lightly.

16. In order to assist the Select Committee’s deliberations, UKIP’s senior officers are

willing to appear before the committee in person, to give oral evidence. Their names are: Mr Nigel Farage, MEP (Party Leader); Mr Steve Crowther (Party Chairman); Lord Pearson of Rannoch and Mr Patrick O’Flynn (Party Director of Communications).

January 2014

68 https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publications/risj-challenges/leaders-in-the-living-room.html 69 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/twitter-trends-2013-ukip-tops-the-political-lot-8999898.html

https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publications/risj-challenges/leaders-in-the-living-room.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/twitter-trends-2013-ukip-tops-the-political-lot-8999898.html

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Annex A

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Annex B

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Annex C

Opinion polls

Company Date Con Lab Lib Dem UKIP Others

YouGov 20/12/13 34 40 9 11 6

Populus 20/12/13 32 40 12 8 8

ComRes 17/12/13 32 37 9 10 12

YouGov 15/12/13 32 38 9 13 9

BBC poll of polls 15/12/13 33 37 10 10 10

ComRes 15/12/13 29 36 8 18 9

Populus 13/12/13 33 38 13 9 7

ICM 12/12/13 32 37 12 9 9

Ipsos Mori 10/12/13 33 37 9 10 11

YouGov 08/12/13 34 39 10 11 6

BBC poll of polls 08/12/13 33 39 10 11 7

Populus 08/12/13 33 41 11 7 8

YouGov 01/12/13 30 38 10 15 7

ComRes 26/11/13 32 37 9 11 11

Populus 24/11/13 34 39 12 7 8

YouGov 24/11/13 33 40 9 11 7

BBC poll of polls `18/12/13 32 38 10 10 10

Populus 18/11/13 32 41 10 9 8

YouGov 17/11/13 33 39 10 12 6

ComRes 17/11/13 29 35 10 17 9

ICM 12/11/13 30 38 13 10 10

Ipsos-Mori 12/11/13 32 38 8 8 14

BBC poll of polls 11/11/13 32 39 10 12 7

Professor William Wheatley, Jr – Oral evidence (QQ 32-41)

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Members present



Professor William Wheatley, Jr, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, and former Executive Vice-President of NBC News

Q32 The Chairman: Is that Professor Wheatley?

Professor Wheatley: It is, indeed.

The Chairman: Good. I now can hear you but I cannot see you any more. Previously I could see you but could not hear you. My name is Richard Inglewood. I am Chairman of this Committee of the House of Lords in England. Welcome to our evidence session and a very big thank you for agreeing to speak to us. The meeting itself is being broadcast and a transcript is being taken of what you say and what we ask you. When we get into the evidence session proper, please mention your name and explain who you are in your opening remark. If you would like to make an opening statement, that would be entirely in line with our thinking, but it is up to you.

As you probably know, we have just heard from Janet Brown. I am sure I do not have to give any description of her to you. She is clearly in favour of the idea of some sort of model to oversee the leaders’ debates here and sees some merit in importing that idea into our arrangements in this country. Perhaps I could start by asking in general terms whether you think there are merits in the commission model from which we can learn here in this country. Do you think there is anything in particular that is important to us, such as debates on a secure footing or voter education?

Professor Wheatley: Thank you, Chairman and Members of the Committee, for permitting me to give evidence today. I have a very short opening statement. After many years of observing, covering and being involved in the production of televised election debates, I believe that they have come to serve an important, indeed necessary, role in modern


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elections. They permit large audiences to observe the candidates close up, hearing unfiltered their positions on the issues, seeing how they think on their feet and how they deal with the other candidates, the moderator and the public. They help create a national conversation on the future, which is what elections should be mostly about. They underscore the importance of elections, making it more likely, I believe, that citizens will go to the polls and exercise their sacred right to determine who represents them.

For all these reasons and more, I applaud the Committee for exploring ways in which leadership debates might become a regular part of British elections, the way they have in American elections. While the American way of conducting election debates has produced good results generally, it has its flaws and I am not here to argue that the UK should necessarily go the way of the US. Every situation is different and when it comes to debates each country must do what works best for it, but I am delighted to have the opportunity to help in a small way as you work your way through determining what works best for you.

You asked about the merits of the commission model. I believe that having an organisation with the mission of organising the debates each cycle has helped to ensure that presidential debates are held and, importantly, that there are likely to be more than one. The public has come to expect that there will be multiple debates, making it more difficult for candidates, especially those ahead in the polls, to try to avoid them. While I do not think we are quite at the point where we can conclude that presidential debates are now guaranteed every four years, the presence of the commission has made debates far more likely to occur than they were a generation ago. Having a commission makes it somewhat easier to introduce formats that are designed to elicit unrehearsed answers and free-flowing discussions, the kind that can prove more informative than a mere recitation of memorised talking points. A commission is able to lobby publicly for such formats. In America the CPD, with some pushing from its critics, has gradually improved debate formats, although in my opinion there remains room for further advances.

The Chairman: Do you think that in reality it is likely that there would not be debates in your country in the future?

Professor Wheatley: I think that is most unlikely to happen. The debates are now institutionalised. The public expect them. It would be an extremely risky matter for a candidate to avoid the debates. I think the public would not be pleased by that.

The Chairman: Thank you. That is very interesting.

Q33 Baroness Scotland of Asthal: Thank you for giving evidence to us, Professor Wheatley. Do you have any reservations about the extent to which independence from political or partisan influence can be secured under the arrangements you currently have for the commission: its funding and organisational structure? We have had written evidence that, given the political interests of its two chairmen, the commission would probably be more accurately described as bipartisan rather than non-partisan. Would you help by commenting on whether its political influences arguably have some impact on the way the commission designs the criteria on which candidates are eligible to participate? I wanted to know your thoughts on all that.

Professor Wheatley: As you know, the commission in the United States was created by the Republican and Democratic parties. It is chaired by former operatives of those parties. While the leaders of the commission are certainly responsible people, it would be a leap of faith to believe that partisan considerations do not play some role in the commission’s deliberations. There is also the fact that representatives of the candidates negotiate in secret


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certain rules of the debates and sign a contract committing to them and asking the commission to enforce them. Even though the commissioners occasionally push back on some parts of these contracts, the very existence of the contracts makes it hard for the commission to support its claim that it is independent of the parties: that it is non-partisan rather than bipartisan.

There are some other considerations in this regard. It is important to remember that a portion of the considerable expenses of the commission is paid for by corporate donors who have business before the government and, by extension, before members of the political parties. This is a further example of the role of big money in Washington politics. Along these lines, it is worth noting that the commission’s present co-chairmen are themselves paid lobbyists whose business it is to try to win favour from the elected officials of the two parties.

What does this all add up to? While I believe that in general the commission has done a responsible job of overseeing the debates, I believe that it nevertheless tends to favour the status quo and has been somewhat slow to reform formats, reluctant to choose moderators who can be counted on to ask pointed questions, and a little tepid about using digital technology to further involve the public.

Baroness Scotland of Asthal: Bearing in mind these quite frank criticisms and understanding that we are starting to look at this ourselves, what would your recommendations be as to how to avoid some of those flaws that you have just identified? Understanding the historical basis from which the commission was created, if you were starting again how would you do it? What, if anything, would you change?

Professor Wheatley: It would be wise if you are going to have a commission to have a commission that is truly non-partisan, that is led by people who do not have a close connection to the political parties, perhaps outstanding people in civic life in general. I fear also that not only the leadership but the board of directors needs to be as non-partisan as possible. If I were starting a commission I would probably want to include members of the broadcast community and some membership, obviously, from the political parties, but still overall to be led and have standards that would be in the range of what we call good-government organisations of the United States.

The Chairman: Am I right in saying—if I could possibly paraphrase what you were saying to us—that you have an anxiety that the commission is too close to the political establishment, using those words in a very general sense?

Professor Wheatley: That is true. You cannot take away the fact that it is led by people who were formerly major players in the Republican and Democratic parties respectively. They in turn are involved in selecting the rest of the members of the commission. In my opinion they are less likely to be aggressive about ensuring that the debates do not simply protect the status quo.

Q34 Lord Clement-Jones: Professor, I wonder if we could explore the question of the role of broadcasters in the current system that you have. We heard from Janet Brown just a few moments ago about the split between production and direction, that a rotating pool does the direction for each debate but the production, the set, the format and the choice of moderator are very much the commission’s responsibility. Do you think that the broadcasters in your system should have a greater role and perhaps even have a seat at the table with the commission? In answering that, could you tell us a little about your experience of working with the commission at NBC? As a broadcaster, would your instincts be different


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from those of the commission as to the way in which the programmes are formatted? You have already mentioned that you think there is an inherent conservatism about the way the programme is formatted.

Finally, do you think there is some merit in our system, where there is some creative tension, where the debates are organised between the parties and the broadcasters? We rotate them around the broadcasters but, subject to a set of rules, the individual broadcasters do the production and the direction under one roof.

Professor Wheatley: Surely. In all honesty, I have mixed feelings about the role of broadcasters in debates. While generally I believe that journalism organisations should cover events not participate in them, broadcast journalists are trained to ask questions and are skilled at moderating televised proceedings. For these reasons I favour a role for the broadcasters beyond simply aiming the cameras and having their moderators act as traffic cops, more or less, for the candidates.

Some background might be interesting here. In 1992 network officials, including me, from the four major American networks doing news proposed to the commission that we work together to stage the debates. We proposed that there be four debates—three presidential and one vice-presidential—held in network studios in four geographically diverse cities and that each of the four networks have responsibility for producing one of the debates, providing an anchor who would question the candidates in a free-flowing format. We argued that there was no need to raise money to stage debates in huge halls on college campuses, no need to have large on-site audiences composed in part of party loyalists and corporate sponsors, no need to arrange for large blocks of hotel rooms and so on. The talks proved interesting and we seemed to be making some progress, but then the commission said that it had decided to go its own way and one network dropped out of the coalition. In the end the commission ran the 1992 debates.

In 2004, my network, NBC, offered the candidates the opportunity to have a debate separate from the ones that the commission had announced it would hold. The Republicans agreed but the Democrats did not. We, the NBC and the Republicans were accused of undermining the commission and threatening the traditional airing of debates on all major networks simultaneously. In the end the matter was dropped and the commission once again organised all the debates, as it has since then.

I have no issue with the political parties and broadcasters negotiating the terms of debates as was done in Britain in 2010 and is done regularly in the presidential primary debates in America. I do worry, however, that such an approach may mean that every time there was a British election, the process would start anew with the possibility that one or more parties would decide not to debate. While this remains possible in America too, the debates here have over the years become such a key part of the election process that a candidate who tries to avoid them does so at his or her considerable political peril.

Lord Clement-Jones: That is very interesting. Are you saying that as a broadcaster you took that view—and obviously you were prepared to put forward a separate debate—but on mature reflection you think that the commission as a body in a sense is a useful guarantor that these debates in a particular way will go forward for the future in the United States?

Professor Wheatley: Yes, I do. But I should point out that broadcasters could also be a useful guarantor in that regard.


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Lord Clement-Jones: Where do you sit now in terms of broadcasters sitting on the commission? You would not have them on the commission but the commission has to consult them closely as part of the process. Where do you think they fit most comfortably?

Professor Wheatley: The commission does consult broadcasters carefully as part of the process but it does not permit the broadcasters to exert editorial leadership for the debates. As for the networks in America sitting on the commission, I would still be opposed to that simply because I continue to believe that the commission is in some ways beholden to the Republican and Democratic parties and I do not think it appropriate that a journalism organisation should be too close to that situation.

Lord Clement-Jones: But just to press you a little, there was the criticism that there was no Latino moderator, for instance, at the last round of debates. How do you overcome some of the conservatism in formats and so on that you have mentioned, and indeed in the choice of moderator?

Professor Wheatley: I have come to believe that the best formats are those that are somewhat less structured than the ones we have had to date, formats that permit a free flow of dialogue among the candidates and that permit the moderator to interject, not only to be a traffic cop but also to pose follow-up questions and so on. To the commission’s credit, in the last round of debates it made some progress along those lines.

To answer your question about minority representation in the debates, I see no reason why minorities cannot be represented in the moderator corps. They are already represented in terms of the audience and the way that is selected demographically.

Q35 Baroness Fookes: In the course of your remarks, Professor, you referred to contracts being made by the participants. I was not quite clear about this. Could you expand on that?

Professor Wheatley: Yes. In each election cycle Republican and Democratic representatives sit down and work out certain terms of the debate for both its organisation and the way it is conducted. I should tell you that those contracts have not generally been shared with the public. As it transpired, in 2012 a copy of the agreement was leaked to a member of the press, who promptly published it, and it is a contract that in 2012 ran to, I believe, 21 pages. It deals with all manner of arrangements, such as where the candidates would stand or be seated, whether there would be follow-up questions permitted by the moderator, how many tickets would be reserved for each of the parties, and so on. It is a document that they negotiate, sign and present to the commission. The commission argues—and I think fairly so—that it is not bound by that contract and that it is free to ignore those terms, but I have to say that many of those terms are in fact reflected in the debates.

Baroness Fookes: Do those terms in any way inhibit the role of the moderator?

Professor Wheatley: They have, particularly in terms of the ability to ask follow-up questions.

Q36 The Chairman: Professor, do you think that the way it is structured in practice means that it is difficult, indeed well nigh impossible, for a third-party candidate to become a real contender because of the way it appears that these contracts are done between the Republicans and Democrats?

Professor Wheatley: The contracts do not provide that no one else can participate in the debate. Indeed, as I believe you know, the commission had adopted a numerical formula for the inclusion of third-party candidates. First of all, the candidate would need to be on the


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ballot in enough states to comprise 270 electoral votes—the number you need to be elected President. Then they would need also to have a standing of approximately 15% in a basketful of public opinion polls. Some argue that that is too high a standard for the inclusion of a third-party candidate but I am glad they do have a standard. Some say that the standard should be 10%, even 5%. Critics argue that because the debates are pretty much limited to the two major parties, various ideas that might be relevant to the discussion do not get heard. It is a thorny and difficult issue. I do believe that the commission has addressed it. On the other hand, I believe that it should be open to further discussion on whether the formula is right.

Q37 Earl of Selborne: Professor, you have told us that you think that the commission in some respects could be restructured with advantage and that it is possible that political parties, or indeed others, might exert an undue influence in some respects. I can see that if we adopted that model in this country our broadcasters would not be willing to concede editorial independence to any organisation, let alone one with commissioners who could be seen to be partisan, even if from different sides. They would say that they are required to uphold impartiality by our regulatory framework. They would, quite frankly, have more confidence that they could deliver this impartiality than the commission. How would you respond to that?

Professor Wheatley: In the UK broadcasters are legally required to practise impartiality. In the US they are not legally bound to do so. The fact is that the majority of American broadcasters, as a matter of professional ethics, strive to be impartial. Yes, we have ideological channels—Fox News on the right, MSNBC on the left—but they are not likely to get presidential debates as the Democrats would almost certainly object to a debate run by Fox News and Republicans to one run by MSNBC. The presidential debates in America have a long history of being moderated by fair, professional journalists. The public expect it and I believe would react negatively and strongly to the introduction of clearly biased moderators. The commission of course has always taken pains to appoint moderators who will conduct debates with impartiality. But I believe that if the networks ran them they would too, even without regulatory oversight.

Earl of Selborne: Do you think that broadcasters with the suitable regulatory framework could indeed deliver the impartiality that they would maintain in this country they are used to doing and are capable of doing and would expect to do?

Professor Wheatley: I have great faith in both British and American television journalists and I feel that both groups could be counted on to conduct the debate fairly.

Q38 Lord Dubs: Could you say a little more about how the US public see the commission’s activities? Do you believe the commission’s activities and judgments are sufficiently transparent, understood and accountable to the public? Is there anything else that you feel you might be doing in this area?

Professor Wheatley: I do not believe that the public necessarily have a view on the Commission on Presidential Debates. It is not an organisation that is particularly well known, and that is perhaps understandable. My view—and I am sure the commission has research to indicate this—is that generally speaking the American public feel that debates are fairly held and moderated. Having said that, I do believe that our commission could have additional transparency. We have talked about those secret contracts between the parties that are presented to the commission. I would certainly like to see the commission release those to the general public so they could observe them. I would like the commission to give


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additional details about its relationship with its corporate sponsors so the public could see what privileges they get. I would like the commission to reveal the terms of its financial arrangements with the colleges and universities that play host to the debates and pay financially for that privilege. On such an important civic matter as the debates, I think the public deserve to know all of these things.

Q39 Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill: Professor, you have spoken clearly on both the advantages and disadvantages, but taking everything into account, what would your advice be to us? Should the UK adopt a third-party-commission model in the way it operates and runs broadcasts on general election debates?

Professor Wheatley: Not being a British subject, I am somewhat reluctant to offer you advice, but I would urge you in your deliberations to keep the focus on what structure will make for the most informative debates conducted in the fairest manner, and then how that structure will enhance the possibility that leadership debates will become a permanent part of British elections. The political parties need to be key parts of the process by which debates are designed and held, but I hope that you find a way to involve them while not permitting them to control it. Their interests in such matters are not always the same as the public’s.

Were you to adopt the commission model or turn the responsibility for debates over to a civic organisation, I would suggest that the emerging organisation be truly non-partisan, not a creation of the political parties as it is in the US. I would be sure that its leadership is composed of people of accomplishment and integrity and that its board membership reflects those values as well. I would recommend that it be funded in a way that avoids donations from those who have business before the Government or who are close to the political parties.

As for the conduct of the debates, I would continue to make sure that the public get to ask questions, as they did in 2010. But I would also give the moderator leeway to ask questions of his or her own, particularly when a question from a member of the public demands follow-up.

I would come up with a numerical formula, as we have in America, for the inclusion of additional parties when they have become an important part of the national debate and have some electoral prospects.

Q40 The Chairman: In the session with Janet Brown before this session with you, she mentioned that coverage could be given to some of the smaller third parties in the general election, not in the debate as such but outside it. Of course, she said, it was not her responsibility to do that. Do you think that is an important point: that in the presidential election as a whole, more coverage should be given to some of the smaller parties, not necessarily through the debates as such but by the media, for the benefit of the electorate?

Professor Wheatley: I do think that we do not hear enough from the smaller parties, both in the media print media and broadcast journalism. I said earlier that I believe that ideas from some of the smaller parties often have relevance to the national political debate. The devil is in the details: organising debates or appearances that would give smaller parties greater access to the public. It is something that I believe is worth looking at carefully. I would say this: when you have a third-party candidate who is beginning to show substantial progress in awareness and support in the public, it is important that that person be permitted entry into the debates. We had this in 1992 with Ross Perot. Once again the devil is in the detail: what threshold there should be for such a third-party candidate to enter the debates. The


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commission has come up with a threshold. I mentioned that some believe it is too high, but you know your thoughts, and I know there is considerable debate in Britain about this. I guess I would err on the side of permitting someone into the debate rather than not if that person had substantial support, but you would have to work out what level is required.

The Chairman: The mechanics of identifying substantial support are quite difficult because it can be mechanistic or it can rely on judgment, and it is not straightforward at all, is it?

Professor Wheatley: It is not and in the United States we have had experience in both mechanistic and indeed arcane ways of making those decisions, but I think you have to try. All you can do is try to be fair. There will always be people who are disappointed. It seems to me that before you let someone into a debate, he or she has to have the potential to win the election. In your country I guess that would mean substantial support in enough constituencies to win control. But your system is not the same as ours and it may be difficult in Britain to come up with such a formula.

Q41 The Chairman: Professor, time is moving on and I think we are more or less at the end of the time you have kindly allocated to us. Other than my saying thank you very much from everyone involved here for what you have been telling us, is there anything you feel you would like to say that we have not covered in the discussion?

Professor Wheatley: No. I think you have asked the questions that one could reasonably ask. I would like to thank you for giving me a chance to participate and to wish the Committee well as it goes about its business. I know it is not an easy task but it is an important one. If I may be of any further help to your Committee at any time, please do not hesitate to call on me.

The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. We are very grateful for having heard what you have to tell us. Thank you.

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