Clause 11 - Duty to establish and maintain Content Board
Communications Bill
3:45 pm
Mr Andrew Lansley (South Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
I intend to speak to the whole group of amendments, as they are related and connected.
The amendments relate to the composition of the content board. Committee members, especially those who were involved with the Committee that considered the Office of Communications Bill, might recall that the Government limited the membership of the Ofcom content board to six people. The Joint Committee subsequently recommended that that number should be able to be increased and the Government responded by announcing their intention to use the powers in the Ofcom Act to increase the size of the board to nine and to include a sixth non-executive member. One reason why the Joint Committee came to that conclusion was that we were made aware, not least because of the presence of Lord Pilkington, of the amount of activity—the weight of
scrutiny—that is required of Ofcom, and of the content board on Ofcom's behalf, in relation to standards, complaints, fairness, privacy, and so forth. For such activity to be permitted to be divorced from Ofcom would be undesirable. Ofcom has—and should have—a legal responsibility for those matters. Although such functions could be devolved to the content board, there is a risk that it could acquire a life of its own and we might end up with two regulators rather than one. In order to reduce that risk, we felt that it was desirable that at least one, and preferably two, members of the content board should be non-executive members of Ofcom and that when the content board meets, its chairman should also be a non-executive member. In order for that to happen, we should prescribe that the content board should also have a deputy chairman and that both the chairman and deputy-chairman should be non-executive members of Ofcom. Of course, neither should be the chairman of Ofcom. There is a high probability, if not a certainty, that the content board would always be chaired by a member of Ofcom. Thus, at least one member of Ofcom would have a continuing familiarity with the content board's work and would be able to speak from a position of authority on how it is approaching its decisions.
There are two likely risks: the content board's decisions might become progressively separate from Ofcom, or instead of there being a single integrated decision-making process Ofcom might become too much of a court of appeal because it starts to second guess the content board. Those risks must be offset and these four amendments are designed to accomplish that: the Government said that that was desirable but that it was not necessary to specify these matters in the Bill.