The fandango around Paul Dacre and Ofcom has presumably suited the ministers and their spads who first leaked his name as the No 10 choice months ago. The former Mail editor may be a shoe-in to chair the regulator. Politicising this appointment has ensured that the substantial questions, over the increasingly technical challenges of the role and its capacity to shape our future, drowned in a pile of political piffle. Many serious potential candidates were dissuaded from applying: only nine threw their hats into the ring in the first round. That the competitive process is proceeding at all, however hobbled to accommodate Dacre, is a kind of victory—perhaps pyrrhic but nevertheless reassuring. No 10 had the legal right to appoint whoever it chose.
The job criteria has now been changed to make an aggressive appointment likely, and in a farcical twist, the “independent” appointments panel includes Michael Simmonds, a former Tory adviser and the brother-in-law of Robbie Gibb, who was Theresa May's comms chief and is now on the BBC board.
The way in which our media is run is crucial to the future of democracy. This anxiety is shared across the political spectrum. Patricia Hodgson, herself an Ofcom Chair between 2014-18 and author of a recent Policy Exchange report on reform of the civil service, observes: “Media appointments will always be a matter for controversy. As such it behoves those in power to find the very best slate of candidates—so that neither the process nor the final outcome can be criticised.”
Ofcom is about to expand to regulate far more than in the past—not just public service content producers (ie the broadcasters) but also the internet and online harms. It shows a lack of attention to the national interest that when faced with an appointment that could shape our democratic future, the government seems preoccupied only with making a flap that it can be seen to win and others to lose.
Ofcom started out as a shiny new regulator in 2003, built by mashing together a raft of other bodies concerned with telecoms, pricing the spectrum, and broadcasting markets and standards. Its legacy was as a regulator of the “pipes” of communication, managing the infrastructure, not the content pumped through. Ofcom became a sound and respected independent body whose primary job was to oversee telecoms markets. But as it developed it moved into regulating content as well, which jarred with its organisational culture.
Within Ofcom there are necessarily many expert economists, but they are instinctively uncomfortable with the analysis of messy content and social impact, where values are hard to measure. The worry, when it took over regulating the BBC and other public service broadcasters in 2017, was that Ofcom would be “captured” by the commercial lobbying its other work exposed it to. Or that it would simply fail to develop the right culture, because after all the BBC is a deliberate market intervention in favour of the public interest. Public service broadcasters have a unique responsibility for the national conversation. And there is some evidence that Ofcom was not an entirely safe place for the BBC, as it sought at times to criticise the broadcaster’s performance in a knee-jerk way, sometimes even in the face of its own evidence. Ofcom’s recent insistence that the BBC needed to become less "London-centric" was way beyond its remit and felt as if it was motivated, improperly, by a desire to please the government.
Now it is being asked to regulate the internet—the modern world. This will require it to make nuanced and delicate decisions about freedom of speech. The UK tradition is not about allowing the loudest, best-sourced, richest, most bullying voice to dominate, but much more productively about the inclusion of less powerful voices and about testing arguments, as well as nurturing risky cultural innovation.
Can an old-fashioned economic regulator adapt to this new task? Ofcom needs to consider thoroughly the principles it hopes to promote and then provide sophisticated answers. Regulating online harms badly would be dangerous. Ofcom will increasingly act internationally, so needs to build bridges and yet be legally secure: it needs new, better legislation. Dacre has been a fierce critic of the BBC, and is neither an economist nor technically proficient. Frankly, he is of the wrong generation. Of course he can keep Ofcom on the front pages by wrecking and rowing: which may be exactly what the government thinks it wants. But is that really healthy?
The Ofcom appointment raises two questions. The first is how public appointments in general are handled deep into a period of one-party rule, when the government has a legitimate desire to have people in post it can get on with. As Peter Riddell, the recently retired public appointments commissioner, has observed in a blog for the Constitution Unit, this desire risks crowding out merit as the prime condition for competitive appointments.
Far less understood is that the whole system of public interest media is being lethally undermined. The logjam of appointments across the media terrain weakens it at a critical moment. Ofcom has had a year with an acting chair, but it also needs a non-executive board member. The BBC needs new board members for Northern Ireland and Scotland, when a punitive licence fee settlement is imminent. Channel 4 is lacking three executive directors and its Welsh counterpart S4C has vacancies for two non-executive board members, when legislation privatising the channel is expected after Christmas. If you were conspiracy-minded it would look like a plan.
This failure is a strategic one, far wider than the appointments issue: the integrity of public interest media is at stake. Is Ofcom fit for purpose?
