The U.K. needs to be better represented in all its diversity on film and TV screens, fight polarizing fake news, and level the playing field for streamers and traditional broadcasters, Lisa Nandy, U.K. Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in the relatively new Labour Party government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, told a London conference on Tuesday, highlighting the “challenging” time the industry is going through amid digital disruption and after the impact of the COVID pandemic and advertising downturn.
Outlining her priorities in her first major public speech since her appointment during a keynote appearance at the Royal Television Society’s London Convention 2024, she said: “There’s a choice ahead of us, whether we choose to be the last guardians of this chapter, or whether we choose to be the first pioneers of the next.”
Addressing the TV industry folks in the room, she vowed the Labour government would help “create the conditions for this new era, not just catching up broken models and ways of working, but ensuring you have the right framework, conditions and backing to thrive well into the future, and being clear about the change we need from you in return.”
Nandy also said, in a dig at the recent Conservative Party governments, that “the era of government culture wars is over” as long as Labour governs and that the Labour government believes in public service broadcasting.
She lauded the BBC, saying “for too long it has been caught between the state and the market.” The secretary vowed to at least keep the funding for the U.K. public broadcaster stable. “The next charter review has to ensure that the BBC doesn’t just survive but thrives,” Nandy highlighted.
The culture secretary emphasized the role the media has to play in properly representing the whole country and not just parts of it. She also expressed the hope to have a more united country at ease with itself heading to the polls for the next election in a few years.
“When warring political tribes with separate news sources and information feeds construct their only realities, it costs us the ability to understand one another, and we’ve seen how pernicious, unchecked disinformation can fan the flames of violence this summer on display in our towns and cities,” Nandy said in reference to riots and violence targeted at asylum seekers. “My friend Peter Kyle and the team at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology are tackling incitement and disinformation already through the Online Safety Act, and in my department, we inherited a Media Act from the previous government with important reforms to the regulation of television and radio services that will ensure that as the way we consume media changes, the landscape changes with them,” she continued.
“Today, I’m writing to [media regulator] Ofcom to kick off their review of the video-on-demand market,” Nandy further unveiled. “This review will lay the ground for a more level playing field for all mainstream services, with video-on-demand [or streaming] services regulated to the same high standards we expect from traditional broadcasters.”
She also emphasized the entertainment sector needs to invest in and produce more content set outside of London and set in working-class milieus. Nandy said her goal was “an industry that will not just survive, but thrive,” adding: “We’ll do everything we can to put rocket boosters under your efforts, but that effort in the first place belongs to you all.”
Late last year, the previous Conservative Party government unveiled plans to launch a new, independent standards body to help fight bullying and harassment in the creative industries that will start its work this year. The body, the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority (CIISA), will bring together stakeholders from the U.K.’s film, television, music and theater sectors and is intended as an authority where concerns over behavior can be raised and investigated confidentially. Several well-known British creatives, including Keira Knightley, Stephen Graham, Ruth Wilson, Naomie Harris, Rebecca Ferguson, Chariots of Fire director David Puttnam, and James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli joined Frazer in support of the new authority.