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State of Play: Why the Commons Select Committee needs to become a strong public voice in media policy debates

The Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport recently held an open consultation called ‘State of Play’, asking the public and interested groups to suggest debates or areas of policy the Committee should review in its work over this parliament.

The Media Reform Coalition submitted our proposals for how the Committee can and should play a much bolder role in forthcoming media policy debates.

READ: The MRC’s submission to the Commons Culture Committee ‘State of Play’

We also encourage the Committee to rethink how it conducts inquiries into media policy, emphasising the urgent need to engage much more widely and directly with the public and civil society – rather than depending solely on the largest media groups and established industry interests for its evidence and policy analysis.

Here’s a summary of our submission, making the case for the Commons Select Committee to become a much more powerful public voice ahead of so many vital policy debates.

The high stakes of media policy

The Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee covers some of the most important and universally impactful areas of public policy affecting British society, culture and democracy. Over the next few years the UK’s major media institutions will face significant, overlapping and potentially existential challenges – and the government will be making major decisions that will shape the future of British media.

But policy areas like public service broadcasting, news publishing, digital platforms and local media are not solely matters concerning the business and regulation of large media companies (as important as these are). These media institutions – and the policies that govern them – are essential to the cohesion of British society, to the creation and representativeness of British culture in all its diversity, and to informing the British public to take part in our democratic processes.

In its own work on these vital debates, the Commons Select Committee needs to become a platform for open and comprehensive public debate about the kinds of reforms that are urgently needed to fix the failures in Britain’s media. Decades of ineffective media policies have put the private gain of large media companies about the needs and interests of the public, and resulted in significant on-going harms to the public:

Addressing the democratic deficit in UK media

All of these harms, and the policy failures underlying them, make the Committee’s role and focus over the course of this parliament vitally important. To best represent the public interest and address urgent crises in the UK’s media sector, we recommend that the Committee explore the following policy debates during the current parliament:

Embedding public participation in the official review of the BBC’s Royal Charter. The government is required to review and renew the BBC’s Royal Charter by the end of 2027, but recent statements suggest the government is sticking to the undemocratic, unaccountable and behind-closed-doors model of ‘Charter review’. In past Charter reviews the Commons Select Committee made progressive recommendations for BBC reform, such as as removing government’s power to appoint the BBC Chair and making the licence fee more independent from political control, but sadly these were ignored.

The Commons Select Committee must use its role in the forthcoming Charter review to ensure the process is open, accountable and properly democratic, and become a platform for wider public deliberation and engagement with questions around the future of the BBC.

The decline of the UK’s local media. Local media in the UK has collapsed after decades of corporate consolidation and takeovers, causing thousands of job cuts and the closure of hundreds of newspapers, radio stations and local TV networks. Approximately 4.7 million people – 7% of the population – live in news ‘deserts’, areas without a single dedicated local news outlet. The ‘hands off’ market-based model of local media has completely failed to support or sustain a diverse local media sector that is made for and about our communities.

The government is due to publish terms of references for its ‘Local media strategy’, according to the Culture Secretary’s remarks to the Committee in December 2024. As with BBC Charter review, this should be an opportunity for an open public debate about the public’s needs, interests and priorities for how they use and engage with local media in their communities. The Committee should engage much more closely with the UK’s growing movement of smaller independent local media outlets (rather than the handful of dominant players), and explore their examples of community ownership and funding for public interest news as solutions to the local media crisis.

Implementation of the Media Act 2024 and the future of the UK’s public service broadcasting (PSB) ecology. The Media Act 2024, passed just before the general election, updated many of Ofcom’s regulatory responsibilities for PSB, but the Act also significantly narrowed the legislative definition of public service broadcasting (PSB), and abolished Channel 4’s ‘publisher-broadcaster’ status – enabling the publicly-owned company to make in-house content for the first time in its history. Ofcom’s implementation of the changes in the Media Act will require constant scrutiny to protect audience interests and the sustainability of public service content.

The Commons Select Committee needs to closely hold Ofcom to account in monitoring the falling provision of vital public service programming, which is likely to worsen following the removal of specific named genres from the legislative conditions that define Ofcom’s oversight of PSB. Commercial PSB investment in children’s content has fallen by 95% since 2003, when children’s programming quotas were removed. The Committee will also need to monitor any changes Channel 4 makes to its commissioning strategy, and consider recommending further regulations – such as an ‘SME Guarantee’ quota – to preserve Channel 4’s founding mission as an investor in and creative engine for SME production companies.

Tackling the UK’s crisis in falling media plurality and concentrated media ownership. The UK is facing a severe crisis in concentrated media ownership. Just three companies – DMG Media, News UK and Reach – control 90% of national newspaper circulation, and these same publishers account for more than two-fifths of the online reach of the UK’s top 50 news websites. Recent media mergers – such as the UAE-backed purchase of Telegraph Media Group or the sale of The Observer – have further exposed the limits of a regulatory model that allows for unaccountable transfers of media power without any recourse to the public interest. Ofcom’s statutory duty to monitor media plurality is massively out of step with the realities of media ownership and concentration in the shadow of dominant tech platforms, who amplify the reach and market share of already-dominant news publishers.

The Commons Select Committee should explore how the UK’s media plurality regime can be updated to better protect diversity of opinion, freedom of journalistic expression and independence from concentrated ownership – as has been recommended by the Leveson Inquiry, the 2013 DCMS consultation on media plurality, the 2014 Lords Communications Committee inquiry, and many civil society organisations. This should include investigating the introduction of clear legislative thresholds on market/ownership shares for triggering regulatory intervention, as well as ‘Public Interest Obligations’ to require dominant media companies to reinvest in public interest journalism.

Regulating Big Tech in the public interest. The online platforms and new digital technologies at the centre of our modern lives operate by opaque algorithms, unaccountable technological biases and an unrestrained commercialisation of user data. These have all helped to amplify disinformation, political polarisation and collapse revenues for ‘traditional’ media. Regulating the global Big Tech companies that control these platforms is essential to ensure they work in the public interest. The Commons Select Committee will need to play a close role in researching and scrutinising a range of different potential public interventions and regulatory changes to ensure that the impacts of Big Tech do not result in wider harms to the British public and media users on online platforms.

Under the new Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, the Competition and Markets Authority now has legislative power to impose and enforce corrective remedies on dominant tech companies. The CMA is currently exploring designating Google’s general search services as having ‘significant market status’, and the Commons Select Committee should play an active and on-going role in making sure this new legislative power benefits British audiences and the sustainability of UK public interest journalism. In particular the Committee should ensure that the interests of small and independent publishers are properly reflected in any deals or frameworks introduced on any designated SMS platforms.

Transforming the Commons Select Committee into a platform for public policy-making on the media

How the Committee conducts its media inquiries is just as important to the effectiveness of its work as the topics and policies the Committee chooses to investigate. Firstly, the Committee needs to ensure that it speaks to and for the public in its investigations, and holds the government to account for (not) properly including the British public in its media policy decisions. Despite media being fundamental to the public’s rights and interests, media policymaking in the UK is defined by a dangerous and undemocratic lack of public participation.

Second, the Committee needs to broaden the range of groups and interests it consults on media policy by engaging more openly and regularly with independent media outlets and civil society groups, rather than focusing on the largest media companies and established sector grandees. The recent Lords Communications Committee inquiry into ‘The future of news’ examined a range of challenges and considerations at the heart of addressing the sustainability of high quality news and journalism in the UK – yet the Committee spoke almost exclusively to politicians, regulators, executives at large news publishers and a handful of academic institutions. Out of the 52 people invited to give testimony to inquiry sessions, only one represented an independent local media outlet. If the Commons Select Committee seeks to properly understand the challenges and opportunities in the UK’s media sectors, it will need to speak to smaller and independent media outlets who are succeeding through alternative ownership structures, different models of ‘doing journalism’, and funding and creating media content that engages with marginalised and under-served audiences in ways that larger established media businesses are not.

Third, the Committee should strive to undertake and interrogate qualitative analysis of the impact of UK media – both positive and negative – and not limit its understanding to quantitative reports, or assuming taken-for-granted ideals are being fulfilled. The public’s relationship with media is about more than hours of content consumed or surveyed scores of trustworthiness or brand recognition. The Committee should explore qualitative methods of media research such as Citizens Assemblies, that involve the public in identifying, assessing and critiquing how media institutions contribute to social cohesion, cultural self-expression, democratic participation and individual connection with different communities.

Finally, the Committee must recognise across all of its work that the challenges facing the UK’s media sectors can no longer be addressed in isolation from one another. The growing dominance of a handful of Big Tech platforms and global streaming services on how media content is funded, distributed and created – alongside the generational shifts in media technologies and audience habits – has meant that the crises in local news, public broadcasting, media concentration and media accountability require a combined approach to reforming and strengthening the UK’s media policies for the benefit of the public.

A Public Commission on Media and Democracy

We also recommend that the Committee explore the mechanisms and terms of reference for establishing a comprehensive Public Commission on Media and Democracy. For too long governments have taken an inconsistent and intermittent interest in media policy, acting only when there is a perception of political opportunity, or to tackle abuses of powerful media interests long after they have already harmed significant numbers of people. A public commission would create the space for understanding the many systemic failures of in our media system, identifying the mistakes in politics and policies that enabled them, and developing a more democratic relationship between media and the public.

The Commons Select Committee could lead on establishing and hosting the commission, by sourcing original research, expert testimony and extensive public engagement. Its core areas of inquiry could examine a wide range of topics relating to the media, from intricate questions of regulation and policy intervention to deeper considerations about the media’s role in facilitating cultural self-expression, social cohesion and democratic citizenship.

The UK has a long history of reviews and inquiries into broadcasting and the press: with the rapid changes across our modern, digital media system, and the ineffectiveness of many recent policy interventions to adapt to these changes, an in-depth, detailed Public Commission on the future of our media is needed now more than ever – and the Commons Select Committee is perfectly placed to start the conversation.

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This post was originally published on Media Reform Coalition.