Welcome to this meeting of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. For anyone tuning in who expects us to be talking about the situation at the BBC, we will provide an update on our work as a Committee later today. This afternoon, we are focusing on the start of our inquiry into children’s television and video content. The written evidence that we have received—which has been absolutely abundant—has described the challenges that the sector is going through. Audiences are moving away from traditional broadcasters to video-sharing platforms and on-demand services. At the same time, there has been a decline in investment in UK-originated children’s content. As a Committee, we are looking forward to exploring, over the weeks ahead, what can be done to support those who make high-quality television and video for children to continue the excellent traditions that we have in this country of making TV that informs, educates and entertains children and young people. We had been due to hear from two panels today. Unfortunately, because of the expected business in the Chamber related to the BBC, we have had to postpone our panel of content makers. We look forward to seeing them at a later date. I am delighted that we are still able to go ahead with our first panel, looking at the current landscape for children’s media. We have two gentlemen incredibly experienced in the worlds of children’s media and literature. You are both very welcome: Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the current children’s laureate, an award-winning screenwriter and author; and Greg Childs OBE, director of the Children’s Media Foundation with an incredible background in children’s television and media. Welcome to you both. Before we begin, I remind all Members to declare any interests before they ask their questions. I should start with an interest of my own: my father has been a children’s television presenter for many years, and is particularly known for “How” and “How 2”, from the 1970s to the 1990s—with a little bit earlier in this decade. I will start the questioning with you, Frank. From your experience working across children’s media for many years, what makes good children’s telly?

First, thank you very much for having us on what must be a very turbulent day. What makes good children’s television? It is obviously different for different ages. As children’s laureate, I have been travelling the country. I have met children in lots of different settings, some of which make my heart soar, some of which make my heart sink. I have found out lots of things. One area that I have looked at is early years. We have looked at the neurology of children in their earliest years when they are being read to or entertained. A couple of things stand out to me as fundamental, important and threatened. First, when a child is very young, it is difficult for them to negotiate the world, as they are being bombarded by information—one minute they are an aquatic creature; the next, they are in the east end of London. The business of reading a picture book with a single image slowly with someone who loves you slows the world down and lets you find it more navigable, and it is a great bonding experience. There are two things in that: repetition is good, because you are building familiarity, and slowness is good, because you are making life navigable. I feel privileged to have grown up in an era when lots of children’s television had those qualities. There was a lot of stop-motion television, and there were lots of different kinds of animation that were incredibly creative: from “The Magic Roundabout”, with little things moving, to “Paddington”, with a drawn background—we could go on. It was also very regular; there were timings. Both those things are incredibly beneficial to very young people. I have mentioned them at this point partly because some of you will have had a rush of emotion when you heard me say “The Magic Roundabout” or “Paddington”. That rush of emotion and nostalgia is important, because it anchors you to a place, a time and a country. I was privileged to have worked on the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, and there was one sequence in it that celebrated television. If you watched it on television, it was not particularly fantastic—because you were just watching television on television—but in the stadium, I can remember gasps of pleasure and nostalgia, and what you were hearing then was a moment of national unity and national identity. That is an important by-product of that as well. For young people, it is about the manageability of time and slowness of pace. In particular, I would make a special plea for stop motion or different kinds of animation. For older children, it is about being seen, knowing who they are and being recognised. In live-action TV series, that is really important as well. Beyond that, when we talk about “good”, we talk about content, but one of the things you are going to find that you are talking about today is not so much content, but how it is delivered. When I was talking about young children earlier, phasing, ritual, time and punctuation were important. The overwhelming experience for children watching TV now is watching YouTube, which is frictionless. It is about flow, which leads to situations where we have “Cocomelon”, the most watched TV programme in the world, making bundles that are three, four or five hours long. That is not entertainment; that is sedation. What I benefited from was the opposite of sedation; it was stimulation and nourishment. There is nobody in this room, I bet, who does not owe something to “Blue Peter” or “How”.

Greg, do you want to add anything?

It is really quite difficult, working inside the industry, to make a definition of quality. We have been asked that more lately, and we sort of know what is bad, but I have had to think about what is good. For me, it is content that has purpose, meaning, warmth and emotional resonance; that connects you to something—your society or yourself—and is constructed with care in mind. Clearly, it is also content that does not actually damage—that is vital—but you asked what is good, and that is content that is made with purpose and meaning. Some of that meaning might simply be an understanding of the way that story structure works, but that is missing in some of the content that I would like to talk about today.

That is very helpful. Frank, can I take you back to what you said about how good TV that is tailored for an audience contributes to a child’s development? Do you want to expand on that a bit? How does that develop the way a child thinks and feels and experiences the world around them?

How granular do you want to get? We could keep you here a while.

We have about an hour—but not just for this question.

Well, there is that sharing thing, and that pace thing of being able to watch and grasp something. Are you talking about very early years or early years?

I mean particularly the youngsters. We are talking about development.

It is about language development and listening to voices, especially in content that is made specifically for younger children—with the repetition of certain phrases, and that invitation to join in and to imitate or make it into a game. With a programme, it is not the meal—it is the menu; it is the recipe. It is that invitation to join—to watch with somebody and to participate in something.

Do you think that children today are being well served by the media environment that they are growing up in?

No, not at all. There is great content out there—we have seen amazing content—but it is the platform that it is delivered on, how it is delivered and the circumstances and the culture around that. That has become very fragmented and is not nourishing. I don’t believe for a second that that can’t be fixed.

Can I ask Greg something? The Children’s Media Foundation clearly believes that children’s TV in the UK is worth protecting. What is it specifically about our TV in the UK that you think is important, and why is it important that it is protected?

It is important because it is crafted and has been crafted for the last 50, 60 or 70 years. It comes from a tradition going way back to BBC radio of thinking seriously about children as a specific audience, and the different age ranges within children as specific audiences, as Frank has mentioned. It is made by professionals who learn from other professionals and apply their trade to what I was talking about previously—to creating content that nourishes. That goes as much for commercial television as it does for commercial public service and public service at the BBC. I always come back to the fact that the woman who invented Nickelodeon said, “What’s good for kids is good for business.” Unfortunately, what we have now is that the dominant platform that delivers that content doesn’t have that as its mantra. That doesn’t sit there any more. Business is what it is about, not well-crafted content.

You talked about the importance of that structure to the way young people develop. Do you worry about the development of young people given that what we had as a structure of our watching in my youth is no longer there, and instead kids can access anything all the time?

Yes, and therefore they access—I think YouTube is one of those things that presents the illusion of choice, but because it is algorithmically driven, you default to more and more of the same choices. One of the problems that I think you are going to have to address is how good content, or challenging, interesting and nourishing content, can be surfaced if YouTube is effectively making the decisions for you based on a very basic idea of what you want. This goes to a more fundamental philosophical problem that we are vacating the human space and handing it over to a—broad definition—AI space. I fear that some of these conversations will sound like they are nostalgic, but I think we are thinking ahead of the curve. AI feeds on what we have already done. It is therefore ossifying what we have already done. When I say AI, I mean that in a very broad sense; there are people working in media who are already thinking like AI. You are tying it to the past. Only the human can surprise you. Only the human can take those leaps, risks, madnesses. AI completely embeds us in a tradition. That is a problem in the media anyway, because it is expensive and it is risk-averse. It is doubling down on risk-averseness and pumping the same thing out. Greg talked about business. Business that is just about business is not good for business, you know? I had the great privilege of working on the sketch between Paddington and the Queen. I was thinking, “How did this get here?” These were okay-ish books—books that were widely but not overwhelmingly read. Then it was this charming little series with stop motion and hand-drawn backgrounds and the lovely Michael Hordern’s voice. And the next thing you know it is the definition of the nation. That has taken a long time and many surprising twists and turns on the way, and nobody could pre-programme that. That surprises us. It has been around a long time; it can still take us by surprise. The environment that produced it needs to be protected.

Hundreds of creatives were involved over the decades.

It is an ecosystem that needs to be protected. I remember Boris Johnson in one of his speeches talking about “Bluey”—no, “Peppa Pig”—and talking as though it could just come out of the air. That is literally the opposite of true. It takes generations; it takes skill; it takes conversation; it takes love; it takes care to create something like “Peppa Pig”, which becomes a business behemoth for everybody—that is productivity. But that is how productivity works in this case, and that is before we talk about the productivity that we get if we have children who feel cherished, challenged and nourished, and what they grow up into.

In the same way as you declared your family interest in children’s TV, Chair, my sister—I think you know her—Konnie Huq was a presenter on “Blue Peter” between 1997 and 2007, which was the same years as Blair actually. My question is to Greg. The Children’s Media Foundation, in your evidence, said that this inquiry “comes at a crisis point for the children’s media industry, for the audience, and for the society children will inherit.” I think you also said that the kids’ media landscape is “broken.” Why did you say that?

Because it is. Essentially, YouTube has captured the eyes of the nation and therefore the brains of the nation. Some 62% of viewing by young people under 16 takes place on YouTube now, with only 22% taking place on broadcast television. The audience has, over the past 10 years—first slowly, but now very rapidly—massively migrated to YouTube and TikTok. Some 44% of children said they watched videos on TikTok last year. TikTok is not a platform for children, according to TikTok; it is for people who are 13-plus. Nevertheless, it has captured their eyeballs, their imaginations and their interest. What it has not done is replace the system that existed before, which was a curated system of content. You had public service at one end, and you had commercial at the other, but all of it was curated for the audience. These platforms are now, as they say, user-generated platforms, although in fact thousands of producers are on there too. What they are actually throwing out is what works best for the algorithm, not what works best for kids. That is why, in our opinion, over the last few years, you have seen a significant decrease in young people’s engagement with society. Have you noticed that “Blue Peter” does not do an appeal any more?

The “Totaliser”.

All gone. Why would you have an appeal with their viewing figures? Last week, “Blue Peter” had 29,000 viewers, 25,000 of which were on the iPlayer. That is not a bad figure for “Blue Peter”. It can get to 50,000 with a bit of a stretch, and it can drop as low as 19,000. Ask any child what “Blue Peter” means, and they will not know. That has ceased to be part of the glue that holds the country together.

It is a far cry from the days we were collecting bottle tops, isn’t it?

Indeed. There are no bottle top collections any more. This is not meant to be a criticism of the BBC, because it is struggling in a situation where that seven-plus audience has migrated in huge numbers to YouTube and TikTok. “Blue Peter” is on YouTube, but the situation that exists on YouTube means that it rarely surfaces—it rarely surfaces to the top on YouTube. You have the situation that Frank described, which is that the algorithm is designed to promote content that is frequently viewed. It is also designed to promote content that holds the attention for longer, preferably to the first standardised ad break. If you can hold the attention that long, you will get preferred in the algorithm. There is nothing in the algorithm that says that content should, for example, meet the YouTube quality guidelines. Yes, there is a certain level of quality, and they are very good guidelines—they are at least as good as the BBC’s—but the extent to which YouTube actually apply them is at the point where you apply to be a “Made for Kids” piece of content. They may say, “No, you have not sufficiently matched our guidelines to be ‘Made for Kids’,” but as far as I know, they do not then use those guidelines and apply them—they can explain this to you; I do hope you are going to call them in—to the algorithm itself. Content of range and public value does not surface, and that is what we need to consider seriously—how we surface this content. We should also consider—as you said, I used the word “broken”—that the industry is broken.

And broke.

And broke—absolutely. This is worldwide. A quick stat: the American market usually commissions around 100 animations a year. Last year, it was down to 91; this year, it is down to 35. Companies are going to the wall—companies in this country are going to the wall. Just yesterday, another company that made live action for kids went bust. The funding model is broken. Where broadcasters would put up some money up front, albeit less and less, other investors could then come in—other broadcasters, distributors, potential toy franchises and so on. They could come in to create an investment infrastructure that would allow you to produce content up front. You would be able to prepare to produce a series. You cannot do that with YouTube; there is no up-front money. There was once, and they took it away. They created a fund, and then somebody spotted it and decided, “This is not a good idea, because I think it makes us look like a publisher, which we are not.” You cannot get money up front from YouTube. You get the trickle-down of revenue, but that has been significantly damaged by YouTube’s rules for children’s advertising. People who make “Made for Kids” content get 80% to 90% less than people who make normal adult content on YouTube.

But there is no concomitant recommendation on there going, “This is for your kids.” There is nothing on YouTube that is pushing that.

No, so they don’t give anything back.

It is not a kitemark.

On the funding point, Georgina Hurcombe of “Pop Paper City” told us, “What we urgently need now is a funding and support model built for the way industry works today, not the way it worked 20 years ago.” Are we stuck in the groove of a previous era in the current business model?

Yes. I imagine you will come on to talk about the Young Audiences Content Fund, but we are stuck in a groove in that pretty much the only funder, in this country and in a lot of European countries, is a public service broadcaster. Some of the larger conglomerates, such as Canal+ and Banijay, are able to put in some investment and take a flyer on content, but it is mainly public service money. ITV did not commission a single programme for children last year—not one. They may commission some this year. Netflix and Amazon, the cowboys coming over the hill to rescue the disaster in the industry, took one look and went back over the hill. Between Netflix, Amazon and Apple TV—that sort of nexus—12 hours of children’s content were commissioned and made in this country last year. The figures speak for themselves. We need to find a methodology for releasing more money from where the advertising revenue is. Alphabet made $100 billion a quarter last year. That is turnover, not profit—they do not reveal their profits very clearly. YouTube made $3 billion in advertising revenue across the world. Our estimate is that it made around $700 million on children’s advertising around the world. That is not being shared with the makers. Not only is it not being shared up front; it is not being shared into the creator economy either. This creator economy that we are supposed to get excited about does not exist in the kids marketplace.

You can’t take that much out, put nothing in and expect the thing you are feeding on to survive.

What should the long-term vision be then?

We need a fund. We need that to fund the production of content that can go on to the platforms where children actually are, so that it is effective. At the same time, we need to be able to find that content. The Young Audiences Content Fund was great, but much of the content for older children, aged seven-plus, was never found. In a way, that is why it was criticised for lack of effectiveness. It was not ineffective. It is that the entire system is ineffective.

Everything Greg has talked about is basically driven by an algorithm. If we vacate the human space, something will come into that space, and it is not something that loves us. I think that is really important. I mentioned in passing the importance of live action in children’s, and that is almost dead. That is like me calling for a regeneration of scrimshaw or thatching. Live action has gone. Where do working-class boys see themselves in our media?

Well, on the BBC—but they do not, because the BBC makes it and they cannot find it.

And who therefore is able to address working-class boys? I am just using them as an example. If we vacate the space, it does not stay empty. I do not think this is unfixable. This is a conversation.

It is fixable.

It is tweaks to surface the material. It can be done. I think we have been conned into thinking this is weather. It is not weather; it is stuff that people own.

I have said we need a fund. We also need YouTube to step up to that fund, or to step up to their responsibilities as funders of content. Somebody in my group said to me the other day, “Basically we are all working for sweat equity now. You do the work, you put it in, you make a show, you throw it up on to YouTube, you hope, fingers crossed, that it is going to somehow please the algorithm and find its way to the surface.” That does not exactly thrill investors, as you could imagine. “What is your investment plan?” “Well, we are going to run an episode on YouTube and see if it works.” I know I am oversimplifying, but essentially that is what is happening to the industry.

Thank you very much, Frank and Greg, for coming in and speaking to us today. What I am going to ask flows on from what you said, Greg, in answer to one of Rupa’s questions, but it is a question to both of you. The BBC remains the biggest commissioner of kids’ TV—the latest figures we have are 86% of output and 95% of spend in public service broadcasting. What would happen if there was no BBC? Who would make kids’ TV, particularly to the high quality that, as Frank describes, can unite the nation and is good for kids?

Do you want to say what would happen without the BBC?

Nothing would happen. It would just be an empty space. They are your last hope. Am I overstating that?

No, I think it is true. It is not just the BBC in this country; it is across the world. I have held international meetings with broadcasters, and they all admit to losing the audience. And the audience is not coming back to their iPlayer equivalents. The Lithuanians gave up altogether, and they now try to make public service TikToks. I actually think that is sensible, but you still need the organisation to be funded to be able to do that. You need an organisation that takes that lead on what public value and personal value mean. So public value to society. Rupa asked why it is broken, and it is because all these kids are no longer engaging with society in the way they always did. Personal value to kids, because their wellbeing is either being damaged by these platforms or is not fostered particularly by the algorithmic recommendation systems. They are following down rabbit holes of all sorts of content. They also need to understand impartial news. Ofcom’s figures on the proportion of children who access news online on YouTube and TikTok are now enormous—I have the figure here somewhere and can tell you if you want to know. There is no requirement for impartial news content on YouTube. There is no regulation of YouTube other than for safety. These are things that the BBC and public service broadcasters across Europe are holding on to in a landscape where they are not holding on to the audience, which does not mean they should not be funded. Our belief—I think I said it in the submission—is that the BBC should be funded more than it currently is, and that more of that funding should go to children’s and youth services at the BBC. There is an uphill battle ahead. If we can create a scenario in which their content is more fairly seen and surfaced on the VSPs—the video-sharing platforms—we will be in a situation where we can perhaps begin to claw back an audience to a richer understanding of what life is like—

How do you do that? How do you get that fairness?

I am afraid it is not down to the BBC; it is down to YouTube, and down to the Government’s relationship with YouTube and the other platforms. What we do not want to do at this stage in the game is to emasculate the BBC and make it less able to make the content that has that public and personal value.

I think you both talked—Frank certainly did—about the importance of curation in producing quality TV for kids. Assuming that the trend continues towards YouTube and away from broadcast TV, who could fulfil that role of curator? How can we get a framework that has curation in it?

As per my last answer, the BBC as a public service broadcaster, and the other public service broadcasters, potentially, if they could be encouraged to commission more—that could be assisted by a fund. Also, the fund itself could be set up so that it curates. We have some ideas at the foundation. We are beginning to look at ideas such as using AI to analyse content and assess its public, personal, educational and entertainment value, and rate it. It is a little way in the future, but it is worth considering that if machines are going to control our lives, let us control the machines that do that. It is possible to consider methodologies for continuing to have institutions and creating a new institution that does that curation. You still have to get over the problem that the organisation that is putting out the content does not wish to curate it. That still has to be the question.

I think that is the dilemma. At one level, parental curation is really important. YouTube, because it is terrified of being seen as a publisher, is obscurantist about how that would work. Parents need to be told how they can tailor their own child’s algorithm. You can tailor the choices that your child will be given, but there is no conversation about that, and that needs to be a conversation. That is the default, isn’t it? Parents should take control, blah blah blah, but they do not know how to, because it is actually quite complicated. There is no reason that there should not be a set of controls that do that, or a YouTube video that tells you how you can curate YouTube for your child and make sure they are seeing what you want them to see or what you want to share with them. That refusal to admit to their own nature is very difficult. A public conversation about how you use YouTube as a tool in your house is worth having, and they should be obliged to do that.

In the submissions there is quite a lot of evidence about how YouTube has perhaps the most complex and difficult-to-use parental controls, because that is a question you asked in your consultation. I have read all the submissions, and there is quite a lot of evidence from people more expert than me on the use of parental controls, and also quite a lot of interesting ideas about how you could use parental controls to do that curation. For example, people are talking about how, if you could get content certificated or badged in some way as of public and personal value, YouTube could create a shelf of content that is UK PSB kids, if you like. There are questions about prominence and attribution. Attribution does not work with kids, but it does with parents. There could be a scenario in which parents could choose a simple methodology for saying, “I want my kids to see this first. I want the algorithm for my child to surface this first,” with UK public service content, UK content of value or BBC UK content—whatever you call it. At the moment, YouTube is not prepared to go that far. We have to have these conversations about how to turn their machinery into curation machinery rather than commercial machinery.

In which the only metric is how long you are watching. There is no other field of entertainment—or food, or anything—in which the only metric is how long you are doing it. Nobody says Maltesers are the best nutrition in the world because you ate loads of them—“You are still eating them, so have some more because this is great!” This is the only area I can think of where duration is literally the only metric. It is crazy, and it is self-destructive. You cannot sell Cocomelon merchandise if nobody loves it. You love stuff that has love in it.

Thank you, I am finding this absolutely fascinating. I have questions on funding, and I will ask them all even though you have touched on certain bits, because I think it is important for you to have the opportunity to expand. Greg, what is the underlying problem that has caused the disconnect between the cost of making children’s TV and the budgets available to make it?

The flight of the audience means that advertising revenue has collapsed. It has collapsed in the adult market as well—advertising revenue on television is shrinking the world over. It has particularly collapsed in kids’ TV, to the extent that even companies like Moonbug, which owns Cocomelon, have been talking to my foundation about what can be done about YouTube advertising. The share of revenue that comes from kids’ content, as I discussed previously, is not sufficient to replace the advertising revenue that has been lost. We are working with a coalition of commercial media researchers in the United States who are trying to work out a new methodology for assessing whether children are watching on platforms like YouTube, not by assessing the children themselves but by capturing whether families are logged on to YouTube, and then using that metric to try to encourage the advertising market to come back. Advertisers have fled, saying, “There is no one watching on television—I won’t advertise. It’s too difficult to advertise to children on YouTube—I won’t advertise.” Advertiser flight is a major problem for funding. The share of the revenue on YouTube is appallingly low, as I have previously said. I think I gave you the example of Adastra, which started a YouTube channel that was doing quite nicely way back in 2016 or 2017. By putting the back catalogue on it, they were beginning to make £3,000 a month—I have taken this from one of the submissions, by the way. Adastra are supporters of the Children’s Media Foundation. The change of advertising rules then came in, caused by YouTube being fined by the FTC in the United States for breach of COPPA regulations—they were capturing data and applying it to algorithmically targeted advertising. They were told that they could not do that any more. A new regime was brought in, which meant you had to mark yourself as “Made for Kids”; there is a different form of advertising, called contextual advertising. Adastra’s revenues dropped from £8,000 a month to £300 a month, and they have never really risen—only marginally. I know of many smaller companies that are in that situation. I also know it happened to WildBrain and to Moonbug—two companies that took massive decisions to be digital-first. Unfortunately, their investors discovered that those were not such great ideas because YouTube completely pulled the rug from under the market. I am not sure that there is much you can do to repeal the COPPA regulations, but something needs to be done to allow people to advertise to children again fairly, openly and in a regulated way—that is what the old television system had. Clearly, we do not need to be considering reducing public service budgets at a time like this, because they are bolstering the entire economy.

The CMF wants there to be a version of the Young Audiences Content Fund. Do you see that as a permanent fund? How would it be paid for?

Yes, we would see it as a permanent fund. The Young Audiences Content Fund was very successful in itself. It spent £40 million, brought gross value added of £300 million-plus in its stimulation of the economy, and produced over 340 hours of content. The only unfortunate thing was that some of that content was not watched, as I said before, because of the way the fund was set up, which was in our opinion mistaken in the first place, in that the content was not YouTube-first—it was held back from YouTube—and had to have a public service broadcaster attached. We think that a broader version of the fund would be worth doing. It would finance content with producers so that they could find the audience where the audience are. A small amount of Government money should be at its core, to fund its operation—the Young Audiences Content Fund cost no more than about £1.3 million a year to run. As has been suggested in several of the submissions you have received, some funding could be found from departmental budgets—for example, for health campaigns. You received a very interesting academic paper about how Government health campaigns could be made so much more effective if they were able to talk to kids in the places where they were. A certain amount of education and health budget could be put into it, as could lottery funding. Lottery funding is for culture, and kids get most of their culture on screens. That is where they get it now. I do not want to take it away from theatres or anything else, but I do feel that lottery funding should be considered. I also think there should be a levy. I know that is a very difficult word to use, particularly in this Committee, but we should keep trying. We should bounce this back to the Government and ask questions like, “To what extent would Netflix and others flee from this country if we had a levy specifically aimed at young people and pro-social content?”

You are talking about a streamers levy.

A streamers levy and a levy on YouTube, because YouTube need to play ball in this—they need to play. They need to release money, and not only to release more money out of advertising but to consider how to produce money up front. Without money up front, you cannot make live-action drama or well-thought-through factual, or have a news service for kids. You cannot have any of that. What you have is influencer videos, and things that start off life made in people’s garages, or content made by the larger companies that went digital-first and have to make it fast, pile it high and sell it cheap. They have to make it in an iterative way to keep attracting eyeballs on YouTube. There is no possibility of making content of any depth, range or meaning if you do not have a funding system for it. I grant you, funding alone does not work; we still have to solve finding. It did not work before because we did not solve the finding. Those two things have to go hand in hand. But yes, there should be a levy on the streamers and on YouTube. It is difficult, and I know that Governments are opposed to it, but a levy aimed specifically at young people could win votes and help to silence the critics in the industry who say, “No, I’ll up sticks and leave.” I seriously do not think Netflix and others will leave such a fantastic production base in this country, with fantastic studios, fantastic skills, the English language and all those things. I do not think they will walk away because we put a small levy on them or, potentially, as the VLV has suggested, a tax on subscriptions. I believe strongly that if YouTube will not release money into some form of fund, a levy will be necessary.

Frank, do you have anything to add? I saw you nodding.

I think there is a tipping point culturally as well. The things you are talking about—“How”, “Blue Peter” and “Magpie”—cross-fertilised each other. There was a space that was children’s visual entertainment. It is now so fragmented that that does not punch through, and that is why these things do not surface. With a levy, there is a declaration of the importance of this. When you are asking Netflix or YouTube to pay a levy, you are asking them to pony up and say, “We think this is important.” That helps to create a space that is easier for parents to curate. The days of “Children’s Hour” are gone, obviously, but a children’s space is still a thing—it is still a possibility—and it is not at all out of reach. You just need them to declare, “This stuff is important, and this stuff is privileged in the following ways, and we are showing our commitment to it in this way.” You are then a member of that culture—a member of the team that does that stuff—and you cross-fertilise and grow great stuff. It is great for productivity as well as for audiences.

Do you want to see any changes to a new young audiences content fund in terms of eligibility or whether it could be platform agnostic in respect of where the content is first shown?

Yes, it should be platform agnostic. It has to respond to the reality of children’s viewing now. It makes it complex and more difficult to operate, but it is not beyond our understanding to do that. Basically, it needs to fund producers to make content that will reach children, and therefore have the possibility to go to YouTube first or to YouTube alone. I also think the fund should be available to people who wish to make games, particularly in Roblox, and who want to make audio for kids, which is another important new feature in kids’ lives—listening to podcasts and so on. The fund should be broadly available to make content that can be placed where children are actually viewing it. A fund would give the Government some possibility of leverage, because you could say to YouTube, “We might not need to create a levy if you are prepared,” as Frank said, “to pony up—if you are prepared to create your own fund for UK content or your own fund for public value content across the world. We don’t mind how it’s done or who it’s done for.” We know they have to contribute, because they are the ones gathering in that advertising revenue. That has to be redistributed in some way; otherwise, the industry stays broken and—remember—so does the creator economy, essentially. When Maddie Moate comes before you, ask her how much she makes out of her very successful YouTube channel. The creator economy in children’s does not work.

Greg, the Children’s Media Foundation said in its evidence said that there is support within the children’s media sector for tax credits. What is the CMF view on the current children’s and animation tax reliefs?

We are all for tax reliefs. Who isn’t for tax reliefs? [Interruption.] I knew there was an answer—yes, the Treasury. The tax reliefs are very effective, and they have helped the industry enormously, along with the fund and so on. They have particularly helped the animation industry in this country, which is really struggling at the moment. But in the end, you cannot have a tax credit on nothing, and if you do not have a budget to make a programme in the first place—if you have no funding coming in from anywhere to make content—how can you get tax relief? You have no business plan. You cannot have a tax credit on nothing.

I understand that. How do we compare internationally, on that funding and on tax reliefs?

The recent uplift has been very useful. It is up to 39% now, I think, which works out at around 29% in reality. That has been incredibly valuable for both, but we are behind the Irish and we are behind places like the Canary Islands and so on. Of course, we appreciate that there is a race to the bottom in tax reliefs, and that is why, again, we do not feel that this should be the only mechanism in use. I do not think the Government should rest on its laurels thinking that its tax reliefs system is saving the industry. It is not. What is needed is funding.

Do you agree with the BBC when it asks for an uplift for “culturally relevant children’s content” that already qualifies for existing tax reliefs?

Not entirely, no, to be honest. We come back to the point that you cannot have a tax relief on nothing. I do not think that is a replacement for the fund. The BBC is very nervous about funds, partly because of the way the previous fund was funded out of leftover licence fee money that was given back after the broadband roll-out. I still insist it was not BBC money that was taken away from it; it was money that it gave back. I can understand why the BBC is nervous about funds, but it should not be. I am sure it was nervous when Channel 4 came along and used advertising revenue to compete with it in the public service space. Provided that a fund does not rob Peter to pay Paul—that is to say, diminish the licence fee, or whatever its replacement may be—the BBC should not worry about it. I do not think a cultural uplift in tax relief is that important. It is more important for us all to focus on how we can create a fund.

In terms of retaining it emotionally and creating national unity, it is great.

Paddington belongs to Canal+.

And Harry Potter belongs to Paramount.

And Warner Bros.

I think the way the fund is set up could assist that. The problem with funding content now, even with content where the broadcaster is in at the start—you have BBC money in your replacement for “Paddington Bear” and it’s going to be fantastic; it is the new “Teletubbies”—is that the BBC will put up maybe 15% or 18% of its budget, perhaps 20% if you are lucky, and send you out to find the rest. You find a distributor and so on, but as you go down this road you find that you are cheese-paring the IP all the time. The interesting thing that happens is that even with smaller projects, where projects get a sort of creative bounce and capture the imagination, as you said with “Peppa Pig”, for example, there is not the investment in this country to sustain them, and that investment comes in from abroad. I think most people know this story. My understanding, anecdotally, of the story of Paddington was that none of the large companies in this country wanted to fund the movie, and Canal+ jumped on it and now own the entire IP. They own Paddington completely. They bought it from the family. They own a little part of every iteration of Paddington you see. And they love it. They are lovely—they came to my conference last year and they were lovely people—and they adore the Paddington brand. But then why wouldn’t they?

It has always been like that. Disney own everything that A. A. Milne ever wrote.

Of course.

Anything that adds to the portfolio of financing diminishes the need to go elsewhere for your funding. You could have a couple of public service broadcasters involved, who are usually restricted to the extent they can take IP because of regulations in-country. You would have a situation where you would have more opportunity to get the thing made—to actually fly that kite—before having to sell away all of your rights.

Yes, certainly. They retain the IP now. The one thing the VSPs—YouTube—do not take is rights.

You mean a streamer like Netflix or Amazon?

I think you will see more and more children’s projects as co-productions between streamers and public service broadcasters. That will happen more and more. The problem will be the extent to which rights have to be given away. In the end, it is the producers who suffer here. The public service broadcasters do not necessarily need to take all the international rights. If a public service broadcaster like the BBC has BBC Studios, which is its commercial arm, they will want to take rights. They make a great success out of the rights they took in “Bluey” for financing that series. That is an enormous success, and a great success on all platforms at the moment. The other thing that is happening in the industry is that everything is going everywhere. The old days of windows and exclusivity are pretty much gone. To achieve the eyeballs, you have to be everywhere.

It is not currently working, no, because of the problem of finding. As you know, I am obsessed with these terms—funding and finding. The problem of finding is also the problem of prominence. The Media Act 2024 put in provisions for prominence on smart TVs, for example, which were considered the last frontier. We kept pointing out, “No, there is another frontier that this Act does not deal with, and that is the VSPs, the YouTubes and TikToks of this world.” Prominence on there is difficult if you do not get the collaboration of the platform to understand that that prominence will please audiences and promote content that they have already paid for. The audience has paid for this content and therefore has the right to see it, and the right for their children to see it, even though their children do not know the process by which it was paid for. That needs to be part of the conversation with YouTube: how to create prominence for publicly funded, public service content. It is really hard for them to conceive of that, as they are international commercial organisations. They would have to consider how they change the algorithm to do that. We also believe that, below prominence, there is this concept of finding content of public value and purpose, and of personal value. The prominence of the BBC is a subset of promoting content that is for the child rather than at the child.

If it required legislation, we would very much support the creation of legislation. I am hoping that what can happen is conversations with these platforms to get them to understand that concept: what is good for kids is good for business. These viewers constitute a massive cohort in the YouTube audience. Surprise, surprise—they grow up, and they become proper consumers with actual money in their pockets, not pocket money. They spend stuff and they respond to advertising. If your organisation has done well by them and by the societies they live in, they smile upon you. That is part of the negotiation the Government need to have. To shut me up, the managing director of Google—I was standing very near you, Dame Caroline, that day—did the classic management line of, “What’s the one thing you would say to me if you could say one thing?” I thought for a moment and said, “I would like Google and YouTube to become part of society rather than apart from society.” That is the negotiation that needs to be had. They need to see the value in that. At the same time, the Government need to wield a carrot and a stick, to say, “If you don’t see the value in it, we will regulate you to do this.”

Google already has an algorithm. We talked a little earlier about the idea of certificating content, badging content, and it being rated in some way. The BBFC rates films, Ofcom rates things for its broadcast standards, but no one regulates YouTube, so some form of regulation and rating system. As I said earlier, we are looking at the potential of algorithmically-based, AI-based methodologies for looking at content and deciding the extent to which it helps your society and your child, and is something that is of personal and public value. We feel this would be worth investing in—again, it could be something that the Government could invest in through the research agencies. Such methodologies are a little way in the future, but basically the algorithm is capable of change.

What is good for kids is good for business.

It needs less than legislation and more than legislation. It needs a cultural shift, and they should be part of that if they want to survive. Children are their future; they are the future of us all.

YouTube created YouTube Shorts to compete against TikTok, because TikTok made them nervous, because so many young people are using TikTok. In creating YouTube Shorts, YouTube once again damaged and diminished the advertising business for children. It also damaged our kids because they are watching shorts over and over again. We know of the studies that say they are more interested in the scrolling than they are in the watching. They get dopamine hits from frictionless content. That was the wrong response. The right response was to say, “We’re not going to take a commercial attitude to this. We're going to take a public attitude to this and say, ‘No, we’re not doing it that way. We’re going to push and drive to extend our children’s audience’s interest and value, not capture their eyeballs for longer than TikTok does.’” That is the culture change that is needed.

On prominence, there are two different ways that you can find things: you can either have them shown to you or you can go looking for them. We have talked about prominence so far today in terms of being shown stuff. It occurs to me that when we were kids, on telly it was the case that BBC One and Two and ITV were preferred in the buttons on the screen, but it wasn’t like that on radio. You had a dial that you used. Today, online BBC News is still the No. 1 online news source, and that is because of brand. We all grew up with that brand, so it is very strong in our minds. For kids today it isn’t because they just haven’t grown up with it; they have grown up in their bedroom on a separate piece of electronica looking at YouTube. Isn’t there an argument that, if you want kids to be watching BBC content, ITV content or other high-quality content, you have to advertise it to them? You have to say to them, “This is really good stuff that you should go looking for.”

Yes, completely. That is kind of what we are saying, isn’t it?

The BBC need to be empowered to do that though, and this is another—

They are totally empowered to do it, aren’t they? It takes money—I grant you that.

It would require the use of significant sums of money. What if, for example, YouTube were to accept the concept that with any public service broadcaster the extent to which public money is in a piece of content could be taken as a notional marketing spend, and that would immediately surface it higher up the algorithm?

Sorry—that is pushing again. I am not arguing against pushing. Pushing absolutely has a role, but so does pulling, and in most consumer markets you have both. Shelf placement is important in a supermarket, but so is the brand advertising that makes you want to seek out that particular brand of soap powder. I guess my question is, why is nobody thinking about how we get to where kids are and tell them more about this particular franchise or character? “You should go looking for it, because this is the best.”

Because they are not watching us.

Well, they are watching something.

Yes—they are watching YouTube.

YouTube take ads.

They are watching “Cocomelon”, and they are watching influencers—kid influencers have 57 million signed up to them in this country. So yes, maybe the BBC should be employing kid influencers to constantly tell people the BBC is great, but that is not—

There are plenty of other ways of reaching children as well, of course. “Newsround” is shown, as far as I can tell, in many or most primary schools in the country, for example. There is still print advertising. There is billboard advertising. There are all sorts of ways of getting to kids.

There is little that is more effective than the YouTube algorithm.

I totally agree with that, and as I say, I am not arguing against push placement, but there is another way of looking at it. You can say, “We need to be wherever the kids are”—it is a ubiquity strategy—but you could also say, “Actually, no. Some of our content is going to exclusively available on our owned channels. If you want to see this brilliant thing, you will have to go to iPlayer.” Or you could even go further and say, “This thing is so brilliant, it will be shown once, at 10 past 4 on Tuesday. If you want to see it, you have to tune in at that time, otherwise you will never get to see it.” Of course, that is how live music, sport and lots of entertainment works. You do not have to do that for all your content, but we do not seem to be seeing a lot of that. Is that a missed opportunity?

Yes, to an extent, because the opportunity for theatrical release, and things like that, could be very valuable. The BBC is exploring it, very much so, with its content—the concept of concerts with live music against programming and so on—but these are small. Don’t forget, there is also a structural problem in the film market for children’s films that are not blockbusters. There is no structure in this country for distributing independent children’s films. That is not working either. I think that what you are talking about is essentially what the BBC is doing now, and the iPlayer is—

What has it done it with?

It is doing it with everything it does. It promotes its content as much as it can. It promotes it on social media where it can, and in the press. It even promotes, to an extent, outdoors. It produces a new series, which is targeted at a certain audience, but the figures do not lie: it cannot achieve the audiences because that content, if it is to be seen, needs to be seen on YouTube. The BBC is very pleased that its iPlayer use by children is holding steady at the moment, so it is not actually going down any more, which is a blessing. But the idea of using YouTube to get them back to the iPlayer, I am afraid, is just not working.

That was not what I was asking about though. On parental controls, you rightly talked about the complexity, and I think it is even more complex than you said, because it is one thing to be controlling YouTube, but most parents are also trying to control Apple, Microsoft, some AI programme, and at least one, or possibly two or three different Meta platforms. They might have multiple children of different ages. It is essentially impossible to do, but there is a very simple parental control that you could deploy. Bear in mind that a large number of parents are very concerned about screen time, and small screens in particular—maybe not a majority but a lot. There is something out there that they could turn to instead, and that is telly—if there was a compelling product that said, “Between the hours of four and 10 every night, we have a good enough product that you can lock away your children’s phones and they will still be glued to the screen.” Why does that not happen? CBeebies and CBBC go up to a certain age, then again it is about brand pull. I think that a lot of kids, when they get to the end of CBeebies age, just go on to YouTube. That is the way it works—but they do not have to do that. If the product was compelling enough, and if it was communicated, and if parents were engaged in that—

I think that these are questions that you need to ask Patricia Hidalgo, the director of BBC Children’s, because if I had the answer to that, I would be running BBC Children’s, I hope.

Thank you both for coming this afternoon. I think that anyone over a certain age could not be less than moved by your introductions—I am not going to give away my age though. My question is to Frank. We have received a lot of submissions that noted the decline in live-action drama, and you said earlier that it is dead, particularly for the 10-to-15 age group. Why is it so important for young teens to see live drama?

Because they need to see themselves. They need to know that their stories are important, that they are part of our society and culture, that they are seen and that they are important, and that the choices they make, which we model in drama, are important to us and have consequences. On another level, removing live action is another step towards the unhuman. We need to defend a human space here: human values, human feelings and the physical presence of a human on a screen is really important too. It is as much that as anything else. People look for themselves, so if they are not seeing themselves in quality drama, where are they seeing themselves? I think you know the answer to that.

I think that leads on to the positive impacts that children do see in those sorts of dramas. I am thinking of British drama like “Doctor Who” and the importance of that. What are the positive impacts of something like that? I mean, it is sci-fi. It is not that you would see yourself in “Doctor Who”, or maybe you could pretend to.

People do see themselves in “Doctor Who”, and they play Doctor Who. Having worked on “Doctor Who”, a big part of it is the imitability of the Doctor: you can dress like him and act like him. It is also about curating something that has been part of our culture all that time; it rebirths, moves on and reinvents itself in the way society does. Seeing yourself in that story is really important. If we lose that, something else will come into that space—I keep saying it.

It could be generational. It is something that is passed down from parents that you pass down to your children.

There is a great Graham Greene line. He says that when you read with children, it is always an act of “divination”—that you are reading into their future, but you are reading from your past. That is what connects the past and the future, and if we break these chains, we break everything.

Greg, what do you read into the announcement about Disney ending the partnership with Doctor Who?

What I read into it is a fear for the BBC’s ability to produce “Doctor Who” in the future, because it will not have the funds to do so. That is my only fear. I think the Disney partnership was fantastic in that it produced additional funding for the programme. Picking up on what Frank said, I do not think it is necessary to have a partnership unless there is insufficient money to continue to make it. I think the BBC should commit to a brand like “Doctor Who” and revive and revitalise it all the time. International co-production is now a fact of life, but one would like to think that public service broadcasters have enough capacity to be able to make enough content themselves in this country to fulfil people’s needs as a society. I have found stats from a survey that I have been desperately searching for: 35% of children think they see young people on TV who share similar interests, 31% see young people who they think sound like them, and 24% of UK children see people on TV who they think look like them. When you think about where they are watching that TV, then maybe you have to think about what it is they are picking up from this machine that is delivering to them more of the same all of the time.

You said that international co-production is inevitable now; that is the model. Is there a trend? Can you see it changing? Is it something that we could manipulate to get back?

There is a trend in European public service broadcasters coming together. That has been talked about for the last couple of years, and that is happening on drama programmes. It is not entirely true to say that drama for older kids is dead.

No.

The public service broadcasters are still making it. It is dead in the sense that they are not watching it—not in any great numbers. That is the problem. It is a trend. It is an old thing—it used to happen before, and now it is happening again—but because broadcasters never have any collective memory, they are all saying, “It is a fantastic new idea” that some European public service broadcasters are coming together, along with potentially long-term relationships with ABC in Australia and CBC in Canada. That dilutes the cultural base, but often because they are all public service broadcasters, they are all talking from the same playbook—they are all going to look after their own cultural base, but with reference to the others, as opposed to a commercial operator, who would want to come in and say, “Well, it’s all about whether or not I can get the advertising revenue in the United States.”

Frank, can I ask you about your Sheffield speech—particularly what you were saying about early years development and the exposure of very young children to flashing imagery and very fast-moving content? Do you think there should be guidance from the health service or the Department for Education that says, “Do not expose your children to this below a certain age”?

Yes. Like I said, I think we need a cultural shift as well. This is a new technology and a new way of watching that nobody is on top of. It has happened so quickly, and I do not think we have fully grasped what we are doing. We need to take a moment to think about what that is—not just the producers or the platforms, but parents. We need to have a conversation about what we are doing, as this is unprecedented. There is always a lag when a new technology comes up. I may have said this, but I always think about how we demonise the great capitalist mill owners of the past for making children crawl in and out of machinery, but children had always worked. They worked with their parents and in other areas, but it seemed natural that children would work. Then Lord Salisbury or someone comes along and goes, “This is insane”. That is where we are up to. The children who are consuming this are working—the movements of their eyeballs and their choices are all being logged and data-mined; they are resources that are being exploited. In the most value-neutral sense, they are being mined, and we need to say, “Woah, hang on a minute. What have we done?” There is always that lag, so I feel quite hopeful that when we talk to these people, they will get it.

It will be interesting to hear what both of you hear from your interactions with people in the world of education and so on. Anecdotally, people talk about there now being issues with spans of attention for children—presenting in year R—and with being able to sit still. There are also more children presenting with special needs at a younger age.

And all kinds of different anxieties.

It is very difficult to establish a direct line of causality—as it always is with these things—but do you feel that there is some connection between the consumption of this kind of media and some of those issues?

Historically, all the things that we have talked about have been quite bonding things—either bonding with your peers, because you are all watching the same thing, or bonding with your parent, who is watching it with you, and having shared catchphrases. That shared culture is disappearing, and what is left is a kind of individual anxiety factory. I have been visiting schools for 20 years as a children’s author, and I have seen the level of anxiety rocket. There are other reasons for that; our children have been on the sharp end of two massive crises—the pandemic and austerity—and they have both impacted children hardest. We owe them this.

My last question will be on bonding. Although we are here to talk about children’s television, I want to talk about general family television. You spoke about the importance of doing things together, and we also touched earlier on the growing trend over a number of years for children to have their own device to watch things on and perhaps do that in a separate room. Do you think there has been a decline in television made for the whole family to watch together?

Except sometimes it does happen, and as a nation we are all much cheerier when it does, whether it is “The Traitors”— suddenly everybody is talking about “The Traitors”—or “Gladiators”. That need, that desire—

Does Saturday night family entertainment exist and work in the same way that it used to?

Yes.

Do you think so?

The hunger for it is definitely there.

I’m worrying unnecessarily, Chair.

Also, Damian, it relates to your previous question. You asked what BBC Children’s can do—it put money into “Gladiators”. It involves itself in “Gladiators”.

Do we know numbers on whole-family viewing?

If you look at the Ofcom figures on children watching television and at the actual viewing figures for children’s television, the viewing figures for children’s television are really low. There are still children watching television, so they must be watching television with their families. I think that Ofcom has some studies that indicate that young people are still watching television, but that is when television is a communal activity—we are talking Friday nights and Saturday nights; we are talking sport with dads or mums. Those communal experiences are still happening—thank goodness, because they are vitally important—but interestingly 20% of children in this country, when they turn the television on, switch YouTube on first. That is when they are watching alone. The interesting figure is for when that happens in the family situation. Actually, families are watching their YouTube likes, and so on, rather than public service television, or public service commercial television. That is coming. Otherwise, in some ways, perhaps we would not be here. Because it is coming to the adult audience, people are starting to really take notice. The kids migrated some time ago; the adults are following the migration.

That is all we have for you both. Before we let you flee, is there any other message that you want to land with the Committee, any questions that you wanted us to ask you but we did not, or any final recommendations that you think we should include in our papers?

Just that we owe them this.

I will cite Frank’s speech in Sheffield. The part I loved was when he said that it is time to collaborate on this; it is not a time for confrontation. We believe that. We believe that the Government should take action, but it needs to be really positive action with the VSPs to make change. He said something like, “Come on you great big dysfunctional beasts, come and join us and make it better for kids.” That is what we need.

Thank you for joining us this afternoon.