The submission by Simone Pennant of the TV Collective, who campaigns for a more inclusive TV industry, refers to a study of 200 of its members which revealed that there is a lack of trust in their abilities and that ‘the overriding feeling was talent felt the industry viewed them as a ‘risk’.’ Training schemes and initiatives, the TV Collective argues, inadvertently create the perception that BAME are “not good enough” for existing roles. As the issue of the lack of diversity ‘has been discussed for over twenty years with no long-term resolution’, the TV Collective believes that the time has come ‘for a drastic intervention’ as the TV industry in the UK is ‘haemorrhaging skilled and experienced talent at an alarming rate and losing audiences as a result.’ The BBC charter renewal therefore provides a very real opportunity to tackle the issue at the BBC and the industry as a whole. Read the submission in full here.

The evidence submitted by Creative Access, a charity organisation which provides media job opportunities to BAME, focuses on diversity of representation in/on television. It states that the media is ‘still far from representing visually the society that pays it bills’, not tapping into a ‘vast pool of talent out there’ which, it argues, is also an economic issue for media organisations: ‘in not recruiting black and Asian workers, [the media] is limiting its labour resource and it will be unable to understand and sell back to significant proportion of the UK population that is non white.’ The economic case for diversity needs to be promoted across the creative sector, and there should also be ‘concrete measures on diversity to the BBC’s public purposes under the charter review process.’ Read the submission in full here.

Religious programming is one of the core purposes of public service broadcasting, according to The Sandford St Martin Trust. At a time when religion is ‘seen as such a powerful influence on world events’ the need for religious literacy has never been greater. However, there has been ‘the clear market failure in religious programming’ as a result of changes to the PSB regime in commercial broadcasting. One of the recommendations given by The Sandford St Martin Trust is that the status of religious broadcasting needs to be raised and promoting religious literacy needs to be one of the core BBC’s public purposes. Read The Sandford St Martin Trust’s submission in full here.

According to Graham Murdock (University of Loughborough), in a communications environment increasingly organised around digital networks, and with dominant players (such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple) based outside the UK, there is a compelling case for a digital commons and therefore an extension of the BBC’s public service remit.  In the UK, the BBC offers ‘the only effective institutional base for a comprehensive alternative to this corporate annexation of the internet’. Furthermore, as Murdock argues, there are series of issues such as the ecological impact of infrastructures, the open source movement, and internationalisation of networks, which all need to be taken into account in policy making processes. Read Murdock’s submission in full here.