Speeches by Hinds.

“I have a couple of quick-fire follow-ups. Away from TikTok and YouTube, is there any evidence on any harm or goodness that comes from binge watching something on Netflix relative to waiting a week for the next episode? Or do we just not know?”

“That might be an argument in favour of preferring channels, not against.”

“If the proposition I put was correct—maybe it is not, but if it was—part of the advice could be, “If you are going to put your child in front of something for an hour, you are much safer putting them in front of one of the few public service media channels than sticking them in front of something with self-selection”—a…”

“But we survived. How did we grow up into these adults?”

“Yes, do you remember them? Why is no one arguing for that? It is impossible to say, “I’m going to pick all these individual, one, five, 10 or 20-minute pieces of content and put them all together, and I will know which ones are good and which ones are bad.” That is what channels are for. We call them curated playlists …”

“I think that the phones in the bedroom stuff is mostly about older children. If I have understood correctly what we are going to get in April, it is also coming right down to the earliest years. There are questions around early brain development and more children presenting in year R with attention difficulty and so on…”

“I am grateful to the Secretary of State for his response. The housing formula has resulted in huge increases for parts of rural England, including a doubling of the number in my East Hampshire constituency, and it should be reviewed overall. However, this question is about one specific aspect, whereby in an unintended …”

“1. If he will review the methodology for assessing housing affordability used to set local house building targets.”

“I want to go back to metrics and KPIs in a moment, but can I ask about the digital-first approach first? We say that there is a digital-first approach, but many things can be digital: a DAB radio station, a video on demand platform, somebody else’s video on demand platform, Facebook, YouTube and news aggregators. Most …”

“It is worth saying those figures out loud again, if you don’t mind. Could you tell us again the trust figure, in the Chinese state broadcaster—”

“I have one last question. I suspect that the value of the World Service to this country and to freedom and peace around the world is huge. How do you prove it? Do you feel you have compelling metrics that can demonstrate it not just to the FCDO but more broadly to the western alliance? We are in a new geopolitical phas…”

“In orders of magnitude, those numbers are the same.”

“Yes, but in a broader sense we know that RT and Sputnik have been growing. They buy share. We know that CGTN buys share. The fact that you may be reaching more people for a minute a week on social media, interspersed with other things, is a good thing but it doesn’t tell us we’re winning any battle.”

“So, all, in other words.”

“And the trust figure in Russia Today?”

“You are advertising—”

“I do not want to cut you short, Tim, but I am conscious that we are short of time. Reach is one measure. People might say that the better measure is share, and specifically share not just overall in the world but among young people. In a lot of the countries that we are talking about, young people are the majority of p…”

“Got it.”

“You may!”

“Okay. Thank you.”