Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell speaks at Edinburgh Television Festival

And all this is to be achieved by competition where possible, regulation where necessary.

The Act is not work completed, it is the signal for work to begin – the sound you here is a door opening, not closing.

It is part of a continuing process – the next steps of which are the establishment of Ofcom, their review of PSB (public service broadcasting), the review of the BBC’s Charter, all in the context of the growth of digital and the approach to analogue switchover.

This is a process intended to deliver our shared ambition – to deliver to the people of this country the best broadcast services of anywhere in the world making best use of the fast-developing technologies.

The to-do list is long, but I intend now to address some of the more immediate:

I will begin with PSB and why I chose the clips you’ve just seen. They are a tiny example of the power of the best of PSB to provide the ultimate in collective popular culture, which unites generations.

Each is a shared memory for people of different ages. It’s fashionable – almost compulsory at the TV Festival – to knock the number of repeats on TV, and blame the laziness of broadcasters.

But I believe there is a real public service in keeping these memories alive, just as much as in creating new memories by commissioning new programmes.

So “Jowell calls for repeats”? Well yes, actually. Not lazy scheduling, not TV on the cheap. But I do applaud the mining of the archives for golden nuggets from the past.

That is the past of PSB. But let’s not get nostalgic. This slot is to discuss the present and the future.

And now we have, for the first time, the central purposes of PSB defined in statute.

I put that definition in the Bill for a reason.

Because although competition can deliver much, it cannot deliver all the range and quality of TV that people want.

A year ago, in discussing what was then the Draft Bill I quoted the words of John Gray, the political philosopher: ‘public service broadcasting produces cultural goods that cannot be supplied by market institutions alone.’

He compares it to ‘the streets and parks of a well-ordered city in the classical European tradition.’ They could be provided and charged for by the market but then ‘a great public good is lost – that of city life itself with its public places for gathering and promenading, its byways for loitering and sauntering, no less than for getting speedily from place to place.’

This is the philosophical case for public service broadcasting. It accepts that there is a public as well as a private realm, a realm not adequately caught by economics.

Culture is hard to pin down. It is not always amenable to quantitative analysis, because is about intangibles.

Aesthetics, feelings, emotions, ideas, technique, traditions, history. It is about argument and debate.

PSB serves people in their role as citizens as much as it serves them as consumers. It gives them the information that people need to understand public affairs, both to observe but also to participate if that is what they want to do.

PSB does this when times are quiet and the news is dull, as well as when events grip the attention and boost the ratings. And it is more than news, it is also about explanation, context, contending voices, as well as factual reporting. The market cannot be guaranteed to do this.

PSB also helps with identity. It speaks of who we are, of our differences and our similarities. It nurtures our national, regional, local and social identities, respecting the history and cultures that make us what we are. In a world where increasingly people feel disconnected from their past, their neighbours and sometimes even their families, PSB can provide continuity and reassurance.

In a world dominated by large companies with EU, US or global identities, PSB ensures national and regional production. This is good for jobs, but also good for national and regional cultures.

Markets will tend to deliver the safe, the proven crowd-pullers, the tried and tested. It will tend not to innovate, not to take risks.

In Ofcom we now have a regulator that will promote competition and keep broadcasting standards high. Unlike say the Federal Communications Commission in the USA, it has the powers and duties to do both because that’s what this country’s broadcasting culture demands.

On of its first tasks is the review of PSB.

Although PSB is vital to the quality and range of broadcasting in Britain today, change is happening and gathering pace. Where change is fast-moving PSB cannot be immune.

Technology and markets are moving fast, viewer expectations are rising, business models are diversifying.. The obligation on Ofcom, the ‘PSB-ers’ themselves and on Government is to re-shape PSB for the future, to ensure it’s still relevant to the viewers and keeps its place at the centre of British broadcasting.

At the heart of PSB is the BBC.

The BBC has been part of the national glue, reflecting and shaping our national identity. Something which in a rapidly changing society is even more important in the future than it has been in the past.

A strong BBC is one that moves with the times that meets the needs of the present and anticipates the needs of the future. And it is precisely because of the BBC’s centrality that it is put under so much scrutiny.

It is premature to talk about Charter Review in any detail – after all a new Charter would not take effect before January 2007.

But I can say that the Charter Review will be wide-ranging, open and transparent, with extensive public consultation and appropriate Parliamentary scrutiny.

But however wide-ranging and however radical, there is one thing that I’m certain of – that at the end of the process the independence of the BBC from Government will remain.

In the review process there will be scope for every interest to be heard. The various elements of the industry, media academics and other experts will of course express themselves with force and clarity. I look forward to those discussions with pleasure, battle-hardened as I am after the exchanges over the Communications Act.

However, they do not necessarily reflect the views of the public.

I intend to make sure that the review process will include properly based quantitative attitude research, informed by qualitative research to make sure that we really do know what the public think.

The Communications Bill process shows that, exhausting though it may be, there is no substitute for thorough consultation every step of the way. So regard this as the first invitation of many – I want to hear from everyone with opinions on this matter, and I want this discussion to reach way beyond the cloistered circles of the media priesthood.

The review will be wide-ranging. It will be open and transparent. And it will be motivated by a desire to give the British people the TV, radio and new media services they deserve, and no other motive will intrude.

I will set out in due course how we intend to take Charter review forward. It will come to dominate the landscape, but next year will also see the reviews of the BBC’s new digital TV and radio services.

And I can announce today that the review of BBC’s online services will now begin under the direction of Philip Graf, former Chief Executive of Trinity Mirror.

The BBC now provides one of the most popular websites in the world, but much has changed in the dot.com world since the euphoria faded. It is now time to take stock and to examine whether the BBC’s online services meet the needs of the public and to examine its impact on the wider market.

Given the timing, it will also feed in to the review of the BBC Charter, looking at how online services fit within the BBC’s general PSB obligations.

There will be wide public and industry consultation, with the consultation period beginning now and running until November 17th.

I hope Philip will be able to submit his finished report by spring next year.

Another key task for Ofcom in nurturing a diverse and healthy ecology is implementing the results of the programme supply review, which I commissioned a year ago.

A strong independent sector is vital to the quality and range of British broadcasting. Public service broadcasters have protected status and many privileges, in return for which they have many obligations. Amongst those obligations is the duty to nurture a vibrant independent sector. It’s good for the industry and it’s good for viewers. And the Licence Fee in particular is venture capital for the nation’s creativity.

The independent producers presented persuasive evidence to the review panel that they were disadvantaged by the terms of trade dictated by the broadcasters, inhibiting them from competing effectively in the programme supply market.

The ITC supported by Bob Philips’s expert panel confirmed that some corrective action was needed.

We took this very seriously and made some key changes to the Act:

I am clear that dealings by the PSB-ers with the independent sector must be fair. They must allow for proper businesses to be built, for creativity to be rewarded, and for control of rights to be equitably handled between those who create the content and those who just commission it. The new codes of practice will be vital in securing this.

I understand that the draft codes are now with the ITC and Ofcom and I look forward to agreement by the end of this year. And although it is not for government to dictate the detail of those codes, the general objectives remain as clear today as they were when the review was published.

And I am delighted that we are already beginning to see the benefits of these new measures. The evidence is that company values are increased, reflecting increased confidence in its future.

One of Ofcom’s less well-known duties is to promote media literacy in the context of broadcasting. The newspapers have a long tradition of being opinionated. Readers know that, and they buy their newspaper accordingly, and we have absolutely no intention of interfering with that.

But the coverage of Lord Hutton’s Inquiry shows that the newspapers cannot even agree on the facts, or more often, they cannot agree on which facts to highlight and which to brush aside. And they widely diverge on their conclusions.

So we need to ensure that we give the public the tools they need to see beyond the hype. I believe that in the modern world media literacy will become as important a skill as maths or science. Decoding our media will be as important to our lives as citizens as understanding great literature is to our cultural lives.

It is vital to provide citizens with the instruments to navigate through this powerful environment, to deconstruct the power of what is often sensationalist imagery.

I accept that trust in Government and in politicians has been damaged, just as it has also declined for some sections of the media. Part of rebuilding trust – trust in the media and trust in politicians – is to recognise the need to reassert the primacy of fact over editorialising and spin.

We also need an electorate that can make sense of what they hear from the media. Ofcom has a statutory duty to promote this kind of literacy in the world of broadcasting. It is a duty I expect it to take seriously.

Because it right that people are able to challenge everything and question everything.

Because that is the way to understand everything.

And the end result? It will, I hope, be a generation of informed, educated sceptics. People should be sceptical about Government, the media and other institutions. I don’t want people to take anything from the media or from us on trust. But most importantly, a sceptic is too discerning to be a cynic. And cynicism – that completely negative nihilistic emotion – is the most corrosive, the most damaging to the cynic, not the object of their cynicism.

So Ofcom has a lot on its plate. I have only picked a few things from its in-tray to discuss.

But the challenges facing UK TV remain the same as they were a year ago.

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