Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee
20 October 2026
Contents updated on 20 Oct 2026
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Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee Actual start House of Commons
Follow its sittings16:09 - 16:27
Speaker 2
Order, order. Welcome to this meeting of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Today we are holding a session on the work of Ofcom. We are delighted to welcome for the first time since his appointment as chair earlier this year, Sir Ian Cheshire. Alongside Ian is Dame Melanie Dawes, who is familiar to us as the Chief Executive of Ofcom.
16:27 - 17:11
Speaker 1
We are also joined by a star guest this morning in the form of Chi Onwurah, Dame Chi Onwurah, the chair of the Science and Tech Select Committee.
She is our star hostage for the day and will obviously be known to both of you as through her role doing that as well. Before we begin, I just want to remind any members to declare any interests at the point that they ask their questions. And I'd like to start off, if I can please, with you, Sir Ian. This is the first time you have been in front of our committee since your appointment as Chair. What assessment have you made so far of the scale of the challenges facing Ofcom and how they are rising up to meet them?
17:11 - 20:31
Speaker 3
Well, it's very nice to be here again, having been here before with the Channel 4 hat on, so thank you for giving us the time. Well, I think I've been struck by probably three main things since coming in, some of which I suppose are fairly obvious from the outside, but a couple maybe aren't.
First is that Ofcom is a multi-regulator, and it has different remits in different areas, and obviously needs to think about different staff in different areas. But in the last three years, it has become totally transformed by the addition of the online safety challenge, and with what's coming now with social media, this is a complete inflection point. And so there's sort of the old Ofcom, which was created to put somewhere to do competition in telecoms and broadcasting standards, has expanded into this very different animal. And, you know, from the outside in, that looks like a very broad set of responsibilities. And in the shape of online safety, genuinely evolutionary, because no one's tried to do this before, no one's regulated them in this way before.
So trying to get to actually how do you make it work is a whole new set of challenges. And having been at BT when we were regulated by Ofcom, I saw a very clear practice for regulation, it was very well established, but also the framework that opened up to give us fiber. So we saw good regulation work there. And at Channel 4, we had the broadcast regulation, which actually worked really well again because there was lots of practice. Online safety changes the game.
And that has been, you know, 450 people now in the organization that weren't there in previous. And a year and a half of writing codes. I think Melanie's written something like nine major pieces of codes. And that's not very exciting from the outside in because it sounds like you're not doing anything, but until you've got the code, you can't measure the response against the code, then you can't get to enforcement. So I feel like I've walked into a point when Ofcom has gone through this transformation, is about to get into the next phase, which is much more about achieving impact and compliance, and not just fines, it's not keeping score, but genuinely changing behaviors.
And I think we've got some good early examples of that with things like X, who've changed, and even Meta, despite suing us three times, are engaging with us. I think what needs to happen now is that we learn our way into how to have maximum impact over the next three years. And the team are very up for it, and we'll be discussing a review of how we're organized to make sure we have maximum effect. But I would say that the second bit has been, you know, this is a highly respected regulator, both in the industry and overseas particularly. I find it interesting that the online safety players are sufficiently concerned about us that our lovely head of legal, Martin, is in court this week, two of them against fifty lawyers from Meta and TikTok and X.
They are taking it seriously. And this is emerging, but it hasn't yet got to the point where we're in the full cycle.
So I think we're in flight on this. And the final thing I would say is that I think I was here before chair and we were talking about what what are your sort of early perceptions and what I've heard pre-appointment. I heard a lot about perceptions that Ofcom was either slow or legalistic or wasn't moving fast enough and maybe didn't have the people or was too big. I generally don't think it's too big. I think you need to understand the whole digital economy to be effective in this.
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