A sad reflection

One of my few claims to fame is that I briefly knew Colette Bowe in a previous life – when she was, perhaps, rather less of the ‘grande dame’ of regulation that we know today.  I’ve therefore followed her subsequent career with interest and, now that that she has elected to leave the chairmanship of Ofcom, I wondered whether she might offer us some indiscrete remarks or other obiter dicta about her 5 years with the UK regulator.  No such luck of course but, courtesy of a recent blog by Roger Darlington, I did notice some interesting remarks she made in an interview at the close of the Oxford Media Convention.  In particular, she was asked about the public perception of Ofcom’s role – in the wake of David Cameron’s famous “Bonfire of the Quangos” speech in 2009 (announcing his intention that Ofcom would be stripped of its policy-making function). Colette apparently insisted that: 

  “Policy making is not our job” and that “Ofcom is the keeper of the facts”. 

Oh dear. The first statement may be the unfortunate reality but I didn’t realize that Ofcom’s emasculation had gone as far as the second. Doesn’t bode well for regulatory policy…