Emitting a hail of shouted greetings, banter and encouragements, Mark Byford charges through the sea of busy journalists crammed into White City’s BBC News Centre. Trailed by your correspondent, with a hurrying photographer and publicist in tow, the tall, bouffant-haired figure whips us round a high-speed tour of the wing’s cavernous editing suites and chattering newsdesks, its ranks of computer operators and knots of decision-makers. “That’s the Ten O’Clock News; this is BBC World; that’s Five Live,” he exclaims, dragging us onwards at breakneck speed.

Byford’s pride and enthusiasm is palpable. As the deputy director-general, he’s responsible for all the BBC’s journalism – 1,200 journalists in this building alone – and oversees the world’s largest newsgathering operation, operating on TV, radio and online.
Today, though, Byford wants to talk about his news empire’s newest outpost: an offshoot of bbc.co.uk named Democracylive. Built around a ‘video wall’ that broadcasts live proceedings from the UK, Scottish and European Parliaments and the Northern Ireland and Welsh Assemblies, supported by a remarkable search function and fancy personalisation settings, the site has immense potential to help people track topics, legislation and individuals throughout our increasingly dispersed legislative processes.

The site had its genesis in three factors, explains Byford: the potential to use technology to provide better access to democratic institutions; the BBC Parliament TV channel’s tenth anniversary; and “the challenge, as I said to the team, of looking around the world at coverage of the democratic institutions in the US, Australia, Germany, France, and taking it one step further”. The ambition, he explains, was “to be the best in terms of innovation and marshalling of the material”.

The result is impressive – particularly given the million-pound price tag, which compares favourably with, for example, the £3.6m cost of parliament.uk’s recent revamp. Users can sign up for alerts whenever particular individuals speak or chosen topics are raised, and a pioneering speech-recognition system searches each legislature’s proceedings for any specified word.

This search function “is not 100 per cent reliable,” concedes Byford, “but it’s reliable enough that you will say: ‘This is so useful that I’d rather have it and know that there may be some times when it doesn’t work, than wait until it’s 100 per cent failsafe’.” Alongside the video coverage, the site brings together all the BBC’s political blogs, offers an entertaining set of ‘historic moments’ vids, and provides guides and briefings on our political system and institutions.

The site is, says Byford, aimed at “all those people – and there are millions – who are interested and involved in the work of our democratic institutions.” Although he accepts that politicians, think tanks, journalists, researchers and lobbyists “will probably be the most intense users”, he is confident that civil servants too will find it invaluable. “If they want to know how debates on a subject have been coming alive in different democratic institutions; to find out the powers of, say, the Welsh Assembly on a particular issue; to see how different institutions have debated and implemented a policy; to simply watch PMQs on demand – they can get it,” he says with satisfaction.

The BBC has, of course, come under fire recently for muscling in on commercial media operators’ traditional markets and straying beyond its public service remit – but Byford is confident that Democracylive commands support across the political divide. “It’s a central public purpose of the BBC to support citizenship and democracy, and to cover the democratic institutions,” he says. “We’re sensitive about the potential market impact of the BBC’s online operations, but this is absolutely rooted in our fundamental purposes. The reaction has been universally positive.”

When asked how far those BBC “public purposes” should lead the corporation to collaborate with government departments in the pursuit of public policy – running programmes on obesity, for example – Byford is clear. “If there’s government information that needs to get to the public – say on swine flu – then clearly the BBC has an important role to play, and we do some things in our education and social action work that tackles these [broader] issues,” he replies. “But in its news and current affairs programming the BBC has to be absolutely impartial, rather than in the vanguard of promoting government policy. The BBC’s independence is an absolutely core value: we can scrutinise [government] initiatives, but we don’t campaign.”

Okay; nobody expects the BBC to openly back government policies. But civil servants often feel that the BBC’s journalists concentrate on attracting audiences rather than explaining the complexities of policy. Byford isn’t wearing it, though: “We’re not chasing viewers at the expense of analysis. People want trusted news and impartial analysis from the BBC; they come to us because they think [our coverage] is fair, accurate and believable, with specialist correspondents,” he says.

Shown the BBC’s online report on the new energy planning strategy – which presented a consultation document going before Parliament as ‘Go-ahead for 10 nuclear stations’ – he gives a little ground. “If you’re doing more than a million hours of output every year on air and producing hundreds of web pages, it would be nonsense to say that there’s nothing that could be improved,” he observes; but Byford doesn’t really believe that the temptation to write a strong story ever gets the better of the BBC’s commitment to truth. “We’re completely driven by trying to be as accurate and fair as possible,” he says.

The BBC’s news coverage will become more controversial still as we approach the general election – not least because the BNP will this year be enjoying more BBC attention. When Nick Griffin’s party won six per cent of the vote and two seats in the European elections, says Byford, “They passed the threshold of how we look at minority party appearances on Question Time”; the same set of criteria “does shape how we consider their appearance across the BBC, not just in elections”.

The rules apply equally to all small parties, Byford stresses. So can we expect to see more coverage of the BNP campaign in this election than in previous polls? “If their level of support goes up, then inevitably they’d meet the criteria for greater appearances”, he replies.

Coverage of the BNP is set to join a host of other issues likely to ensure that in the coming election the BBC is, once again, not only a news provider and commentator, but also a topic for fierce debate. Chances are, the corporation’s new website will end up carrying parliamentary and assembly debates on the BBC’s commercial activities; on the balance of its news reporting; on the licence fee; on the way its provision of free, high-quality news shapes the UK’s media industries.

Byford is phlegmatic; when it comes to the BBC, he says, “Everybody’s got a view. Everybody watches it; everybody listens to it; everybody owns it – and therefore everybody’s going to comment on it. If we get a lot of criticism and comment, it shows we’re still relevant.” For him, “the most important thing for the BBC is that it stays at the heart of national life – and the amount of coverage we get at the moment shows that that’s more than being fulfilled.”

A brief tour of Democracylive

• The eight-screen video wall provides simultaneous live coverage of the House of Lords, the House of Commons, the Scottish and European Parliaments, the Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies, and to parliamentary committee proceedings;
• The search engine ‘listens’ to the recordings and pulls out both specific mentions of search terms, and debates in which those terms are discussed;
• Users can ask to be notified whenever a particular individual speaks, and video will be saved for them;
• One section contains guides to each of the institutions covered, plus an explanation of exactly which powers lie with each legislature;
• The comment section brings together all of the BBC’s political bloggers;
  The website can be found at www.bbc.co.uk/democracylive.