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Minister for Fun opens consultation on future of the BBC

Should Auntie be forced to identify what on Earth she is for, and do that?

The Government has opened up a wide-ranging consultation on the future of the BBC, whose ten-year duration Royal Charter expires in 2017.

Inside the BBC Micro

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Coincidentally a Government review of the criminalisation of license fee evasion, was also published today, the Perry Review, which has decided to allow the BBC to keep locking up people who don’t pay the £145.50 per-household fee - at least until 2018. The last Parliament voted to decriminalise non-payment in the Commons, but the vote was sidelined by the (non-elected) House of Lords.

The scope of the Green Paper is wide-ranging, which the Minister for Fun John Whittingdale has justified because of an “unprecedented” pace of change in media consumption over ten years. When the Charter was last reviewed most people could receive only a small number of national BBC TV and radio stations, the number of which has proliferated, with a huge online presence: websites, apps - and the Corporation has even designed its own computer. Again.

So, up for grabs are the size and purpose of the BBC (that gets re-written with every new Charter), the quotas and trading terms of its relationship with the independent British TV production sector, and the governance model.

This wasn’t a surprise: the details were leaked to the Sunday Times.

However Whittingdale said he was doubtful that a full switch from a flat rate poll tax to a subscription model wasn’t possible just yet, for technological reasons. So in the short-term, the Green Paper suggests, the funding could be either "a reformed licence fee; a media levy; [or] a hybrid licence fee and subscription".

The current license fee reflects neither consumption nor the ability to pay, but leaks today hinted that the license fee could be adopted to reflect the some measure of income, with the middle classes (who are super-served by the BBC today) paying more than the poor (who rarely appear on the BBC anyway).

“You have to have an ability to switch off and most households do not have the tech in the home that would allow that to happen”.

The Green Paper should ask whether the BBC “tries to be all things to all people, everyone on all platforms, or a more precisely targeted mission.”

The Public Purposes of the BBC in its current Charter

The word "diversity" doesn't actually appear in the BBC's Royal Charter, although it is in the "Our Values" blurb on the BBC's website. The formal mission is nevertheless a classic of worthy, mid-noughties New Labour waffle:
The Public Purposes of the BBC are as follows — (a) sustaining citizenship and civil society; (b) promoting education and learning; (c) stimulating creativity and cultural excellence; (d) representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities; (e) bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK; (f) in promoting its other purposes, helping to deliver to the public the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services and, in addition, taking a leading role in the switchover to digital television.

Labour’s shadow culture minister Chris Bryant called the BBC “The NHS of Culture”. But nobody, not even Bryant, spoke up for the current BBC governance structure.

micro:bit board side view

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“The Trust is Bust”, Bryant thought. “The Trust either lip syncs the Director General or undermines him.”

Whittingdale agreed:

“It was seeing some of the exchanges at the Public Accounts Committee between Members and the BBC Trust that convinced us that the Trust did not work.”

In the debate that followed, former tech journalist Matt Warman MP complained about the BBC producing lots of apps “of little public value”. John Redwood MP called for an English BBC, since it wasn’t fair that Scotland and Wales had one, but England didn't. Former BBC journalist John Nicholson (SNP) said that BBC Scotland gets far less from the license fee than Scots paid in revenue. (Which is true, but Scotland gets the rest of the BBC's output "for free".)

Only DUP MPs expressed strong support for a subscription revenue model. Ian Paisley Jr MP noted that the BBC employed “two hundred people who work for Twitter.”

You can find the Consultation page here and the Perry Review here. ®

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