BBC must learn to live without licences, not cling to the past – David Behrens

It would be naive to think that the timing of the Culture Secretary’s attempted emasculation of the BBC was coincidental. A smokescreen was clearly needed to deflect attention from the frat house antics at Downing Street – or as it’s now known in Conservative circles, party HQ.
Culture Secretary Nadine DorriesCulture Secretary Nadine Dorries
Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries

But that doesn’t mean Nadine Dorries was wrong to signal that the days of guaranteed funding by a tax on owning a television set were over. No other institution, apart from the health service, is taxed separately from everything else, and in an age of satellites and the internet, a century-old system based on public ownership of the air itself is an anachronism.

She was not suggesting that the BBC is done for. Yet, to listen to the predictable chorus that rallied to its defence, you would be forgiven for thinking that only two options were on the table: leaving it alone or doing away with it altogether. Neither outcome is likely nor desirable.

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The truth is that between those extremes lies an infinite number of solutions, and the challenge now for the Corporation is to forge a new way forward, not cling to the past. It will do that only by becoming smaller and more focused – not by insisting on having a finger in every one of the pies on the broadcasting smorgasbord.

Former BBC Chairman Michael GradeFormer BBC Chairman Michael Grade
Former BBC Chairman Michael Grade

That will mean changing the habits of several lifetimes, for while the BBC is a precious cultural institution which the country would be infinitely worse off without, it is also an inflated and complacent outgrowth of the civil service. As such, it has managed to get through the last 100 years doing more or less what it pleases, despite all the regulation placed in its way. This week’s relaunch of the previously axed BBC Three channel is a case in point.

It will deny this, of course, but how else can you explain its avaricious appropriation of the internet, a medium that is not covered by the TV licence and is more than adequately served by commercial rivals – yet whose bandwidth Broadcasting House has committed itself to filling with news and podcasts for the benefit, it says, of people who don’t watch TV.

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The presence of competitors is the salient point here, because the main job of a public broadcaster is to produce content that is in the public interest but which would not be viable if left to the open market. That’s not the case with the BBC news website and nor is it true of Radios 1, 2, 3 or 5. It’s not even a valid argument for keeping BBC One if it’s stuffed with recycled reality formats.

Demanding that the Corporation divest itself of any one of those tentacles is like asking someone to choose which of their organs to give up, and there are already powerful and well-liked advocates insisting that all of them be retained.

But it’s not as if the licence fee is the only non-commercial funding model out there. A decade ago, Finland abolished it in favour of a ring-fenced tax which excludes the lowest earners. And that’s in a country with a better argument than ours for keeping its public broadcaster, because no-one else is making programmes in Finnish.

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The BBC’s problem has always been that it can’t bear the idea of another broadcaster doing something that it’s not doing, too. Historically, that’s why it launched a separate TV region for Yorkshire, why it tries to outbid its rivals for sports rights, and why it’s now so keen to maintain a presence online. In each case, it has argued that it must remain popular with everyone to make the licence fee seem like good value.

What it should be doing is precisely the opposite – creating markets for niche content that no-one else is interested in supplying. And if these are funded by general taxation rather than a bespoke fee, the need to please all of the people all of the time goes away. It’s not rocket science; Channel 4 has been doing it for the last 40 years.

The extent to which the Corporation has insulated itself from reality was brought home last week when even Michael Grade, a BBC evangelist and a former head of three of the main networks, ridiculed managers at Broadcasting House for knowing nothing of the privations of ordinary families. You can dismiss Nadine Dorries as a meddler if you like, but Grade knows what he’s talking about.

So the job for those managers is to become as creative as the best of their programme makers, and come up with a new financial model that will sustain them for another generation. Because if they don’t, no-one else will.

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