The causes of woes are largely agreed on: a licence fee falling behind inflation, and the young drifting between TikTok, YouTube and new forms of video content rather than turning regularly to it as the source of information and viewpoint.
It’s far from the only confusion about what the serious bits of the BBC are “for”: there is still scepticism among many senior news journalists, for instance, about the resource poured into BBC Verify, which sets out to be the arbiter of what is true and false in the wider media ecology – and sucks up huge amounts of newsroom resources, which would once have gone into funding actual reporting.
Underlying all this is uncertainty about the funding model and how a new government approaches it. Lisa Nandy, the Culture and Media Secretary, is shaping the next royal charter, which governs the BBC and needs to be agreed to begin in 2027.
Talks with Tim Davie, the Director General are under way – and as the Sunday Times also reports, the argument in government is about to kick off in earnest, too. Nandy’s starting point is that if faith in the license fee is declining, the best way to secure the funding base for a national broadcaster is through taxation. Bolted onto this is a recipe for “mutualism” – in which the BBC would be “owned” by taxpayers.
This thinking is more likely to complicate the problem than answer it. For one thing, because the notion that “direct control and ownership [by] the public” is suited to setting the priorities of a broadcaster is bizarre – the only benefit of the idea is to make it harder for a future (Tory/Reform-influenced) government to make changes, though they would likely find a way to do that. And it is a strangely defensive way for Labour to start out formulating a policy: to aim primarily at blocking something that might happen in future.
Nandy obviously does not believe the licence fee, which funds around two-thirds of the BBC’s outgoings, is sustainable. Evasion is currently at around 11 per cent, which is not drastic – but the bigger headache is that fewer younger licence fee payers are coming on stream to keep the model going.
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Read MoreAlso, the final say on this lies with the Chancellor, and Rachel Reeves’s position on not raising the tax burden is, as she put it at a press conference in Beijing, “non-negotiable”.
But targeting that group through the size and location of properties is a patchy idea. The government already worries about the high prosecution rate for license fee non-payment by women who are living alone or widowed. And in essence, taxing a service continues the habit of forcing people to pay for BBC services in a way that does not take account of what people actually want to pay for, which is never a great starting point.
If the BBC is going to max out its commercial heft – which in practice means taking investment out of domestically-focused programming – that will feel closer to the beginning of a subscription model than anything else.
But that would mean more than Labour offering a combination platter of a new tax and an -ism.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor of POLITICO and a frequent BBC broadcaster
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