The oddity of the BBC is that while most people outside the left and right fringes would concede that it is a global asset, there is wide disagreement about its funding and future purpose at home.
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.
Sometimes, its own news and factual content bosses seem unsure about what they are trying to bring to us – Radio 4’s The News Quiz, for instance, has just rebranded itself away from being a jokey current affairs show to presenting plodding theories by panellists about NHS funding. After hearing last Friday’s outing, the casual listener might beg for mercy. Or at least humour.
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.
BBC managers would say invidious choices have been forced upon it by funding crises, such as losing stars like Mishal Husain to a private sector high payer, in her case Bloomberg – though it is a bit of a Beeb mindset to dwell on the loss of talent, rather than to focus on how best to bring on new stars.
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.
According to the Sunday Times, she reportedly favours exploring paying for the BBC by taxation, rather than the licence fee – an extension of previous comments to the same effect.
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.
Nandy has to start somewhere. But the mutualism idea is a distraction. The model has struggled enough in entities like John Lewis, which “exited” its most pro-mutualism chair Sharon White over troubles in the business, and the National Trust, on a similar model, is endlessly riven by rows about what the “public” really wants from it.
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.
It does not take policy genius to see that this would end up in another layer of oversight (who would represent “the people?” And on what basis?) to other models of public ownership, which can feel pretty remote from the actual public. So I think we can throw that one onto the large heap of “not gonna happen” ideas for reshaping BBC governance, or which, if it did happen, would not address the more serious matter of who pays for it and how.
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.
She leans on European models instead. Scandinavia and Germany raise general levels of taxation to fund their broadcasters. All of these countries, however, took this step at a time when cost of living and sensitivities to taxation were lower, or indeed have a warmer attitude towards higher taxation than British voters by default.
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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”.
So if the BBC cannot be funded from general tax, it would need an extra tax akin to the council tax model. Theoretically, this is a runner and is favoured by one of the former Tory chairmen, who thought wealthier people should be paying more for the BBC.
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.
The one solution the government is loath to discuss is a gradual shift toward a free core of programming, and a subscription model for add-ons. That sits more easily with the present Director General’s pursuit of income via partnerships with international media and tech companies, and rights deals for hits outside the UK.
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.
Getting there also presents many headaches, both technological and in terms of what is and is not included in the core and the price of the add-ons in drama, sport and entertainment. It needs careful thought, and a testing of the arguments.
But that would mean more than Labour offering a combination platter of a new tax and an -ism.
If Labour wants to future-proof the BBC, it needs to widen its thinking – and switch on to what the future might actually look like.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor of POLITICO and a frequent BBC broadcaster
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