BBC settlement has injured its independenceThere have been many moments when BBC's managers have decided discretion is wiser
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ThE MaStEr
2010-10-25
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BBC settlement has injured its independenceThere have been many moments when BBC's managers have decided discretion is wiser than valour
Monday 25 October 2010
The BBC director general Mark Thompson makes a persuasive argument for the new BBC licence fee deal , but it leaves some big questions unanswered. Just under a fortnight ago, the government launched an extraordinary ambush on cash that is expressly raised through the licence fee to pay for the BBC's domestic output.
The BBC was dragged into the comprehensive spending review as if it was just another Whitehall department. The government seems to have reckoned that popular disenchantment with fat-cat salaries and dodgy editorial standards would let it get away with what looks like an assault on the corporation's single most important quality, its political independence.
White City's defence case goes like this: far from undermining the corporation's independence, it has been strengthened. The BBC has gained a natural part of its extended family and at the same time fought off the real challenge that came a week ago today, with an 11th-hour attempt to force it to underwrite free TV licences for the over-75s. That would have been more than a burden with a £600m price tag. It meant taking responsibility for a social transfer, a matter of government policy that has nothing to do with broadcasting. It would genuinely have been an improper use of the licence fee, "financially disastrous ...
constitutionally unacceptable", Mr Thompson writes today. The World Service is already available not only overseas but to any small-hours insomniac tuned to Radio 4.
The BBC had previously accepted a ringfenced budget for the digital handover, and allowed the surplus to be redirected to expanding the high-speed broadband network. Like those obligations, the World Service is a proper aspect of the BBC's public value remit, and indeed will soon be part of the same news hub in Broadcasting House. In fact, the BBC Trust and the director general had already been working on a proposal to incorporate it. There was no element of compulsion here, nor of government bullying, let alone the cultural vandalism of some newspaper headlines.
Faced with the government's pre-emptive strike, the choice the trust, the executive and the director general made has advantages. By insisting that paying for the World Service was only possible if a new licence fee settlement came with it (nearly two years early), there is now space to think hard about how to maintain quality output in the face of very tough cuts over the next six years.
A licence fee negotiated, as it should have been, next year, would have been conducted in an era of austerity and amid government and media hostility that could have led to a tense and possibly unwinnable fight against efforts to restrict what the corporation does, and probably would have resulted in even less money to do it with. It might have led to losing a share of the licence fee to other broadcasters.
Nonetheless there are difficulties beyond the manner of the late-night, last-minute negotiations and the apparent inclusion of the BBC in the CSR. The World Service, although it is editorially independent, remains a vehicle for foreign policy. The Foreign Office retains control over where and in what languages it broadcasts. The government now has a foothold in Broadcasting House. Moreover, the licence payers have not been consulted; no one knows what they think about their money being used to pay for, say, foreign language broadcasts to Kurdistan. Arguing that this is the least bad option may be true but does nothing for the claims of an autonomy protected.
Maybe there is a more subtle truth: the BBC's independence has always been a convenient myth. There have been many moments when the BBC's managers have decided discretion is wiser than valour. Yet, like the British constitution, it is an important myth. Any injury is slow to heal. And it has been injured.
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