1. By showing US imports, films, makeover shows, sport etc, the BBC brings in an audience for the more educational stuff it also shows. To reach out to everyone with it’s quality broadcasts it has to have a broad remit. And just being able to watch all this stuff without the adverts is worth the TV licence alone.

2. The BBC is phenomenal value for money – 37% of all TV viewing for just 23% of TV revenues. Most people would pay more than £12 a month. Sky is £45 a month for nothing but imports and repeats and they have the cheek to force you to watch adverts as well!

3. Finally, because the BBC is not funded by advertisers, it can make programmes in the interests of viewers. It is the only organisation that can stand up to the big multi-nationals when they do something wrong. The others are too scared of losing the advertising revenue! I think we need a BBC tabloid newspaper in this country as well.

Alternate funding methods for the public service have long been under consideration since the political sustainability of the license fee started to come under threat. Within the organisation these discussions are the framework by which management increasingly tailors its output.

Increasing commercialisation of in-house brands through spin-offs, product licensing and greater international marketing has reduced the need to escalate the license fee in the past two decades, while before that loosening the restrictions of exclusive contracts enabled the BBC to hold onto talent and retain workers who might otherwise have been poached.

Consider the case of Top Gear presenters Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond – both ubiquitous in promotions of motor/machine related DVDs. Add this to newspaper columns, book deals, speaking or hosting engagements and various personal appearances and the scale of their earnings built out of the profile provided by the Beeb is more than it could offer alone, yet far beyond the capability of any purely commercial operator.

The reintroduction of Doctor Who is also designed to build a multi-platform presence and I’m awaiting the day when they OK a serious coproduction deal to enter into and establish their place in the cinema market. But that day will have to wait until policymakers and competitors both agree to liberate the multiple functions of the BBC and accept its role in providing essential cross-over connectivity between media formats and production platforms.

Commercialisation was the first step in reducing the relative cost of the fee without reducing the overall quality of the service – integration is the next step in eliminating coertion without eliminating the service charter.

When the fee all for practical purposes costs as much as a postage stamp does now for the individual tax-payer it will have been depoliticised to the extent that there is nothing left to complain about except the inability of overly populist commercial operators to provide ever-growing dividends without distorting the level playing field or creating artificial monopolies.

The point about technology is worth investigating further in my view as I personally doubt innovation can continue at the same rate of pace as now once convergence and integration are achieved and content proliferation is fully enabled. How long this will take before plateauing begins to occur is a matter of perspective, but by then the politics of the debate will have shifted in focus away from the symmetrical corporate funding/personal payment dichotomy.

But I am pretty sceptical about this claim – “The subject of payment is already starting to be superceded by the way personalised TV is evolving into a system which the consumer audience is beginning to pay indirectly through phone bills according to usage as a result of digital media conversion” which you make.

if you mean by that that political debates about the future funding model of the BBC are therefore futile, because they have been settled by this “evolving system”. That makes little sense. There is a licence fee to fund the BBC and there will be a debate about maintaining that or various models after that. Technological change will affect that; the idea it settles the political choice is odd.

Less than pretty much every other form of traditional media, AIUI…

Sunder, your thinking appears overcomplicated. The subject of payment is already starting to be superceded by the way personalised TV is evolving into a system which the consumer audience is beginning to pay indirectly through phone bills according to usage as a result of digital media conversion.

So from both perspectives of the supply-side and demand-side economic question policy-making lags significantly behind events – which only shows the irrelevance and lack of balance of both your political perspectives.

The latest Conservative thinking was published by the Conservative Research Department a few weeks ago in a paper entitled “Plurality In A New Media Age”, but I doubt if it would help you much on these issues. It certainly assumed the licence fee would persist indefinitely, and it by-passed the recent models for the future of poublic service broadcasting that Ofcom put forward in its April 10th PSB review.

The report commissioned by John Whittingdale from the Broadcasting Policy Group (which I chaired) was published four years ago (Beyond The Charter: The Future Of The BBC), but does not seem to have penetrated very far into Conservative thinking, not least because John Whittingdale was shifted to another portfolio before we completed our work – by the way, the Group had no political affiliations, and contained more Labour supporters than Conservative ones.

As Mark Thompson reminds us in the Telegraph this morning, public willnigness to pay for BBC output is much higher than the licence fee for a significant proportion of the population. However, the BBC cannot tap into this willingness, because it is committed to a flat-rate compulsory licence fee (despite agreeing in 2000 to a supplemental digital licence fee, as proposed by the Davies Report, on grounds of fairness – most viewers could not receive BBC digital services at that time – why should they have to pay for them?). Even if the single package were retained, a tax-based fee would re-position accountability, remove the burden of the licence fee from those least able to pay, and allow the BBC to pitch its ambitions at a level where ability and willingness to pay were highest.

A flexible package of services would allow the poorest to opt out of what they cannot afford or do not want, but there would be nothing to stop the Government from funding a completely free version of BBC content (through the web or even through broadcast transmission) if that was deemed socially desirable. Both choice and subsidy would thereby be transparent.

I prefer the subscription model, because I think it offers the most choice, accountability and transparency, but a tax-based licence fee is at least socially equitable.

By the way, Sunder, paternalism has its limits: you can force people to pay for the BBC, but you cannot force them to consume its services. Amongst the 16-24 year olds, as Ofcom has shown, BBC Television is rapidly declining in popularity.

David Elstein

Thanks for the detailed and interesting comments. As you will have gathered, I am coming at this particular issue more as a citizen, viewer and listener than a pointy-head. So I can’t pretend to compete on expert knowledge of the topic at all.

I would be v.interested to know whether you could speculate on what the Conservatives might finally do on the BBC. They seemed to find your proposals something of a hot potato. Antony Jay’s are considerably more in the electoral suicide note category. I can see there is some interest in a fight, but I find it difficult to judge whether there is going to any radical thinking in this area. (In the end, unlike you, I hope they might be rather conservative!)

Of your various proposals … In principle, I would be rather tempted to support a politically viable progressive reform of how the licence fee is distributed, as the regressive/poll tax element is certainly an issue. Aside from practical issues of policy design, the issue would presumably be that losers would make much more noise than winners. (And you state that the intention would be to drive downward pressure on the overall BBC income, though others here have also said that they think the BBC could be smaller). But there is a tempting idea in there.

While there are concerns about independence on the taxpayer model, I agree with what you say about the BBC World Service. At the risk of hyperbole, there is a good case for saying that the World Service is the best thing the BBC does, and just about the best thing that anybody in Britain does at anything. However, my hunch is that the particular distinctive culture and history of the BBC itself is the reason that it does appear to operate with considerably more independence and credibility than seems to be the case in other government-funded foreign broadcasting services.

I am inclined to think that there could be more creative ways of increasing transparency and accountability/voice than simply relying on the power of exit. A purely subscription model has dangers in how to provide unpopular programmes, unless there are very broad packages. I guess some of us are instinctively for a bit of BBC liberal paternalism/elitism, or at least some rather indirect mechanisms for democratic voice in the interests of public service quality.

Maybe that’s all rather too much treating the BBC as a bit of a secular religion. Still, some of that is widely held, and it is an issue which reformers will have to take on board.

There is also evidence that many of those prosecuted are unemployed single parents, who are often pursued by the collection agency repeatedly, as their ability to pay the licence fee is undermined by the fines imposed. Even though almost no-one is imprisoned for non-payment of fines imposed for evading the licence fee, the threat of a criminal record is wholly disporportionate to the offence (for instance, non-payment of gas or telephone or electricity bills does not carry the same threat).

The great advantage of a subscription system is that it would enable the BBC to offer a layered proposition to consumers, along the lines of cable and satellite services, and that different televisions could be connected to different layers of provision. This flexibility would be greatly helpful to the BBC in judging real viewer and listener preferences, which is currently not possible. Obviously, for consumers to have a choice of service packages, or the right to opt out altogether, would be a significant improvement in accountability (the nominal accountability provided by the licence fee is almost completely ineffective, especially at the individual household level).

Most studies show that the BBC would be strengthened financially by a subscription system, as evasion would become impossible, and added quality services (such as High Definition) would be paid for by those who wanted them, whilst poorer households could limit themselves to basic packages. Historically, this was the effective situation when the BBC introduced BBC2, where households who wanted the service paid a colour fee (BBC2 was the first channel to be broadcast in colour), whilst those remaining with just BBC1 paid a black-and-white fee. For a long time, radio and television had separate licence fees.

The biggest problems with the licence fee are its inflexibility and its regressive impact on the poorest. If we really believe the BBC is like the NHS or education, it should be funded out of taxation, with non-payers of tax exempt, and a surcharge of about 0.75% of taxable income levied on taxpayers to maintain the BBC’s current level of income. The BBC’s DG would pay £5,000, and most of the commentariat about £1,000, with MPs on a £400 rate: once the cost of the BBC were fairly based, we might have a more informed debate about the right level of the licence fee.

Some people worry about editorial independence, but the BBC already receives some 15% of the licence fee direct from the Treasury (who pay for the over-75s), and its World Service is funded directly by the Foreign Office. S4C and the Gaelic Television Service are also directly funded. No issues of editorial independence have been reported in any of these cases.

The idea that we should have fleets of detection vans, armies of snoopers, threats of criminalisation and an underclass of the prosecuted in the period after digital switchover (timetabled for 2012) makes such an apparatus wholly redundant is evidence of hardened brain arteries. The BBC is a (mostly) brilliant institution which has no objective means of judging audience preferences and demand: subscription would at long last provide that.

Oh, that’s what happens now.

QT, I suggest you may have knocked your reading spectacles off when you had your fit of pique that anyone could take the same evidence and reach a diametrically opposed conclusion to your own.

I wrote that bias against paedophiles is acceptable because it is justifiable. It is because it comes after open debate of the issues and it is a position supported by law.

I used this example to try to show that bias under such conditions is considered fine because it isn’t ‘political bias’.

The complaints of BBC bias are not comparable because they are an attempt to influence the outcome of an ongoing debate, and that they therefore renounce any claim to objectivity in doing so.

I agree wit this, most euroscepticism is simply ‘omg they’re legislating on the shape of bananas!’ sort of crap. Its just guff.

If you’re serious, it suggests that no matter what the BBC does no-one will ever be happy with it (from a political point of view at least) and it should be abolished.

Erm, NO! The whole point is that it sits in the politican centre where both sides are annoyed it doesnt do their side any justice. That is what is called neutrality, much as its difficult to get your head around

Why would you want to get rid of a broadly politically neutral news org (though I still think its too right wing on its news agenda), and instead only read crap that reinforces your prejudices?

Similarly, as a social liberal, supporter of the Democrats, moderate Europhile and moderate libertarian, I find the BBC biased in favour of social conservatives, Republicans, Europhobes and authoritarians.

This suggests to me that it’s doing a pretty decent job, no?

Next it’ll be said the Beeb is unfairly biased in favour of professional sport at expense of the amateurs or in favour of law abiding citizens against criminals – this sort of recidivism leads to questions about paedophile’s rights!? Why is there Songs of Praise but no equivalent for satanists, you might ask.

This is stupidity. The question of bias is not that bias is bad, or that conclusions drawn from bias are incorrect, but that the uncertainty created by bias needs to be negated through effective representative balance. There will always be critics, but existence of opinion doesn’t provide validation, though many conservatives wish it were so and seek affirmation through representation.

The simple fact this debate happens at all contradicts the suggestion that the license fee is guaranteed in perpetuity or that the issue isn’t taken seriously.

The truth is that the license fee is the least worst funding solution (it is a voluntary tax – you don’t have to watch TV) until adequate payment methods are developed in replacement. Auntie does it’s best to avoid accusations of unfair bias and we hold it to far higher standards than we expect of any other media organisation. All of which is A Good Thing.

It is informative to remember how this issue has changed over time as political fortune has swung between the major parties and the institution has developed to treat all with equanimity, and that this pattern can be applied to all institutions which reach ‘official’ status. The military, church, parliament etc have all been (and sometimes still are) portrayed as bastions of corruption against the ‘one true way’. This should not however dissuade us from recognition of their applied and actual value.

If you think the BBC doesn’t do much better TV than anyone else I’ll send you a tape of an evening of commercial Australian TV. Fancy sitting through 30 minute, yes, count ‘em, 30 minute long commercials? If it wasn’t for BBC stuff I’d give up on TV altogether.

I wouldn’t say that, I don’t think the BBC does much, in terms of TV, “better” than anyone else.

That’s balls, and betrays your own bias.