Derek Wyatt, a Labour member of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, has called for Ofcom to take over funding of the BBC.
His comments come in a piece in the Financial Times.
Note also that he talks about "holes in the pension fund"...


Time for a real debate on the BBC
By Derek Wyatt
Published: September 7 2004

Discussion over the BBC’s charter renewal has been a damp squib, the Elstein report nothwithstanding. With an election looming next year, all three political parties have now agreed their position: no change.

Shame. Shame too on the media commentators who have failed to raise even half a debate. I went to the Edinburgh TV Festival last month partly to discover what the industry was saying to itself, especially about the BBC.

The conference centre proved efficient but its atmosphere seemed to anaesthetise us all: there was almost no discussion about the impact of technologies on the future of public service broadcasting or on the politics of the BBC’s charter.

Beyond the talking shop of Edinburgh, one of the unforeseen consequences of the Hutton Report has been to stifle wider debate about the corporation’s role and silence those prepared to question the status quo. The 10-year fully licence-fee funded BBC from January 1, 2007 looks like a done deal.

Stop and imagine, however. Imagine if the BBC was the National Health Service. Imagine if the NHS had lost 40 per cent of its patients to the private sector over the past 10 years. Would we still fund it to the same degree as we had always done?

Imagine if the BBC represented the university sector and it had increased its participation figures by 40 per cent over the past decade, would we still fund it as though it hadn’t?

Over the past 10 years the BBC has lost viewers and listeners (one rival broadcaster puts the loss at 40 per cent) and has failed to make any substantial impact with most of its new digital TV channels and radio stations.

The current funding agreement guaranteed an above-inflation licence-fee increase - an arrangement that prevailed while broadcasters in the commercial sector have taken a battering from the advertising recession.

Yet the BBC finds itself with a substantial overdraft and holes in its pension fund. Staffing levels are back to 1994 levels. The BBC is a bloated, unmanageable, out of control, imperial player.

Its senior staff receive fat-cat salaries and bonuses. They have pensions, expense accounts and cars the envy of the public sector. Nowhere in the world does any public service broadcaster pay its senior staff the number of six-figure salaries that the Beeb does.

So, let me suggest a different scenario.

First though, let’s agree that none of us knows by how much further viewing and listening figures will drop by 2012 (halfway through the next licence period) let alone 2017.

It would clearly be unreasonable for politicians to increase the licence fee if the accepted wisdom is that, faced with an increase in digital competition for viewing, the BBC will lose audiences. The Beeb will have to borrow from the mantra of Mies van der Rohe, where “less is more”.

Given that into this mix the government now thinks it can attain digital switchover by 2012, this will result in a further deterioration in the BBC’s viewing figures. It’s time therefore to put the BBC on to a new footing.

Let’s scrap the charter. Let’s scrap the 10-year folly. Let’s be bolder. Let’s treat the BBC like any other utility, like the NHS, or like any government department (where the chancellor demands a 5 per cent reduction in staff every year and other savings).

The NHS is, after the Red Army and the Indian Railways, the largest employer in the world.

The NHS will be with us, in whatever form, in 2017.

And so will the BBC. The NHS receives a three-year funding review from the Treasury. So should the BBC.

For the moment, let the licence fee be the way we fund the BBC. But since the Treasury already agrees a free licence for those over 75 (who would bet against this being for those over 65 by 2012 to ease digital migration?), and funding for the BBC World Service, it is not unreasonable that the corporation’s governance should come under, if not the Treasury itself, then at least, Ofcom, the regulator for the rest of the industry. The BBC system of governors has simply failed us.

Three years ago, iPods had not been invented. Today Apple has a $1bn business. Three years ago BT said broadband would only be available to 65 per cent of the population; by 2006 BT will have achieved 98 per cent coverage. Three years ago, 3G mobile phone operators did not anticipate such an interest in photography and moving pictures. By 2006 these new services could be generating as much as 30 per cent of their revenues.

In this scenario, it would be madness for any government to commit to even a five-year charter, let alone one that runs for a decade. The Beeb will always be with us and a three-year rolling funding review is exactly the medicine it requires. As part of this three-year review, the BBC should be challenged to meet a number of targets, just as each government department is.

Finally, as cars start to build in hard discs so that families can receive live entertainment on the move; as the iPod spawns an entire family of new media devices; as portability becomes the new driver, then the Beeb has to become a software facilitator.

Fundamentally, is the Beeb up for this? Are its current staffing levels and late 20th century organisation systems nimble enough for it to recreate itself much as Microsoft has done each time its hegemony has been threatened? I doubt it.

wyattd@parliament.uk

Derek Wyatt is the Labour MP for Sittingbourne Sheppey and a member of the culture, media and sport Select Committee.

This is a personal view