This is taken from The Guardian:

BBC made to wait on licence fee

by Maggie Brown
Wednesday June 7, 2006

The BBC will have to sweat it out until the end of the year before it learns the level of the licence fee it will receive under the new funding deal being negotiated with the government.

The culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, said last night that a final decision on the BBC licence fee from April next year, under the corporation's new charter, would be made "towards the end of the year".

Ms Jowell's comment suggests that licence fee negotiations with the BBC will not be completed until the autumn - scotching speculation that a deal might be concluded before parliament goes into summer recess next month.

She added that her department was "in the thick of BBC licence fee negotiations" when she addressed the annual summer drinks of last night's all-party parliamentary media group at Channel 4, attended by MPs and peers.

The new BBC charter has to be in place for 2007, and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is working hard to publish a draft before the summer recess.

But a decision on the corporation's controversial bid for a licence fee of RPI plus 2.3% will have to wait longer.

The licence fee settlement is being decoupled from the charter, in part because of the degree of politicking surrounding it.

This became apparent at a DCMS-hosted seminar on May 5, where an alliance of commercial media companies spoke forcefully against a lavish licence fee deal.

The ITV chief executive, Charles Allen, last month published a detailed critique of the BBC's bid for a generous settlement, which he said would bear heavily on poorer families, claiming the corporation had based its licence fee pitch on "back of the envelope" calculations.

Tellingly, the full report of accountants PKF, who are advising Ms Jowell, made some stinging criticisms of the BBC's bid and methods of presenting savings in the "red book" of its finances.

The BBC has said it will be offering clarifications on its costings and methodology, in response to the PKF report, which was published in late April.