This is taken from The Guardian:

Labour calls for inquiry into BBC licence fee deal
Shadow culture secretary writes to Commons culture committee chair, asking for investigation into last-minute settlement
by James Robinson, guardian.co.uk      
Wednesday 27 October 2010 07.24 BST


Ivan Lewis, shadow culture minister, is worried by the last-minute nature of the BBC licence fee deal. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian
The shadow culture secretary, Ivan Lewis, has demanded an urgent parliamentary inquiry into the BBC licence fee settlement following the hastily negotiated deal agreed with the government last week.

Lewis has written to John Whittingdale, the Conservative MP who chairs the Commons culture, media and sport select committee, asking him to hold an investigation into the six-year deal.

His request follows the agreement last week between the government and the corporation that will see the BBC licence fee frozen at £145.50 for six years until 2017. The settlement was announced by George Osborne in last week's comprehensive spending review.

Lewis wants ministers and BBC executives to give evidence to MPs about how the deal was reached and answer questions about its implications for the corporation's services. He described the settlement as a "dodgy deal" in parliament this week.

He also said the agreement "rode roughshod over the independence of the BBC, crushed any serious prospect of reform and involved no consultation with licence fee payers or parliamentarians".

"The BBC is one of this country's great institutions and its future a matter of public interest," Lewis added.

Licence fee negotiations between the BBC and the government normally take up to a year and the final agreement is subject to parliamentary approval.

The latest deal was hammered out behind closed doors in just over a week in a series of dramatic meetings between the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, the BBC Trust chairman, Sir Michael Lyons, and the BBC's director general, Mark Thompson.

A last-minute proposal to saddle the BBC with the £556m-a-year cost of providing free TV licences to the over-75s was withdrawn less than 48 hours before Osborne's statement during a hectic final period of negotiation.

But the BBC agreed to take on new responsibilities, including funding the World Service and most of the Welsh-language broadcaster S4C's budget, as part of the agreement, which was negotiated in a matter of days.

The settlement is a 16% cut to the annual £3.6bn-a-year licence fee in real terms and meeting the extra commitments will cost the BBC an additional £340m annually by 2015.

In order to meet these extra costs, the corporation has said it will seek savings of £140m a year for four years.

The culture committee could grill Hunt, Thompson and Lyons on the details of the deal if it holds an inquiry.

Last week's settlement has been described as "tough" by Thompson, but he has also said it provides stability for the organisation and that it was the best the BBC could hope for in the circumstances.

"Anyone who believes that the BBC could have achieved a licence fee settlement at any stage, and under any government, which would have called for lower efficiency targets than other public bodies were facing, is deluding themselves," he wrote in MediaGuardian on Monday.