Although written rather cautiously, this analysis by former Panorama editor Steve Hewlett appears to suggest the BBC may be fatally compromised:

The new chair of the BBC Trust urgently needs to find a new consensus
Corporation faces serious strategic issues that must be addressed
by Steve Hewlett
The Guardian, Monday 22 November 2010

Paddy Power is already offering odds on the next chair of the BBC Trust – 11/8 Roger Parry, 15/8 Patricia Hodgson and even 50/1 for Andy Duncan, to name but a few. Applications closed last Friday and plenty of fun and games is to come, no doubt. But whoever gets the job will arguably find themselves in the midst of the most serious set of strategic issues the BBC has ever faced.

The recent, very hastily concluded, licence fee agreement is described by the BBC executives who negotiated it as a prime example of pulling victory from the jaws of catastrophic defeat. In the cool light of day they go further.

They now tend to say that the deal is not just the best of a bad job achieved in the most difficult of circumstances, but in many respects a good deal for the BBC in any terms. A secure settlement for fully six years with written guarantees of no further government cash-seeking incursions requiring only 16% savings – manageable over the period with a few additional responsibilities, for the World Service, S4C and a bit of local TV, thrown in. And above all the BBC avoided the uncapped (in terms of both timescale and cash) liability for free licence fees for all over-75s that the government appeared determined to saddle it with. So after a desperate few days it's back to business as usual.

But there is of course another way of looking at it. Whatever the short term advantages over the alternative, the circumstances of the licence fee deal raise the most serious questions about the BBC's prize creative and editorial asset – its autonomy and independence. It does rather look as if the government – albeit for reasons of short-term book balancing rather than with any long-term strategic view – marched straight through long-established convention, leaving the BBC with what amounted to Hobson's choice. If you want a new licence fee deal then give us our due – or else!

In truth the idea that, in return for licence fee settlements, the BBC gives the government something they want is hardly new. John Birt played this card effectively over 10 years ago when in the name of taking the nation into the digital, multichannel future (and providing a digital counterweight to Rupert Murdoch's Sky), he secured a bumper settlement and a green light for all those new channels and services (which have since paradoxically contributed to the BBC's image problem over its size and scale). Nevertheless it was a very generous deal, all firmly BBC branded and, critically, offered up at the BBC's instigation.

In the next settlement Mark Thompson didn't fare quite as well. The move to Manchester was originally the BBC's idea but when Thompson threatened not to do it if the settlement wasn't big enough, Gordon Brown insisted and cut the settlement back anyway.

Worse, in order to secure the settlement the BBC ended up agreeing to pay for the so-called "digital switchover help scheme" to pay for old people and the very poor to go digital. A move that even some current BBC trustees now regard as a grave strategic error. Looking at that as a trend, first the government was offered benefits from the licence fee (under Tony Blair), then it came to expect to get something for itself (under Brown as chancellor), and latterly it marched in and demanded its share.

Not only has the rather flimsy but historic convention (that the BBC alone decides what to spend the licence fee on) been ridden over roughshod, but with all the government-specified things the BBC now has to pay for subject to ringfencing or long-term future funding commitments (S4C, World Service, local TV, broadband roll-out etc), the licence fee has already, in effect, been top-sliced.

Henceforth large amounts of licence payers' cash are to be spent supporting government industrial policy and some non-BBC services. Which, incidentally, leaves the trust's previous "red line" – that top-slicing would break the critical line of accountability between licence payers and the BBC – in shreds.

In any event the direction of travel is clear. The BBC's room for manoeuvre – in effect its autonomy and independence – is being further constrained with every new licence fee deal. You might even argue that the licence fee itself, so long regarded as the cornerstone of the BBC's independence, is in danger of turning into the opposite.

A new consensus about the BBC is urgently needed – about its purposes, its scope, its funding, its governance and, most importantly, its autonomy and independence. These are the key questions facing whoever takes over from Sir Michael Lyons. And whatever it is, it most certainly is not business as usual.