Time to wean the junkie BBC off its tax habit
March 11th 2008
Today Ed Richards, chief executive of the broadcasting regulator Ofcom, will deliver a speech on his planned review of public service broadcasting to the Royal Television Society.
The BBC’s first director-general, John Reith, famously defined the mission of PSB as “to inform, educate and entertain”. A lot has changed since Reith wrote those words, but not much has moved on in British television, which pretends to be edgy and forward looking while clinging to a system and a way of thinking that, in its essentials, Reith would have recognised.
What are those essentials? A belief that substantial state intervention in the television market is necessary; the maintenance of a specialised tax to fund it; a stubborn refusal to acknowledge in policymaking the contribution made by non-PSB broadcasters; producer capture; and, worst of all, a rampant and condescending paternalism.
Nationalisation may have triggered an agitated debate when it came to Northern Rock, but in broadcasting it elicits no more than a shrug of the shoulders. In the past year the tax funded BBC has acquired a commercial publisher of travel guides (lonely Planet) while the state-owned Channel 4 grabbed 50 per cent of Emap’s music television channels.
That there are defenders at all for the licence fee, an aggressively policed and regressive tax, is one of the wonders of British life. A third of households in the UK consume less than five hours of BBC broadcast content each week, yet pay as much as those who listen religiously to John Humphrys and adore David Attenborough.
It is no longer good enough to say that the licence fee continues because it insulates the BBC from political interference, or that all other opinions are worse. The government already determines the level of BBC funding by setting the licence fee. It should ignore the squeals of those who benefit from this patent unfairness and announce that the licence fee will end - sooner rather than later. If the state wants a broadcasting arm, it should be paid for from taxes, advertising, subscription or a combination of them all.
But the funding issue is a technicality compared with the policymaking blindness that has afflicted TV since the arrival of satellite and cable companies. These offer hundreds of channels and range of programming that Reith would have found inconceivable.
Successive culture ministers, and Ofcom itself, have politely acknowledged the contribution of a sector now worth (in annual revenue terms) £5bn and broadcasting 14,000 hours per month of public service content - and carried on as if it did not exist.
Ofcom’s challenge is to develop a vision driven by the interests of consumers - and not by broadcasters, who generally shout the loudest. In doing so it should escape from the endemic paternalism that has driven PSB since it started: the belief that unless viewers and listeners are “educated” to watch certain types of approved programming, Gresham’s law will apply and the bad will drive out the good.
The explosion of choice in past decades has conclusively demonstrated that competition brings you more of absolutely everything, including public service content: more news, more reality, more arts, more game shows, more documentaries, more cookery, more quizzes, more sport, more films and so on. People do not all choose the things that the establishment likes, but the right to choose is a socially positive development. Ofcom should encourage more competition and resolutely turn away from pleas for the subsidy - including those from channel 4.
In taking a radical approach, Ofcom would also save the BBC from itself. The corporation clings to the licence fee system. But in doing so it condemns itself to making hours of programming that is indistinguishable from material on commercial channels in order to justify its universal tax. That is a waste of creative talent that should be focused on providing material the market cannot or will not provide but that society values. And when it tries, the BBC is magnificent at doing just that.
Every time the BBC promises - in the course of a licence fee bid, typically - to boost public service content or stop buying US imports, its good intentions are swiftly undermined by the need to chase ratings. It is time to wean the junkie off its tax habit and give the BBC back its real mission.
Ofcom should start that process.