Back in December, DCMS officially launched the process of renewing the BBC’s Royal Charter, with the publication of a Green Paper detailing the Government’s areas of focus for BBC reform – along with a public consultation inviting the public’s responses to these proposals.

The Charter review is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to debate the BBC’s future. Regrettably, the Government’s vision for the BBC’s next Royal Charter proposes many concerning and dangerous changes.

The Paper’s ideas around commercialising the BBC’s funding model, its seeming abandonment of ‘universality’ as the BBC’s guiding mission, and its lack of commitment to democratic accountability, would each undermine the BBC’s place and purpose as a public media organisation. Taken together, they represent a blueprint for the permanent decline of the BBC.

This piece details the Media Reform Coalition’s analysis of the Government’s Green Paper and consultation. We want to ensure this once-in-a-generation debate on the BBC’s future involves as wide a range of voices as possible, and is not restricted to just a narrow group of industry interests and private negotiations between Ministers, the BBC and dominant commercial players.

If you would like to collaborate with the MRC as part of our campaigning on BBC Charter review, please get in touch.

The public consultation: a disappointing tick-box exercise

The BBC Charter review is the most important decision about the UK’s media in over a decade. It follows that the British public – who fund the BBC, use its services and whose lives are shaped (for better or worse) by what the BBC creates – deserve a direct role in debating and deciding what kind of BBC we want, how it is organised and what its purposes should be. The Government’s public consultation on BBC Charter renewal, however, is little more than an online survey. It squashes the public’s role in shaping the future of the BBC into 32 tick-box questions, many of which are poorly designed, expecting expert knowledge to understand and are therefore unlikely to produce useful findings on the public’s views.

Some of the questions trivialise vital debates on BBC reform. Question 1 asks simplistically if respondents “agree or disagree that the BBC’s current Mission and Public Purpose should remain the same?” – with no opportunity for respondents to evaluate the Mission and each Purpose individually, offer thoughts on how well the Public Purposes function, or to specify what they would like to keep or change.

Other questions present answers in leading language that negates the public’s opportunity to reject or challenge the Government’s apparent preferences for reform. Question 27 asks if the TV licence fee “should be reformed to support the BBC’s long term sustainability“, with none of the answers (or any of the other questions) allowing respondents to separate the urgent question of reforming the licence fee from the broader topic of the BBC’s financial sustainability.

Along with over-simplified “agree or disagree” framing, the consultation also features ‘shopping list’ questions. These present numerous non-exclusive and positive-sounding options for BBC reform, which would be difficult for anyone to disagree with. There is no further explanation of how these reforms would work – information that might help deliver richer and more informative responses. For example, the proposals in Question 8, on “options aiming to enhance the BBC’s accountability”, are unlikely to draw furious public opposition. Yet there are certainly widely contrasting public views on (and limited public understanding of) what it means in practice to e.g. change the structure of the Board, enhance parliamentary scrutiny of the BBC, or to require the BBC to “hear regional perspectives”. The questionnaire allows just a 200 word free-text box for more detailed contributions – suggesting that Government is not interested in further public discussion on these major matters of governance, independence and accountability

The Government’s choice to launch a 12-week consultation in the middle of December – days before many will take time off for the Christmas holidays – shows a lack of concern for the importance and value of public participation in policymaking, which undermines the democratic quality of any potential outcomes. The Government’s terms of reference suggests that this rushed and confusing survey will be the only opportunity for the general public to contribute to Charter review, before Ministers proceed with opaque ‘stakeholder engagement’ and behind-closed-doors negotiations that typify so much media policymaking.

As it stands, the consultation does not lessen the current risks to the essential democratic legitimacy of the BBC, with the views and desires of the BBC’s most vital stakeholders – the British public and licence fee payers – reduced to a handful of percentage figures from a survey that is highly unlikely to deliver meaningful impact.

Licence fee ‘reform’: abandoning universal public service

The BBC faces extreme financial pressures that constrain its ability to provide a universal public service. These have been driven primarily by successive government freezes and below-inflation increases in the value of the licence fee, which have created a 40% real-terms cut to the BBC’s public income since 2010 – resulting in devastating reductions and closures of core BBC services.

Yet in its Green Paper the Government claims “the BBC receives a level of public funding commensurate with its role” (pg. 63), which will come as a surprise to audiences who have seen the BBC cut 1,000 hours of programming, cut hundreds of jobs from its news services & trashed its hugely popular local radio network.

The licence fee as a funding model is deeply unpopular, outdated and unfair to the poorest households, and it allows the government to attack and pressure the BBC through unilateral control of its public funding – as former Chancellor and axeman-in-chief George Osborne coyly admitted to The Times (£): “the Chancellor can basically boss the BBC around on its finances because the government sets the licence fee.”

Despite the clear case for radical reform to restore the BBC’s public funding, the Green Paper presents a strangely complacent view of the future of the licence fee. The Green Paper (pg. 71) describes the licence fee as a “tried and tested” model, without elaboration or justification, and categorically rules out replacing it with any other forms of public funding – such as general taxation, a levy on streaming services or a universal household charge as supported by the MRC, the Voice of the Listener and Viewer and the Citizens’ Forum for Public Service Media. The Green Paper does not raise the question of ending the Government’s unaccountable and unjustifiable control over setting the licence fee, despite frequent mentions of a desire to “strengthen and uphold the BBC’s independence”.

Where the government proposes changes to how the licence fee is collected, or new concessions and discounts that might support poorer households in contributing, these are framed entirely as opportunities to continue reducing the BBC’s overall level of funding. The Green Paper suggests that the Government’s overarching policy on BBC funding is heavily focussed on increasing commercial sources of revenue; it includes only glancing thoughts of how this would unavoidably limit the BBC’s capacity to provide a universal public service to meet the needs and interests of all audiences.

Public funding for the BBC requires radical reform, especially reforms that create a more direct and democratic link between the public’s ownership of the BBC and the services it produces. However, at its core the Green Paper represents a misguided approach to this central question, and a dangerous abdication of the Government’s responsibility to establish a model for the BBC’s public funding that would form the basis of a universal, democratic and genuinely independent national public service.

Commercial reforms: a point of no return

Throughout the Green Paper, increasing the BBC’s commercial revenue is presented as a natural solution to financing the BBC in the challenging modern media economy, scarcely deserving of discussion. It is, however, an ideological belief rather than an inevitability.

It is true, as the Green Paper details, that the share of total BBC income derived from commercial sources has risen markedly, from 22% in 2015/16 to 35% in 2024/25.

But this is not because of any uniquely commercial success story of BBC Studios, the production and distribution arm created by the last Royal Charter settlement in 2017. Rather, it is a consequence of 15 years of stagnated public income following government attacks on the licence fee, which have forced the BBC to depend on commercial revenues while still cutting back its public services.

The false notion that increased commercial revenues would be “reinvested” in public services, to make up the public funding shortfall, does not stand up to reality. The current annual ‘dividend’ of just £120m going from BBC Studios to the BBC’s core public services doesn’t even touch the sides in reversing the annual loss in public income from licence fee freezes.

The Green Paper’s proposals for “growing BBC Studios” (pgs. 67-8), and thus making the BBC even more dependent on commercial income, suggests the Government either doesn’t understand – or isn’t concerned by – how commercial models are entirely at odds with the BBC’s mission as a universal public broadcaster. Commercial revenues require serving the largest or most profitable audiences, or selling the BBC’s production services and content rights (IP) to private companies. The basic notion that content commissioned for the BBC, and paid for by licence fee payers, belongs to the public is absent from the Green Paper.

This belief in an inevitably more commercial BBC is also shown in the Green Paper’s insistence that allowing advertising on the BBC – which has never featured adverts on any of its public services for over a century – is a golden opportunity for securing its future funding. Here, the Paper’s own evidence completely undermines its case. It claims that limited or even full advertising on BBC services could “potentially generate significant revenue”, while simultaneously noting that commercial broadcasters’ revenues from TV advertising are in terminal decline. Non-linear advertising through digital platforms is also highly unlikely to supplement, let alone replace, the BBC’s public income as a foundation of BBC funding, given how this market is dominated by the online search and display monopolies run by Meta and Google.

Proposals to create a two-tiered BBC, through the introduction of pay-walls or subscription for “more commercially viable TV content” (pg. 70), are grounded in a decades-old ideological assault on the principles of public media; to inform, educate and entertain all audiences. These are debates that were rehashed and exhausted 10 years ago, when the Conservative government (that had otherwise been openly hostile towards the BBC) reluctantly conceded that providing free-to-air popular programming was an essential part of the BBC’s mission to be universal.

This time around, the Green Paper manages little more than a nod at the many practical problems and deeper questions of principle that come with abandoning a universal free-to-air service. For example, the Paper casually suggests that some programmes or services might be locked behind a pay-wall “if the BBC chose to do so“, placing the blame for audiences losing access to their favourite programmes squarely on the BBC itself. Then it notes that the introduction of pay-walls or subscription would bring “a reduction in the level of the licence fee to reflect the BBC’s narrower TV remit” – creating a sinister double-bind where the BBC has less public money to make content, forcing it to commercialise a larger share of valued free-to-air content, in turn reducing the BBC’s overall public service and motivating even further reductions in the licence fee.

None of these scenarios would “support the BBC to thrive and deliver against its public service obligations”, as the Green Paper claims is the Government’s ambition. Rather they would shatter the foundational compact between the BBC and the public that funds it, creating a point-of-no-return for guaranteed public investment in universal services, and force the BBC to further reduce the range and diversity of services it can provide free-to-air for the whole UK.

Tom Chivers is the Vice Chair of the Media Reform Coalition.  This post originally appeared on the Media Reform Coalition website and is reproduced with permission and thanks.