License To Kill?: The BBC's Uncertain Future

In a survey to licence payers issued in March ahead of its ninth charter review, the BBC asked respondents some fundamental questions. What type of organisation should the BBC be? What should the BBC provide? What should the BBC stand for?

They are key questions at a time when the scale and scope of the services the broadcaster offers, the way it is regulated and funded, the fairness of its licence burden on those in financial hardship, its role in a global war for words and truth, and even its own journalistic integrity, are all up for debate as never before.

The current BBC charter ends on 31 December 2027. The decision-making process around what comes next will be a chance for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to take on some of these problems and prepare the BBC for the next decade.

Two months after taking office, the new Secretary of State at DCMS Lisa Nandy, speaking at the RTS London Convention, addressed the looming BBC renewal. The task of the next renewal was no less, she said, than to ensure that the BBC “doesn’t just survive but thrives for decades to come”.

It marked a significant public change in relations between the government and the broadcaster, in comparison with years gone by.

As a senior BBC source puts it to The House: “One of the tragedies of the BBC is that politicians always approach it as a problem. It may not be perfect but it’s an absolutely incredible asset for the country that any other nation would kill for.”

Rather than leaning into an institution that could create jobs and growth, and that is at the centre of a “world-class” industry, the source argues, the last Conservative government saw a nadir in relations.

“During the 2016 charter renewal, there was a lot of lobbying around at the time to clip the BBC’s wings in various ways,” they add. “Political attitudes in the past have been: the BBC is this big beast – is it too big? Is it causing harm in the market? And I think you’ll still find people who advocate that argument.”

Indeed there are. In a major speech in May, BBC director-general Tim Davie admitted that domestically the BBC already faces a “trust crisis that, without intervention, threatens us all”. It’s easier to list the political and campaigning groups that openly profess mistrust, and even outright battle lines, against BBC News than those whose trust it retains.

Nigel Farage appears to be among them. Last summer, the Reform leader claimed on X: “Our state broadcaster has behaved like a political actor throughout this election”. He pledged that Reform would be “campaigning vigorously to abolish the licence fee”.

Its critics aside, the BBC is also fighting to tell its stories in a more complex mediascape than ever before. Since the last charter renewal in 2016, an incalculable number of alternative disruptor platforms, streaming giants and podcasters have entered and altered the area for good. It has hastened in an era of acute distrust in traditional, “legacy” news outlets, and institutions generally.

There is also no doubt that global powers are seeking to control the media, and truth, in unprecedented ways. Take the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán’s advice to the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022, that the way to secure power was to “have your own media”. Or the summoning of the bosses of NPR and PBS in March to a congressional subcommittee meeting, to be excoriated as the managers of “radical left-wing echo chambers” by Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Speaking in October 2024, Davie identified vast sums of money being invested by “malign powers, frankly – Russia, China, others” into “media, bordering into pure propaganda”, as a threat to world safety, which the BBC aims to counter.

John Shield, who until the end of May was director of communications at the BBC, says a “big global battle for ideas, for information, for cultural relevance” is being fought.

“If you care about western values then you want an organisation of scale and weight in there,” he says. “When you’ve got huge global market players from the USA, China, you could argue that the BBC is something you should be investing in.”

So, the BBC has multiple questions to answer and problems to face down, all at once. Can a charter renewal possibly hope to address all of them?

Tom Chivers, research associate at Goldsmiths and campaign co-ordinator at the Media Reform Coalition, whose PhD covered the 2015-17 Charter Renewal, is in no doubt that it had better address them, or leave the BBC with an existential threat.

“There’s a positive side of a review,” he says, “which is to do something transformative with the BBC, and then there’s the threat the government faces if you don’t take that transformative opportunity.

“We can all see what’s coming down the track from Elon Musk, tech giants, Reform, from a huge base of people who are completely opposed to and detached from the BBC. They’ve got to address these deep problems.”

Deep problems which the government and the BBC have two years to fix. The renewal process used to be a murky affair, hashed out between a boys’ club of BBC directors and ministers behind closed doors. Those days are over, albeit not a distant memory – Chivers says a truly meaningful renewal process “has only really existed since 2006”.

For many licence fee payers, the biggest point of contention isn’t over the BBC’s place in the world, nor about trust, but simply how much that licence costs, and whether it’s worth the money.

The fragmentation of the BBC’s distribution model has inevitably led to more piecemeal consumption by licence fee payers. To some, the expansion and diversification of services means better value for licence fee money. To others, the BBC funding model has become an outmoded and punitive tax against those living in hardship, and those who only access a small section of the overall offering.

Not least because with some £700m of savings demanded by governments over the past five years, swathes of local and regional programming have been dropped, leaving towns and cities with a shrinking offer of unique, place-specific content. The BBC may be a slick, multi-platform, multi-device media giant, but there are plenty of listeners and viewers who don’t care much for podcasts and streaming. Are they still in the corporation’s thoughts?

The National Union of Journalists (NUJ)’s Kevin Stanley, who represents staff within the BBC’s Nations and Regions division, says: “It’s been sad to see the huge cuts to linear broadcasting, notably in BBC Local Radio. The NUJ believes there is no substitute for boots-on-the-ground journalism; reporters who live and breathe their local communities. That’s where the real stories come from.

“It raises a legitimate question about what the BBC actually wants to be.”

The question isn’t a new one – the licence fee and what it delivers has been a sore point, and a bargaining chip, for decades. But now, the senior BBC source says, the stakes have gone up, as has the pressure. If the BBC is going to restore trust, it could start there.

The source says: “I think that there will inevitably be a debate about whether the licence fee should be more progressive. There’s a debate about whether lower incomes should pay less. Things like that are absolutely worth exploring.

“The BBC would resist any move towards full commercialisation or subscription models. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t any room for reform on funding. Could there be a progressive alternative? Are there ways to support lower-income households, while preserving the universal ethos? The charter renewal will re-evaluate that.”

But Chivers – who advocates a revolutionised, mutual funding model – believes a simple re-evaluation isn’t enough at this juncture. He says something far more fundamental must be on the table.

“I would hope that Lisa Nandy and the government see that this isn’t just a standard technocratic debate about moving the levers about how much or how little the BBC should do, how much or how little funding it should have, how much it should compete with Netflix, how much funding the world service should have, etc,” he says.

“This is actually a debate that goes to the core of so many problems, around political disaffection, the decline of trust in institutions and in media and journalism especially.

“The charter review is an opportunity to really look in detail at what can be done about all these crises.”

The senior BBC source urges the government not to shirk from difficult decisions: “If, for example, the right thing to do is to reform the licence fee, politicians [could] come to it too late and say, ‘This is too hard, let’s just carry on as we are.’

“That’s not the BBC escaping a piece of difficult reform, it’s escaping an opportunity to do something that would be good for the BBC but, more importantly, good for the public.”

Multiple crises, all at once. And two years to face them. It’s an invidious position for any organisation to be in, let alone a corporation that, by its own heavy reckoning, aims to be a bulwark against huge, “malign” global forces in the years and decades to come.

A DCMS spokesperson said: “The BBC is a vital national institution and we want to ensure it doesn’t just survive but thrives in the decades to come.

“The Culture Secretary has been clear that the upcoming charter review will consider a wide range of issues, ensuring the BBC continues to operate sustainably. We will provide more details about charter review plans in due course.”

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