The BBC

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Last Thursday Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell announced that the perennial bug-bear of penny-pinching students everywhere, the television licence-fee, would, as expected, fail to rise in line with the standard rate of inflation over the next decade. Dashing the hopes of the corporation’s director-general Mark Thompson, the unions and even the minister herself, this treasury-imposed cap might well threaten BBC content and jobs. But in no developed country bar Germany does the government spend a higher proportion of GDP on broadcasting, and the BBC will still have over £20 billion to spend over the next six years. In this 21st century world of ever-faster internet and multi-channel television, is there really a case for the BBC’s model of licence-fee-funded public-service broadcasting?

The BBC is easy to criticise but impossible to replace. A blanket licence-fee covering all who own a television effectively subsidises the viewing habits of the more privileged sections of society; a disproportionate number of people who tune in to the BBC are elderly, wealthy and white. Public funding allows it to provide television, radio and web-based content free, squeezing commercial stations and online newspapers. The government will begin considering possible alternatives to the licence fee early next decade, and next time the BBC applies for a renewal of its royal charter in 2016 it may find the case for a subscription based service hard to resist.

But the very fact of its near universality makes the BBC a unique institution. Headline figures of audience share, in which all the terrestrial channels have been in freefall over the past decade, are misleading. Few institutions can claim that over 90% of the UK population uses its services every week. 37% of all British respondents to a Media Centre Poll last year spontaneously mentioned the BBC as their most trusted specific news source, four times as many as its nearest competitor. In an era when national narratives are thin on the ground, a brand which engenders such respect is not to be lightly thrown away. On the international stage, we saw last week how quickly Britain’s national reputation can be tarnished by its broadcasting with the Big Brother racism row, but the BBC remains an unparalleled means of enhancing the country’s standing abroad. Its website, currently ranked as the 15th most popular English language site in the world by online traffic monitor Alexa, is in many ways now taking the baton from its venerable World Service in spreading a British message across the globe.

Both global and domestic media environments will evolve rapidly over the next decade, and the BBC’s place within in them in 2016 is hard to predict. But for now, at least, the license-fee remains the surest way of maintaining the quality and independence of the greatest national institution in Britain. Forking out £135.50 for a television licence, as we will from 1 April, may hurt the pocket, but it is a small price to pay for the BBC as we know it, even if its bosses will complain they wanted more.