Welcome to this meeting of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Today is the opening of our oral evidence on the BBC royal charter review. First up we are joined by James Graham and Marina Hyde, both of whom have views—that is what we want to hear—on the BBC, where we go and its future. James is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. His works include “Quiz”, “Sherwood” and “This House”—which sometimes gives slightly uncomfortable commentary on the Whips Office here in this building. His play “Dear England” about the England men’s football team, which I absolutely love, will be coming to our screens on the BBC very soon. Marina is an award-winning Guardian journalist and podcaster who hosts the hugely popular “The Rest is Entertainment” podcast. It regularly discusses the state of British TV and media in the UK and, like us, has been covering a lot of the ups and downs of the BBC over recent years, and had a long-form interview with Tim Davie on his departure as BBC chief executive. Thank you both very much for joining us today. Before we begin, do any Committee members have any interests to declare?

I am chair of the APPG for the BBC.

Ah! Very good; thank you.

I am an ex-BBC employee from a long time ago—the last century.

Thank you, Rupa. I am going to kick off with the questions, starting with Marina. Given all that we know about the changing media habits and the dominance of global platforms, do you think there is still a place for a publicly funded BBC, and do we still really need public service TV and radio?

Yes. However, before we begin, I would also like to declare an interest in that my husband works at the BBC. He is director of distribution and business development. People often say that if the BBC did not exist, you would never invent it now. However, I think that, now more than ever, it is a massive anchor in our shared mainstream culture. If you look around the world, where the loss of mainstream culture across all sorts of different societies is causing these huge fracturings and there is great polarisation, then to me it is extraordinary that we have something that reaches 90% of people in this country every single month. Some 60% of people frequently check the news. There is nothing else like that; in something like the US news market, nothing gets above 25% and the views on those organisations are incredibly polarised. When you go around the world—and you will know this as well, James—they envy it, as a soft power instrument but also as a creative and conceptual idea. The BBC is also a huge part of why we have the greatest creative economy in the world—so it’s a yes.

It’s a yes from you. James, what do you think?

I’m afraid I am going to have to agree, which is going to be really boring.

That is okay. You are allowed to.

Coming at this as a creative and writer, I never underestimate the power and importance of being able to tell stories about yourself to yourself and to others so that they can better know you. I come from a class and region in the UK that is often under-represented in terms of access to arts, culture and media, and I think the east midlands region also still ranks almost the lowest in terms of TV production, film and general culture making. I am part of the proud 8% of people—a furiously low 8% of people—who work in the TV and film industry who come from a working-class, state-educated background. Without state subsidy and investment in arts and culture, training and investment—whether that be theatre, but also the BBC and its role in the wider cultural ecology that supports our cultural ecosystem’s pipeline—I do not think I would have the privilege of sitting in front of you and speaking today. I would not be here had it not been for a culture free of commercial pressures, appealing to your shareholders and turning a profit, but that instead gets to encourage and find forgotten voices from forgotten regions and trains and empowers them and gets them to tell their stories. That system means that I am hopefully now on my way to repaying that investment from the state in terms of the plays that I have going to Broadway and the film production I have just recently brought to the UK with American and foreign investment. That is my repayment for the investment in me as an artist, because of this culture of state subsidy.

Marina, we often talk about “The Traitors” and its success as being real evidence of the fact that the BBC can still reach a really large audience and bring people together through scheduled programming in a way that others cannot. Do you believe that to be true? Is the BBC still able to do things that other platforms or streamers cannot?

Yes. “The Traitors” is a great example of those kinds of big live things where people feel that they have to watch it and they have to watch it linear. Funnily enough, 80% of BBC consumption is still done on linear, which people do not often realise. It is interesting when you look at the streamers who have tried to disrupt that and seeing how much more they are trying to become like it again. Having disrupted the model by dropping everything at once—dropping all your episodes at once—and creating binge, Netflix is now trying to get back into parcelling out the release of things because it creates a much bigger cultural conversation. You want the memes and podcasts about individual episodes. You also want the press coverage and marketing, and you want to be in that cultural conversation all the time. You can see what the BBC delivers. When Netflix was still in the running to buy Warner, Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, was doing a huge round of broadcast interviews, and he said, “Remember that in all these years that we have been successful in the UK, “Adolescence” is only the second time that we have ever broken into the top 50 of broadcast ratings.” Broadcast television dominates TV in the UK. It’s interesting, I am not quite sure how he is measuring that, but his perception is that the PSBs provide these big moments, and it is still hard for them to get in. The iPlayer grew faster than Netflix in the last quarter, I think, so it is a misconception. Because of the purchase that things have on the cultural conversation, we may feel that “Stranger Things” the final was the biggest thing in the whole world. It was enormous globally, because Netflix is a global channel, but actually “The Night Manager” season 2 did massively better than that. It didn’t have a huge purchase on the cultural conversation in the same way, although we talked about it all the time and it was brilliant.

And those water cooler conversations are still an important part of British life and community.

Absolutely. Yesterday, I got to contribute to the launch of the National Conversation, which is a non-governmental initiative, but is run out of the Independent Committee on Community and Cohesion. We all recognise and understand why social cohesion in this country is suffering, given the hollowing out of our communities and the fragmentation and atomisation of us as people, as digital puts us into these ever-narrowing silos. None of us is going to sit here pretending that there are not modern pressures on the very idea of a public service broadcaster that still values these linear television experiences, but all the evidence suggests that these cultural touch moments are important. It could be the world cup that we are about to watch—for some reason, even though I could watch it on my phone or in my house, I am absolutely going to go to a pub and watch it on a less good television and have to queue to go the toilet. There is a human need for belonging and human connectivity, and those experiences are getting ever less. These moments where you share a story or share a moment—a royal wedding, a world cup, a “Traitors” final—unite us. We are only the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. It is a best-of-all-worlds scenario at the moment, which is why I find it frustrating that we do not celebrate that. I love my streamers, both as an audience member and as a writer who gets commissioned by these majority-American streamers to write work and try to tell British stories. But we should be under no illusion: those American-funded streamers, as brilliant as they are—they create really high-quality, incredibly well-authored work—are vulnerable to changing historical and global forces. A different CEO at the tech company or a different President in that country can change the climate. The investment that you think will be consistent for the next 10, 15 or 20 years can get withdrawn and, without the blanket or safety net of the BBC, you suddenly lose your capacity to produce this television and tell British stories about British people on a scale that reaches not just us, but people globally.

That is really important. Marina, before I pass on to one of my colleagues, can I just talk to you a bit about radio? Obviously, you present a very successful podcast. With the rise of podcasting and internet audio, can and should the BBC continue with the range of radio output that it has at the moment?

That is an interesting question. Rather like with TV—linear TV will decline and will find an equilibrium with streaming—an equilibrium will be found in live radio. My feeling is that podcasts have exploded, and we can see that people like them. As we will probably end up saying quite a few times, there is no particular reason why public service content has to be delivered in one-hour TV shows, 30-minute radio shows or whatever it is. There is no particular reason why it cannot be long-form podcast series, short-form video or whatever it is. To some degree, you have to go where the audience is. Audiences are clearly going that way, and maybe there is an argument for allocating more funding to podcasts and less to linear radio. You would probably have to ask people with better data from inside when they come before you, as I am sure they will.

You are kicking off our inquiry today, but we have quite a few sessions over the summer. It is interesting to get your thoughts so that we have a few things in mind as we get more of our sessions under way.

It is a shame that the car manufacturers successfully lobbied to be kept out of the Media Act. As a result, linear radio is very hard to find in all new cars. That is a shame because once things become difficult to find, there is a knock-on effect on everything. Long term, that even affects our democracy, if people are not hearing little bits of news on the hour, or whatever it is. It is difficult in cars, which is a shame.

That is absolutely right; you have to know what you are looking for and go searching for it.

James, you spoke about public service broadcasters and the need to tell more British stories so that people can see themselves in productions. Does that happen enough?

Not quite, but we are very good at it compared with other nations and certainty compared with America. Obviously, the point of a public service broadcaster, whether that be the BBC or any public service broadcaster, is that, as part of the civic bargain of receiving taxpayers’ money, they have both a moral and legal obligation to create productions outside of the M25. The majority of them do. You can see that in examples such as “Blue Lights”, which is a television drama that is incredibly popular across the country. It is filmed in Northern Ireland. I do not know what the budget was, but the success of that generated £20 billion of income that was re-invested in Northern Ireland’s economy. That is more than the budget to make the show. Not only does that have a creative power, but it allows people to see and hear themselves in television dramas and stories at a time when most of us as citizens feel voiceless or lack agency in our lives. I have never underestimated the power of seeing yourself on stage, screen or in cinema. I remember the feeling, as a young kid growing up in a world where I did not have access to much live culture, of sitting and watching BBC TV dramas in the golden heyday of the ‘90s, when you think of shows like “Cracker”, “Our Friends in the North” and Alan Bleasdale’s “Boys from the Blackstuff” where you see and hear voices that sound like you expressing experiences that you recognise. You feel a greater part of a continuum of human existence. You feel a greater part of a national story. We can all recognise that those things that knit us together as a national identity are suffering. It was my great pleasure to be able to write “Sherwood”, which was a TV drama for the BBC. I know in my heart of hearts—I keep saying it, because I do not want them to un-commission me—that no other broadcaster, including the American streamers, would have commissioned a drama set in the east midlands about the ongoing wounds of the miners’ strike in post-industrialised society. Nor would the BBC have put any pressure on me—which they didn’t—not to allow voices and stories and themes that really mattered to me in talking about the unique experience of Nottinghamshire miners and how their struggle was different to other parts of the country during the miners’ strike. Being able to give voice to that story was a great honour for me. However, there were challenges. There is no production base in the east midlands, so we had to film the majority of it in Manchester and the wider north-west. I hope that something like that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, where you create an appetite for stories in particularly under-represented regions. You can then find training opportunities for people in those regions and may be able to create a base. It is a mixed bag. Without public service broadcasting we would not get those lights on these communities because international streamers are more interested in telling wide-appeal stories rather than idiosyncratic ones. I am not going to sit here and pretend that it is perfect. There are under-represented regions and, certainly when it comes to class, we are nowhere even close to getting representation in that area.

So there is risk aversion and, as you just touched on, sometimes a need to try and tell wider stories. Why are PSBs not telling British stories enough, and how do we change that? You spoke about the moral and legal knitting together. I subscribe to all of that. How do we get there?

I think they are. They are certainly telling more and the BBC still, to this day, is the single biggest producer of UK content in this country. They tell a wide range of stories, but I just think there are problems in the pipeline: how do you find these under-represented voices? If people go to a school where, because of the changes in the curriculum—I understand why—arts, drama and music are not at the core of that curriculum, then how do they develop the skills or even the psychological belief—break through that psychological barrier—to believe that they could be a storyteller? How would they even know the huge range of jobs that exist in television production? We always think of actors, writers and directors, but there are electricians, grips, DOPs, production designers, make-up artists and other huge jobs, and it is sometimes very hard to communicate to people outside of urban centres that those jobs are available. Why I value and love the BBC—they should go further in this, of course—is their local presence in communities. I remember seeing the BBC in the middle of Nottingham whenever I would go into town, like a community hub or a church. You would go, “There it is, that’s my local BBC. They’re reporting on my district council, they’re investing in local stories, and I get to phone them in the drive-through show and talk about the potholes in that particular road.” I think they do penetrate on a local level and provide local training. In Manchester yesterday, it was a thrill to go up to Salford MediaCity: every young researcher and intern who worked with me there had a thick north-west accent. That’s great, but without public service broadcasting, there is no incentive for Paramount+ to invest in Scotland or for Disney to cover your local district council meetings—they are just not going to do it.

What was the response in Nottinghamshire, around Sherwood? You spoke about being on the radio. Can you articulate that more? Are there murals?

Of me? Not yet, but I would obviously advocate for them if anyone wants to pay for one. It was hard. When you are not used to TV production units turning up and asking to tell a real-life story about real-life trauma, there is possibly an assumption that it is going to be exploitative or sensationalist. I was asked the question a lot, “Why are you doing this? Why can’t you let sleeping dogs lie?” “Sherwood” was about the wounds between us, and people understandably often wanted to bury them. I would always advocate for the catharsis benefit of storytelling in helping us to look at difficult issues. It was difficult, and I kept trying to generate in-person community meetings—town hall meetings in public spaces—to get people to talk to me about their concerns so that we could work together, but most of those conversations happened online because people did not have those public spaces any more or did not turn up to them. I had to plunge into the local Facebook group to answer questions about why I was doing this show. That was not immediately a very easy place to be, but we got to explain our cause through open dialogue and conversation, and I think we won people over in the end. To Marina’s point, we did not want to upload the drama all in one go. We split it across several weeks, which meant I could have constant conversations every week on BBC Radio Nottingham. I turned up every Monday morning on the breakfast show to talk about the previous night’s episode, take questions and use drama as a means of generating discourse and interrogating difficult subject matters about social cohesion and the wounds of deindustrialisation.

On that point, during your journey of trying to engage with the community, did you feel more pressure or responsibility in terms of the creative gift you have, the community wanting to trust you, and your wanting to represent them?

Yes, huge. Imposter syndrome kicks in pretty quickly: “How can I represent an entire community’s views?”. Again, to pay credit to the BBC, had this been a commercial movie or had I been doing it on YouTube, there would not have been the infrastructure or the support that came from the many departments of the BBC, such as EdPol, that have a responsibility to make sure that you are telling the story responsibly. I got kids from my local comprehensive school to come on set for in-person Q&As so that they could have that access. There was no pressure from the BBC, but I do not think it would have been a priority if it was not public service broadcasting. We made sure that the original premiere was in Nottingham, rather than London. When we launch our series every year, we have a green carpet running through Nottingham to the Broadway cinema, where Shane Meadows launches all his dramas. That is so people can be invited to it, but also so that they can see the BBC in their community. The opportunities are there to do that, but they are not quite being met. Maybe we can talk about this later, but I do not know why they do not celebrate the joy of watching “The Traitors” live by having millions of franchises spread across libraries and social clubs across the country where people can gather in the same space and watch the same thing together rather than in their homes. That could be a way of making the BBC feel like part of the social infrastructure of communities.

Yes, although northern does not mean working class, does it?

This is a difficult area of representation. Other areas of under-representation can often be more visible—not always, but when they are not there, you see that they are not there. The problem is that we don’t really have a definition of “working class.” Very loosely, the one we lean into is, “What did your parents do when you were 14 years old?” That is not a flawless definition. I was glad to be able to speak about this at the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh TV festival a couple of years ago, but the problem I found was with the misperception of class as a purely financial and economic status. I reject that entirely. It is also a cultural status: it is about rituals, behaviours and story, and about the legacy of the place and family you come from. Now that I have elevated myself from the economic status of my parents, I feel shame in that, so I no longer use the words “I am working class”; I say, “I am from a working-class background.” I cannot think of any other identifying characteristic that you have to give up later in life. You do not become less Catholic or less gay as you get older. Because of that definition, I feel that I have to say I am less working class, and I get why. It is a problem of definition, and I think broadcasters are genuinely trying to fix it. They are trying to find those under-represented working-class voices and tell those stories. It is a problem of definition, and I do not necessarily know how you solve that. We have diversity and inclusion forms, and increasingly you have to take it on trust that people are from the backgrounds that they say they are. When you do not see that represented in productions and on screens, it is not rocket science to go out and find those voices.

The BBC still does a huge amount more than any streamer in terms of training—I think it spent £12 million on training last year. It is still about how you penetrate local communities. Obviously, the licence fee is under a great amount of pressure, and I would hate to take anything away from programming budgets. The BBC’s drama programming budget is under strain, and there probably will have to be cuts. I worry about that, because I think it becomes a self-fulfilling cycle where you are making cuts to the thing that you are best at and most admired for in the world because of what I consider to be unnecessary funding pressures. Embedding yourself in local communities, and particularly in the regions, is the only way to access under-represented talent, particularly working-class talent. It is about establishing your brand relationship with younger people in schools, on social media platforms and on YouTube to raise awareness and pride in the people’s public service broadcaster, and getting young people to take pride in having a broadcaster that belongs to them, that they are an equal stakeholder in and that is accountable to them. That psychological, cultural stuff might excite and encourage a younger generation to take more interest in getting that training.

I have one thing I would add, which is that the nature of the work is often freelance and precarious, particularly all those backstage jobs, as it were, to use a catch-all term. Actually, one of the things that the BBC does best is that it is able to provide ongoing contracts, which is harder for other productions because they get going, something lasts for, say, three months and then it is finished. If you do not have the bank of mum and dad, it is incredibly precarious. How are you supposed to manage until the next one comes along? Permanent positions are a huge part of that, and the BBC is certainly able to offer more than anyone else on that front, although much more can always be done.

That is a great point, and I go back to the idea of risk. If you are a commercial streamer, you view risk slightly differently. Understandably, it is about reaching the largest international audience to get the largest number of eyeballs. I celebrate this—it sounds like a bad thing—but in this country, both in our arts and theatre sector and in our media and television sector, there is still just about the right to fail. We should celebrate that. If I fail, and I have frequently failed—thank you for listing all the things I have won awards for; no one ever remembers the other things—it is the places where it did not work that I learned the most lessons as a creative. If we lived in a purely commercial environment, I might not have survived as an artist, particularly coming from a background where I was not given the training or did not have the safety net of subsidy from my parents. I was allowed to fail and learn from that failing so that I can write television drama. The online discourse is frequently frustrated at all the popular shows that leave the streamers in their second or third series, because they do not quite get the eyeballs. Places like the BBC, Channel 4 and ITV have less pressure, so they can make sure that series can run and run and run. The first series of “Line of Duty” did not do amazingly, but there was clearly something going on; it was an exciting and vibrant story. The BBC trusted it, and six years later, it was all anyone was talking about on Monday morning. “Who is H?”, and so on. I will not reveal who H was. Yes, the risk is what helps under-represented working-class artists, as well.

They are trying. I think they are on course to meet their target, which is having something like 25% of people from those backgrounds, using the metric: “What did your father do when you were 14?” Again, however, if there are cuts, it will be much harder to provide those entry-level things, and they are all entry-level starting positions. Not having huge cuts is always helpful in that department, because then you are able to take risks on training younger people, rather than having to rely on a smaller pool of people who you absolutely know are not going to make mistakes, because you have to do things under straitened circumstances. I think that is quite important.

As you say, going to where the audiences are is important. I love the idea of doing more live things. At world cups, there are fan zones and things like that, and it just becomes a huge public event. As we are more and more atomised, and as people increasingly experience things through their phones and other screens, live things are really important in bringing people together, as is making people see: “Oh, there is a physical opportunity for me here.” That is important. I also think that going to where people are is important. As I say, why can’t they do that? In fact, they are investing more in allowing people to create shortform content, which is where lots of young people are looking. Working-class people, the same as all young people, are consuming shortform content. They can see themselves in that, they can self-start in that, and there should be more investment to bring people in via those routes. Those are the routes where people are now. That is a helpful way, rather than people feeling that they have to come in on a big drama, or something that they perhaps do not watch yet, but they might as they age up. For now, I think that going where people are is important.

I agree. It is about having that local presence in under-represented and sometimes under-invested-in communities. I cannot imagine it could come from the current licence fee, and I do not know what other options there are for aligning education and business apprenticeship budgets with investing in these local hubs. Geography still matters as, unfortunately, geography is still destiny, in a lot of places. Obviously, anyone can access YouTube online, and the democratisation of creating content is a good thing, but I would love to see these regional hubs have a huge presence in every community. In the absence of a high street—I would say this, wouldn’t I?—it is often the theatre and the BBC that are still present and open in these hollowed-out communities. I do not know what outside investment from different Government budgets might be able to help to align training and opportunities so that schoolkids and people at local colleges can go to their local BBC and see different jobs, as just seeing them can be so important, psychologically and culturally. If they then express an interest, maybe they could get some training. My first ever play was supported by BBC Radio Nottingham. They gave us a small budget, and lots of publicity and chat as we opened in Nottingham. I got not only confidence in talking about it but empowerment, resources and training to do it. Again, it was a local story based on the miners’ strike—I am a one-trick pony. It was my local BBC radio station that gave me the first confidence boost to tour a story.

Good morning to you both. The BBC’s first public purpose is: “To provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them.” Marina, last year we had a session with Tim Davie where I raised the number of appearances Reform had had on “Question Time”, which seemed disproportionate to the number of Reform MPs. Can the BBC ever achieve true impartiality, or is that an impossible concept?

It is interesting how it is viewed. As I say, 60% of people frequently use BBC News as a source, and polarisation is incredibly small: it is almost equally as trusted by Labour and Conservative, leave and remain, or lots of the different ways we have divided audiences or voters in recent times. If you look at the US market, it is incredibly different. Nothing is used regularly by more than 25% of people, and polarisation is absolutely enormous: someone who really loves Fox News may really hate The New York Times, and vice versa. In a world where everything is fracturing and the loss of the mainstream is causing so many problems, we have something that is really quite precious. We do not have that bad a problem compared with so many other places. That is purely because of the BBC, because it sits at the centre of the mainstream. Yes, people have problems with it. It is not for me to discuss the booking procedures, but I would say that Reform was, none the less, a big conversation out in the country. They should not have pretended that the conversation was not being had. London may not be like that, but other places are. You have to serve people not just on the basis of the results of the last election. Whether it is palatable or unpalatable to some people, not showing those figures, who people were talking about, would for me be a form of censorship.

Do you think the BBC is held to a higher standard on news than other broadcasters?

For sure, and it should be. As it is publicly owned, we are all literally invested in it. That is the joy of universality, but the downside is that when things go wrong, people feel quite literally invested in it. It is amazing that the BBC is the world’s most trusted news brand by far: it reaches 400 million people a week around the world. They are very good at reporting on themselves when they get things wrong. It is difficult because many of the people who report on them work for their commercial adversaries, which creates a different dimension where people want to talk about these stories and they get a lot of airplay. The other side of universality is that people are invested in these people. They are household names; when things go wrong, we know who we are talking about. I have slightly moved on to BBC crises now, but there are many other organisations where things go wrong, such as the Metropolitan police or Parliament, and they draw a particular interest because people are also literally invested in them. Those are the times when it is a great strength that we report clearly and sometimes quite brutally on them.

Thinking about recent controversies, such as the Gaza documentary, the “Panorama” programme on Trump, Glastonbury or the Gregg Wallace situation, why do you think that these incidents always become a crisis for the BBC?

First of all, they are all important, and they were all mistakes—we should always report on people’s mistakes. I think there are probably all sorts of mistakes going on in worlds that we do not really know about. I am always intrigued by high finance; I hear a lot of things, but I do not read a lot of things. The BBC is always going to be a household brand, and people understand what is being talked about and, as I said, they are publicly invested in those things. I think it is always good content, and the longer the row goes on, the more eyeballs it draws to some extent. Also, to some extent, the running is being made by commercial adversaries or politicians who may find it helpful to continue the row. It is just the other side of universality. Of course, it matters and it is huge in our country, which is why we talk about it obsessively. I have to say, if you go to other countries, such as the US, and talk to the people who run HBO or Netflix, they are always slightly bemused by the way in which something that they regard as a very enviable asset slightly tears itself apart every now and then, and by the fact that we tear it down. Again, it is hard to explain it, because they do not have something that fits that universal model. It is hard to explain that that is actually part of it.

Do you think the BBC faces enough accountability when it makes editorial mistakes?

I do not think they go unaired. Actually, compared with some of those other workplaces I mentioned, or with creative industries where they have these difficult things and there are these power imbalances, or anywhere where there is a special status conferred—I mentioned the police and Parliament—I would say that the BBC’s processes are more sophisticated and fit for purpose than some of those other workplaces.

How much do you think these crises around editorial standards at the BBC affect the degree of trust that the public have in the BBC?

I think you have to have them, because otherwise people think that things are being swept under the carpet. I think it affects trust, because you have this constant sense that things are always going wrong, when actually they are mostly going right and it is doing wonderful things all the time. You have this intense focus on errors. I think they recently did a consultation exercise, and there were two things that people minded most. We have already talked about one, which was portrayal—people seeing themselves on screen. The other was independence from Government. Funnily enough, 40% of people thought it was doing well on independence from Government and 38% thought it was not, so that area definitely needs attention. They had something like nearly a million responses, and people thought that independence from Government was the most important thing.

Do you think the charter should be used to give the BBC a greater role in countering disinformation and polarisation?

Yes, but I think that “disinformation” and “misinformation” have almost become culture war words now—I slightly shy away from them. When people hear them, they think, “Oh, I don’t know.” There are very good ways that the BBC can do it. There is quite a lot of behavioural science to show that if you just tell people something is fake news, but they want to believe that thing, the same area of their brain reacts as if they had been punched. They become very defensive and they do not want to be told or informed that they are wrong. Education, to use another part of the BBC’s mission, is interesting. At the start of the Iran war, they produced a TikTok video showing how people were using footage from other conflicts and AI to create fake narratives. That was a way of educating rather than informing. It did huge business—it got something like 35 million or 36 million views on TikTok—so there are ways of doing it. However, I do not think the BBC should be anybody’s policeman. It is incredibly important that they keep their own standards, but I am nervous of leaning into “misinformation” and “disinformation”, which have become culture war words.

We are going to stay on the subject of independence from Government, with Jeff.

Marina, you referred to the BBC questionnaire. There were nearly 900,000 responses, and some 90% said that independence is really important. You referred to the figures. How do you explain the 48% who believe that the BBC is independent of Government and the 38% who do not?

I am glad I got the figures right off the top of my head. There is a point where you wonder if they are just talking about the Government of the day or about an issue. Some people will say that the BBC is too pro one side or the other in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and there will be many complaints about both. In a situation where the Government appoint the board members and the chair of the board, it is quite hard to say to people, “However, it is completely independent of Government.” It is quite difficult to convince some people of that.

Do you think the general public know about the Government appointments, or is it more about their political view when they start viewing the BBC?

It is an interesting question. I think some do, but by no means all. Other people will think, “You’re too close to them. You’re just like them. You’re just like all politicians in Westminster,” but we know that not all politicians in Westminster are the same. There can be that perception. I do think that people are aware that the licence fee is in the gift of somebody. It is quite difficult having to argue for your existence every 10 years. For me, it would be good if they considered something more permanent, like a permanent royal charter, or what happened with the Bank of England—an independence where you are not dependent on the Government of the day and do not have to argue your case all over again each time—but that is just a suggestion.

James, we tend to focus on news and current affairs when we talk about independence from political influence. In your life as a creative, have you ever felt any caution because of concerns about political influence, either in commissioning or your personal work?

It’s interesting. I certainly have not felt pressure around censorship and things that might make the commissioners queasy. I have written television dramas for PSBs about Brexit, the referendum campaign and Parliament, and I am writing a drama about the England football team, which is on BBC One this Sunday night. No one has ever steered me away from a subject matter, a particular political moment or a political figure, or given me guidance on my political representation of political views. A huge amount of discussion happens around editorial policy. As a writer, I have meetings with people who go through the script and look at areas—it is almost like a legal read—but that is more about unfairness, impartiality and risk of defamation. I feel like any pressure I have ever felt is a positive thing about making sure you do not alienate any of your audience or say anything libellous or untrue. The pressure is more to do with that; it is certainly not about subject matter.

Do you think that is the case with your creative colleagues as well?

I absolutely assume so, yes. This idea of impartiality is interesting. Everyone’s perception is going to be different, and that is a symptom of the culture that we live in. Our frame of reference, when we look at the world, has changed; it is not for broadcasters any more. We all live in 65 million different realities. In a very divided climate, it is no surprise that many of my left-wing friends cannot believe how patently obvious it is that there is a conspiracy of conservatives in the BBC, while many of my conservative friends cannot believe how obvious it is that the BBC is so left-wing. I used to take screen grabs of social media feeds where, on the same day, people could not believe how pro or anti this or that it was. I eventually stopped doing it, because it was not a way to happiness. A difficult problem in the modern world is that if you try to please everybody, you end up pleasing absolutely nobody. Again, not to repeat the point, but I have seen people on social media feeds declare that they have cancelled their licence fee because of the BBC being clearly so pro-Israel over Gaza, or the inverse. I do not know how to solve that problem. To me, impartiality is an aspiration; it will always fall slightly short because it is run by human beings, and human beings are flawed, but I do not think that we should make perfect the enemy of the good.

Finally, to both of you—although I think Marina has already started to answer this question—what measures do you think could be taken to increase the BBC’s independence from Government?

As I said, I think it would be better if the BBC had something more permanent and was not always arguing for its existence in the same way. Of course, you would still talk about funding, and I think independent experts would be in charge of that. That would be a better way to go about it. As I said, I think the BBC’s resistance to polarisation—the fact that we have such a big mainstream—is so valuable in a world in which lots of other countries and societies do not have that. We see what happens when that falls away or never existed. It is definitely worth it. That is what I would say on that particular front.

I agree.

Hi. Good to meet you again, James, and good to meet you, Marina—I believe I have been in your columns.

I’m so sorry.

I want to ask you both about the decline of funding and what it does for programme quality. A new DG is taking up the reins while a strike is on in certain news programmes. Repeatedly, more and more cuts are being announced—the latest is for 15% of all staff to be downsized in the next 15 years. Do they feel more dramatic than previous rounds of cuts? I think it is the biggest downsizing for years and years.

When there have been many cuts before, further cuts feel particularly like they are cutting in. Obviously, that has to affect either quantity or quality. You would hope that it did not affect quality, but it will mean fewer things can be made and fewer opportunities. Sometimes, cuts can be a great galvanising mechanism in all sorts of different ways, or a way to change direction, but certain things just need funding, including all kinds of different things for the BBC to keep pace with where the world is going and where streaming is going. For example, it would be great if the BBC had more funding for the algorithm—for AI—because lots of amazing stuff is there, but how does each service surface that stuff to you? That is very important. Anyone who is connected with search in any way will tell you that the TikTok algorithm is a thing of witchcraft and they do not understand how it is so good, but if I can put it politely, that has had quite a lot of top-down investment. It would be great if we could have that sort of investment in our algorithms, so that people see the stuff that is there. That is an example—but it costs money.

I think news has been fingered—that is where the strikes are. There is an NUJ one today on “The World Tonight” and those kinds of programmes. Is that a particular worry? The BBC traditionally has a soft-power role, while all around the world these things are becoming more paid services. What if that role is lost? James, do you have any comment on whether it is also affecting drama? It is worrying. There is a thing called “acting up”, which you might know about through your husband, Marina, where people do shifts but are not paid for it—they have to do a certain amount of acting up before they are remunerated. They are getting people to work on good will, because of their reputation. I do not know if it translates over into drama, but it is worrying for news.

It is very worrying for news. There is no question that, in the past decade, because of the cultural pressures on the BBC—I think that is measurable—trust in the news has slightly gone down, even though I think two thirds of the public still believe in the value of public service broadcasting. To Marina’s point, I feel like there is a level of fatalism and negativity about it, whereby we are still kicking a brand because it is slightly losing its impact or reach, or because of the pressures on cuts, even though 76% of the world and 60% of the UK still thinks that it is the best, most trusted news broadcaster. But these pressures are real. Speaking about drama production, I do not think that it has happened yet, but I know internally that, if the budget pressures continue, it will be quantity, probably not quality, that goes down. They are going to have to make fewer commissioning choices, and again I would worry that that might affect under-represented or regional voices—I do not think that it will, because of their public service remit. It is the twin pressures of production costs going up furiously—whether energy, building or labour costs—because of forces beyond our control, and the political pressures, which I understand, of having to keep making the case to your public, who are paying a TV licence fee. I do not think that case has been made particularly strongly, and I clearly sit here as an advocate one way for public service broadcasting. As the case has not been made strongly, it is harder to defend maintaining or increasing the television licence fee with justifications that make it politically palatable. I do not know why there cannot be better communication from the BBC to its licence fee payers, thanking them and celebrating things that we have invested in as stakeholders. This is very naive, but I believe that whenever a television drama does well in awards or gets an Emmy, or a BBC Studios film gets an Oscar, it should be like we have all invested in it or had a stake in a horse that crosses the line. We should all watch it and go, “Yay! That’s amazing.” A thank-you letter should go out to everyone saying, “You invested in that writer. You invested in that actor.” We should be able to celebrate it more so that some of the pressures on the licence fee would not feel as politically unpalatable. People would defend the licence fee themselves in the public because they recognise that, in the same way as the NHS or state education, it is doing a social good and, as you reference, Dr Huq, it has soft power around the world.

I guess there are some savings with Gary Lineker off the books, because he was very highly paid. Do you think that, ultimately, we will end up with a much narrower BBC if we do not fix the funding problem? We keep hearing about the revenue drop-off from the non-payers, but it is difficult to get the exact figures. I think there is 12% evasion, but they are always a bit cagey about that.

They have got that problem, but scale is really important. If you look at where we are going in the 2030s, for example, you might have between three and five destinations of scale, and if we want one of them to British, it will probably be iPlayer. It would be great if the other PSBs were brought on to iPlayer and you had something that is of a much larger scale and is much stronger. It would be great for them, because the other PSBs are in the reach business, and they would have bigger reach. You could still have adverts if you accessed “Bake Off” or “I’m A Celeb” via iPlayer, and if you were watching “Countryfile”, “The Traitors” and so on, you would not. It could be something that has large scale. If you get smaller and smaller, it is hard to be universal. This is a tiny but absolutely vital side point: back in the ’50s or ’30s, universality meant radio, then it meant TV. I really think that high-speed internet is a huge part of it. If there is not high-speed internet, people cannot fully access all parts of the BBC that are for them in the best possible way, and make it personalised and something that they get the best value out of.

With the £60 million-worth of cuts coming down the line, it just feels like a smaller number of people are being stretched thinner and thinner. As you said, the BBC is a lot of things. It is almost like the NHS—it is so pervasive and there are so many bits of it. It feels like it is almost providing a free service and cutting journalists to do it, because you don’t have to pay the licence fee to get all the bits; you can look at the website or whatever.

It is interesting that the licence fee does not cover news. It is paid for out of the licence fee, but the charter does not cover news in the same way. Obviously, if the money is getting less and less, it is harder to be universal. It is harder to offer people what it should be offering: universality. Some of that is that not everyone is paying, and some of that is that it is just that it is very difficult to reach everyone, for some of the reasons that I have given.

James, you were very vivid about the local English story when you answered Bayo’s questions. We have also heard about local radio cuts. Older and disabled people, in particular, rely on the old-fashioned wireless, or whatever it is nowadays. Do you think there is a disproportionate impact on certain groups of people?

Yes. That is the last area that I would be looking at for cuts. I will not repeat myself. For the BBC to be a national broadcaster and national storyteller on a global scale is great, but it also has the power to be idiosyncratically micro to local concerns. It can use local talent and local journalists who live in these communities. With the collapse of local newspapers, because of economic conditions, I don’t know where that transparency and access to local stories is going to come from. There is a knock-on effect on the pipeline towards creativity. I recently did a play called “Punch” in the west end, which actually got to Broadway. It started off at the local Nottingham Playhouse. It was a very local Nottingham story about a one-punch killing in Old Market Square. It was a story of restorative justice. I discovered it because of a BBC radio documentary—a six-parter—about restorative justice. The access to that story only happened because of local knowledge that came from local reporting on that story. The story would not have arrived to me had it not been the local expertise giving transparency to that tragic story. It then got to a national scale on a BBC documentary that became a podcast. I then got to tell that story in Nottingham, through subsidy, courtesy of my training, and it then happened to go to the west end and Broadway, and it has more than tripled or quadrupled its investment back because of that. We also got to tell an idiosyncratically Nottingham story. It was amazing to hear east midlands accents 100 yards from Times Square on a global scale. It is a strange ecosystem whereby cuts in local news media may have meant that there would not be a play on Broadway.

Lastly, whenever we have a question in the Chamber on this, the villain of the piece seems to be Robbie Gibb, with his known links to the Tory party. I mean, the guy was indirectly responsible for a £10 billion lawsuit from President Trump. I just wondered whether either of you had a position on Robbie Gibb?

I wouldn’t talk about it while that lawsuit is still active—I wouldn’t want to get in the way of the procedures there. People can sometimes become fixated on individuals. It is a problem that people perceive it as having a metropolitan left bias. I am not saying that it does, but there is a perception among many people that the BBC had that. Without getting into individual board appointments, and certainly not into that ongoing case, I would say that it is probably not helpful to consider that there are these lightening rod villains of the piece. The general issues are much more things like independence from Government in a deeper way than one appointment.

Can I quickly go back to the funding issue? If I had to put you on the spot—if you were suddenly responsible for making that decision tomorrow about how we fund the BBC, looking through the lens of the fact that fewer people are paying the licence fee and that the cost of making TV is going up—how would you fund it? Would you continue with the licence fee? Would you expand it to more people? Would you bring in more of the BBC services under the licence fee? Would you scrap it altogether and put it under general taxation? What is the answer?

I feel it is a bit like the old cliché about democracy that the household model is the least-worst option. Everyone being personally invested in it is a general good. If you have a subscription model, then you are just responsible to shareholders or whoever it is, and if you have advertisers, then you have a whole different boss. I think that the only way for it to be universal is for everyone to contribute. As you say, different services could be brought under it that are not necessarily under it now. However, for people to feel publicly invested in it, which is so important because without that, it is nothing but just another streaming service or whatever, then to protect the asset that it is, that model is the least-worst option.

Would you have it as a licence fee, or just roll it under general taxation?

As a licence fee—but I realise that others feel differently about that—because then it has more independence of the Government, which I believe it should.

I would say the same. I think that the benefit of it being under general taxation would be similar to other areas where we understand the value and ethos of contributing to something we do not necessarily receive ourselves. I do not have a kid, but of course, I understand that through general taxation your kids should be educated. I might break my arm, and someone might say, “I’ve never broken my arm, but I’ve broken my leg.” We all pay for things in a similar way to how I might for the BBC. I do not love classical music, but someone else absolutely might—and the BBC is still the biggest employer of musicians in Great Britain. I understand that. If it was funded through general taxation, you would not have to constantly make these arguments because we would just recognise the blanket value of it. However, because it is this separate thing, we always have to keep making the case for it. People feel a personal stake and sometimes a personal animosity when they see the cash leaving their bank account and they do not necessarily agree with what they see. It creates difficulty and sometimes these natural tensions that come in any civic society. My only argument to that is I think it is the best way to fund it. I do not know whether the BBC, and us as contributors to it, have maybe been a bit complacent in just constantly remaking that argument and the positive case for everybody having a stake in a universal public service.

Do you think that the BBC does make that effectively? If you look at my constituency, it is south coast, but not a leafy, affluent part of the south coast. It is an urban area. If you look at the heat map of how people use BBC services in my neck of the woods, it is predominantly the big-ticket items: things such as “The Traitors” and a lot of local and regional, TV and radio news consumption, but not massively people engaging with national BBC news or a lot of the other content, because they do not always necessarily feel that it speaks to them. What more can the BBC do to make the case to demonstrate to people that this is your BBC, this does speak to you, and it is something worth investing in?

I will always defer to the philosophy of Gareth Southgate—I am very biased. Having written this play and the television drama that will be on this week, I think there was something about his template of taking something that was not working and that people felt very negatively about in public life and turning public opinion around. The England football men’s team was not in a good place in 2016, and people felt very despondent about it. He was brave in deciding to try to create a genuine reset in its relationship with England fans. That involved changing and encouraging cultural and environmental differences in the team, but also how he engaged with the fans. He literally wrote a letter—whose title, “Dear England”, I stole—to the fans to ask them grown up, non-patronising questions about why this matters, why do we fund this, what do you want your England football team to be, and also encouraging them ask whether we could maybe conduct ourselves a little better in this space. I do not know what the BBC equivalent of that would be. In this difficult time, but when there is the opportunity of this consultation and you guys being here today, we should ask what equivalent revitalisation of the dialogue could happen between broadcaster and citizen to revive the civic bargain that is the BBC. Is it about being incredibly transparent about the information that has come out of this consultation? Is it about continuing that consultation in a more social media-friendly way and with people contributing. Not wishing to go back to my national conversation yesterday, but Oxford University is part of that national conversation that is encouraging every citizen to leave a one-minute voice note on what you want your country to be. It might sound like a small gesture, but I think the spirit of that feels like you are contributing to a conversation, maybe with good ideas or terrible ideas—my voice note yesterday was appalling, and I hope nobody listens to it. It is about that level of engagement to say, “This is your BBC”, outside a more formal consultation and in a more social media-friendly version. In this reset moment—I think it should be a revival, reset, resurrection moment of public service broadcasting—it is about asking: what are the values? What do you want to see more of? What do you want to see less of? That way, you make people feel like they have a genuine stake in their broadcaster.

And people in the BBC need to live by the motto WWGSD—what would Gareth Southgate do?

I think about it every day.

Marina, you said earlier that most BBC content is still watched on linear, but I think that is less true the younger you go down the age groups—in fact, over time, the proportion is shifting away. I want to come back to the conversation you just started on the iPlayer. There is some conversation at the moment, including with the BBC itself, about whether other PSBs should be brought into the iPlayer. I guess it is possible, if you are one of those others, that you would not really want to be brought into anything, as you might rather start something new together. What is your take on that?

I agree there is a risk not only to pride but that it is done badly, but I do not think that we should start thinking of it like that. If it were done well, that would involve both the BBC and the other PSBs getting over themselves. The iPlayer is already there, and it is already enormous—as I say, it grew faster than Netflix in the last quarter. If you were creating some whole new thing, they could still keep their players or whatever it is, if you were looking at this model. If it were bringing people in, the BBC would have to be agnostic about it, and it could not give its own shows all the big prominence. What would happen is that you would create scale, and “scale” is just the word of the times. If you look at all the M&A activity, particularly in the US, people are trying to get together. Maybe there will be three to five destinations of scale in the 2030s. If you want one of those to be British and to be public service broadcasting, I think that you should bring them in. You would obviously deliver value to the licence fee payers, and you would give bigger reach to those PSBs, which could then sell more advertising and make more money. They may keep their players, or they may decide not to have their players after a certain amount of time, and that could then be invested into programming. There are all sorts of ways you could do it without trying to design the user interface on the hoof.

It is an interesting question—whether three to five destinations at scale really is a stable equilibrium, and why there would not be just one.

When you say “one”, do you mean one like Netflix?

Let me come on to that. If you had the super-PSB streamer, and you then had Netflix, Apple and Prime, all of which show their own stuff and some PSB stuff, and in some cases, do some cross-selling of other commercial services, and over it all you also had YouTube—or ubiquitous-tube—is that a stable equilibrium?

It might be as stable as you are going to get. You can see that people are consolidating in lots of different ways. The public service broadcasters have always collaborated in lots of interesting ways, and they obviously share lots of missions and values. They could share various background things, such as tech or even HR—there are lots of things. That would mean that all the audiences were being given better value, because more was being spent on the things that they see and hear.

My final question is to you both. In this crazy world we live in, with infinite choice and daily brain overload, do you think that we might find people turning back to a renewed demand for channels, where somebody else has done the work for me?

It is funny you should say that, as it is becoming a big thing. As I said earlier, all those places disrupted things and said, “You can just watch TV whenever you like”, but people actually quite like leaving something on—background radio is something that people really like. While they love podcasts, they do not want background radio not to exist. If you look at what something like Netflix is doing, it is now bringing podcasts on to its platform, because at the moment people spend one, a maximum of two, hours with its service. What they would like is for people to hang around. In the old days, people would turn the TV on. Podcasts are a relatively cheap thing to do—to some degree, everything is a chat show now—so you can have things like that and at the same time, you can have these huge event moments, like “Stranger Things” or “Wednesday” or whatever it is. There are lots of channels—FAST channels—that people will probably talk to you about, where people just want to put on one thing and watch it all the way through the day; they love whatever show it is and they will watch “Top Gear” or whatever it is—that is a bad example, but—

We grew up with variety until very recently, and the situation you have just described is not variety; it is bingeing. Maybe I am just being overly nostalgic. Is there a prospect that we might decide that what we had before was pretty good?

That is what they did—they disrupted. Netflix disrupted, and now they would like a live sport event, they would like a certain show to drop at a certain time, they want a live reality reunion—these reality reunions are huge. What they want is for you to turn it on, and sit with it, rather than thinking, “Oh, now I have to think of the next thing or wait for something else to be suggested to me.”

I understand why the priority for YouTube or social media platforms or streamers is attention. They want you to stay on it. That sometimes means just going, “You watched this, so you’ll like this.” I understand that. They are just keeping you engaged by having a singular sort of experience, or a genre you are watching. The public service remit of somewhere like the BBC is that it is meant to introduce you to surprises—things that you did not know you would like. On our phones, with the arrival of AI slop, which is going to be melting our brains and which is meant to keep our attention, we know that physiologically, emotionally, psychologically, it does not cultivate us. It does not nourish us. It is the equivalent of a late-night kebab rather than a home-cooked meal. I suspect that, eventually, one day, even among the generation of young people you identified who do not necessarily have the brand awareness of the BBC as being their BBC, there will hopefully be a reaction against the mind-numbingness of these algorithms towards wanting surprise, wanting discovery and wanting to be challenged—in the way that you get, as you say, if we just turn the BBC on; you would get a drama, an entertainment show and then a documentary and you would learn and discover things. The old historic role, as nostalgic and outdated as it may seem, of educating as well as entertaining, feels to me more important than ever, especially in an age of loneliness and social isolation. Watching these programmes makes you feel connected to your country.

Thank you both so much. You have given us some really valuable insights to kick off our inquiry. Before we let you flee, are there any final messages that you want to put on the record as we move forward in our pursuit of trying to find our solutions for the BBC?

I would just reiterate, in case it has not been made clear a thousand times by me, that I think that sometimes the arguments against the need or the requirement for the BBC in this day and age when we have all of this choice misunderstands the global lead that a public service broadcaster gives us in terms of taking risk and finding voices that in other places would not seem commercially viable but always end up being successful—whether that is “Adolescence”, “Fleabag”, or hopefully “Dear England” at the weekend. It is always seen through the frame of the difficulty of impartiality in news and “Why do we need it, when we have all of this American money coming in to tell our stories?” One day that American money may not be there and suddenly we won’t be able to tell our own stories. We have to keep ownership of it.

I would reiterate my point about the absolute value of a cultural mainstream, and what happens when you don’t have one, which we can see all over the place. We have something that is unique and that has given us the greatest creative economy in the world. I think that is absolutely worth safeguarding. It is a benefit to all of society.

Thank you both so much. Witnesses: Sir Peter Bazalgette, Dr Alex Mahon CBE and Patrick Younge.

Welcome to our second panel this morning. We will now hear from Sir Peter Bazalgette, who is the co-chair of the Creative Industries Council. Peter is obviously a renowned figure in the world of broadcasting and arts, who was once described as the most influential man in British television. No pressure, Peter. Previously, he chaired Endemol UK, Arts Council England and ITV. Welcome to you. Dr Alex Mahon CBE last appeared before us as the chief executive of Channel 4, but she is now here in her own capacity and will give us insights into the BBC as someone who has been one of the country’s most eminent and respected media and TV executives. Patrick Young is a former non-executive director for ITV Studios, former chief creative officer at BBC production, managing director of Skin In The Game Studios, and chair of council at Cardiff University. Pat is chair of the British Broadcasting Challenge, which is a campaign group that has submitted written evidence to the inquiry. Crikey—that was a long introduction, but welcome to all of you. Thank you so much for joining us today. Alex, before we start, you will have seen that there was a “Panorama” documentary last night on the “Married at First Sight” TV show, which is broadcast by Channel 4. Before we get on to the BBC, I just wanted to give you the opportunity to respond to that documentary and express any thoughts that you have on it.

Obviously, I am no longer at Channel 4, but I watched the programme last night and there are some very serious and concerning allegations in it. The right thing for them to do is to launch an investigation—in fact, I think they have announced two investigations: a legal one and a duty of care protocols one—and then we should see what those investigations come up with and act on any findings.

For any channel, reality TV always comes with its inherent dangers, but a lot of changes were brought in in the wake of some of the issues that came out of “Love Island” and various other shows five or 10 years ago. Do you feel there are now enough protections for people who are contestants on reality TV shows?

The industry is always trying to evolve and take allegations or incidents very seriously. The duty of care protocols therefore advance all the time, but it is always worth another look—especially in this case, because they are quite serious allegations—to make sure that enough was done and enough is being done, and that protocols are evolving in the appropriate way.

Thank you very much. I am going to move on to our core subject today, which is the BBC. I think you were all here to hear our previous witnesses. Marina talked about there being a case for a permanent charter, so that the BBC does not have to keep coming back every so often to renegotiate the premises. Do you agree with that, Baz?

Yes, I would be in favour of a permanent charter. You have to have points at which things like the level of funding, and maybe even the strategy, are reviewed, but the idea that we would commit ourselves indefinitely to a public good, which the BBC is, is a very good one. In fact, I think the premise of the debate around the BBC is quite often wrong, because you hear people say, “I don’t watch the BBC, therefore I shouldn’t pay for it.” This is not what people who send their children to private school say about paying their taxes for education, and not what people who use private medicine say about paying taxes for the health service. I believe the BBC is a similar public good, and a permanent charter would greatly assist it. Even more than that, I think it would be quite good if you linked the level of the payment—let’s call it the licence fee for the moment—to the rate of inflation, so that you did not have to have frequent reviews of the BBC’s funding.

Patrick, what would you say to that question, thinking specifically about how the BBC would be accountable? If it did not have to come back every few years to renegotiate the charter, how would we ensure that the BBC remained accountable?

First, a permanent charter would put the BBC on the same footing as every other body. We do not say, “Shall we have an NHS?”; we have an NHS and then argue about what we should do with it. Likewise for the BBC. You may not know that within the current BBC charter the BBC is required to keep money back for its own winding up, because there is the potential for that to happen every 10 years. The BBC could go without a positive vote to abolish the BBC: if it is not renewed, it simply lapses. That cannot be a sustainable basis on which our national broadcaster works. Also, the current arrangements basically invite a level of political interference that undermines trust. I think it was George Osborne who said he could not believe how much leverage he had over the BBC and how he could literally tell them what they could fund. A permanent charter that puts the existence of the BBC to one side is a good idea. Imagine if you are the BBC and you are trying to negotiate a 20-year contract with someone who says, “Well, I don’t know whether you’re going to be here in 10 years’ time, because legally you do not exist in 11 years’ time”—that puts them at a real structural disadvantage. So I think a permanent charter is absolutely the right thing. Then you get into an operating agreement, and that is where you have the discussion about what it should do, what it should stop doing—a discussion we perhaps do not have often enough—and how it should be paid for. That could be done on an eight-year or 10-year cycle, so that you still have that democratic engagement about what the organisation should and shouldn’t be doing, how much it will cost and how it is going to be paid for, but it is separate from the existence of the organisation.

Alex, you have previously run a public service broadcaster. What about the BBC’s public purpose? If there was a permanent charter, to what extent would anyone be able to influence its public service aspect—the public purpose of the BBC—and to what extent could that ever be changed?

I have never worked for the BBC, but I have been asked to give opinions on it since 2003. I worked periodically as part of a committee to do that. The other witnesses are correct that you should have a permanent charter, but that should be about the existence of the organisation, and then every five, eight or 10 years, you have a debate or discussion about what the purposes are, what the funding arrangements are and what the strategy is. Channel 4 was established permanently by order of Parliament, but it has that debate all the time with various Governments and with DCMS. You can separate the existence of an organisation from what it is meant to do day to day and how it should be funded. Then you need to look periodically at the purposes. If you look at the purposes as they stand, they are very strong. I think there is discussion about whether one or two of them should be adjusted and changed, but if we look at impartial news, learning for all ages and appealing to all of the UK, those are very strong and, to some degree, evergreen. Then you get into, “Where does technology take us? How do we need to think about young people? How do we address news in this environment?” and you can do that on a periodic basis. Sir Peter Bazalgette: May I add something on the purpose? As you say, Alex, the purposes of the BBC are quite well set out, but for me, they are not quite elevated enough to the general principles. They say what, but they do not always say the why. If the why was there, you would be more comfortable with a permanent charter. Let me explain what I mean. For me, the purposes or value of the BBC as a public good are very simple and fall under three headings: democracy and resilience, culture and the creative economy. Democracy: you cannot have a successful democracy without an informed citizenry. Resilience: think about covid; you need a reliable service that everybody believes in in times of crisis. That is democracy and resilience. Culture: you heard about that in the first session this morning; I like to think of it as programmes for us, by us and about us, and developing shared values and enriching our national conversation as well as having a healthy domestic production base to back up those national stories. Thirdly, the economy, which I speak passionately on as co-chair of the Creative Industries Council: the screen is one fifth of the creative economy—the creative economy is about 6% of the whole British economy—and the BBC is the sort of cornerstone of the screen, as we have heard. For me, if the charter had more of the why in it and elevated what those purposes are as to defining the public good, we would be more comfortable with a permanent charter.

That is really interesting, thank you very much. Pat, did you want to come in on that?

I want to come in on the first point that Peter raised about democracy and resilience. There is an issue that goes under the radar, which is the moment we are in with this particular charter renewal discussion. At the moment, we are living in a world where six men own or control most of the platforms through which media is shared, produced and consumed. Elon Musk owns X, and we have seen the direction that X has gone in. He spoke about Tommy Robinson’s event last weekend and said that there will be a civil war in Britain—he uses his platform to that end. You have Ellison, who owns Oracle, a big data company. He owns Paramount Skydance and Channel 5; he also owns 20% of TikTok and is the data provider for TikTok USA. Then you have Mark Zuckerberg. He owns or controls Meta, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. You have Jeff Bezos. He owns Amazon Prime, but he also owns Amazon Web Services. If Donald Trump actually wanted to retaliate against the BBC, the quickest thing to do would be to lean on Bezos to deny web services to the BBC. At that point, iPlayer would fall over and we would be denied access to iPlayer, and we all know that these American oligarchs have bent the knee to Trump over the last period. Then we have Sergey Brin and Larry Page; between them, they own or control YouTube and Google. We have six men who own all the platforms through which most content is discovered, shared and consumed. They also own most of the data, and they own the algorithms that decide what gets promoted and what does not get promoted. The BBC is the only organisation at scale that we have that provides us with any resilience against those or other actors acting in a malign way. Those men largely control the information environment. The BBC needs to be thought about as part of our democratic defence and resilience against a data environment that we no longer control. That needs to be part of the thinking as we look at this charter. This is not just about BBC and Spectrum. This is much more existential than that for the BBC and UK democracy.

That is very interesting. Thank you very much; you put that beautifully.

I want to add to what Pat is saying. Coming from broadcasting, I guess what we are saying here is that it is not so much “How do you protect the BBC?” but “How do you protect Britain?” When we are talking about the BBC and the news and information it provides, it is about its importance to democracy as well as British society. We are coming from the position that that is a public good, a civic essential and, to some degree, our core national infrastructure. As you have heard from the previous witnesses, the public service media system in the UK is the best in the world. It is wonderful when Britain is the best in the world at something—anything. The Government have a real opportunity here to ensure that that is strengthened. They need to think about not just what we need to preserve, but what we need to build, and stop thinking about how they can do less or how they can do better and think about what we need to build that makes us stronger. That takes some choices, but it is important to think about it in that frame. That is why establishing a permanent charter is probably a critical decision. The purpose of the BBC as part of that must be clear.

What you have all said is extremely powerful and underlines what is at stake here. Do you get the sense that the Government understand the critical moment we find ourselves in when it comes to the future of the BBC and its importance in protecting democracy, as you have described it?

Lisa Nandy said that the BBC is to British democracy what the NHS is to public health, so I think there is an understanding. I am not sure yet whether there is an understanding of what that requires in terms of the policy response and the moment that we are in. I think there is an instinctive understanding about the democratic moment that we are in, but it is going to take some imagination, as well as some bravery, to do some things that put us in a better position for the long term, not just to get through this charter.

One of the things we need from Government is more connectivity between two things they care about. They have given Ofcom powers over social media—we will see how effective that is—but the truth is that we live in an era of immense undermining of civil society by what appears in the cesspit of social media, the home of rumour, gossip and paranoia. We have not touched on that yet. To some extent, the BBC is the antidote to that. While the Government are rightly concerned with the use of mobile phones in schools and children’s access to painful and unpleasant influences on social media, we have perhaps not made the connection to the positive effects of public service information and media.

Can I expand on that? The BBC is central. Channel 4 and ITV also play a role here in terms of “Channel 4 News” and “ITV News”, as does Sky News, to be fair. They are all are properly regulated, sensible broadcasters that contribute to the public good. GB News—I am just going to call it out—poisons the well. It operates at a lower standard of impartiality and truth. It is largely a one-party broadcaster with a small b, but it sets a template against which others are then measured and which they cannot respond to because they work within the system of due impartiality. The regulatory response to GB News has been very poor. There can be a GB News—that is not the issue—but they should play by the same rules as everybody else, and they do not.

Good morning. The Green Paper talked about the Government considering putting in—or retrieving, really—a public purpose to put R&D and innovation at the centre of the BBC’s activities, “potentially as part of a new Public Purpose on driving growth”. Asking all of you, should the BBC have a new public purpose relating to innovation and the use of technology?

It is very tough to cut an organisation by 30% in real terms over the past 10 years and then to give it a responsibility for innovation. Historically, the BBC was extraordinarily innovative in media in the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, because there were no other players and it was comparatively well funded. It was able to invent all sorts of pieces of technology. The BBC are no longer in that position. What they can pioneer, though, are new forms of programme making and of public service delivery. In other words, in terms of innovation, I would be more inclined to think about the content than I would about the distribution, because I do not honestly think that they can come up with pieces of technology that are radically different from what America and the rest of the world are dominating us with. That would be my personal view.

I think you have to look at where the innovation is needed and where it is not happening in the market. If we look at what is happening in the market now, UK adults watch, on average, five hours of video a day—not this group, but that is what the average UK adult does. If you are 16 to 27, 64% of that is on YouTube and social, so people are consuming information all the time, but most of it is short form, and we know that that leads to lack of context, lack of information and polarisation, because the salacious is at the top of the feed. It also leads to a pernicious effect: when people watch things on their own, they do not socialise the views, and that is a driver of the things that we are finding most dangerous in society, which is radicalisation, whether it be left or right. You have heard the director general of MI5 say that 13% of the people they are now investigating are children, so we have those huge impacts linked to that kind of atomisation. What we really need is young people to see true facts and information. To do that, the BBC has to be credible and has to earn their trust. Unfortunately, young people do not have the same hierarchy of trust or architecture of information that older people have, and that is because of the brands they have been exposed to over time. But they are hyperconnected and they are clever, so I think the innovation—to build on what Peter said—is about, how do we innovate? How do they innovate the ways to get to people and the forms of the information, to make it interesting, entertaining, fun and available? It is much more there that the BBC needs to innovate in order to be relevant in the future.

In terms of the technology, absolutely. Actually, the BBC had a technology purpose, which is what led to iPlayer and the digital switchover, but then, bizarrely, it was taken away. I think it needs to be restored, because at some point we will need to turn off the analogue signal and we will need to get everyone on to IPTV. The BBC can play a role in driving that. To pick up on what Alex has said, algorithms drive a lot of content discovery, and we need investment in building some public service algorithms to elevate public service content higher up the feeds or into different feeds. Someone said to me that on your mobile phone, even if the battery dies, you can still make an emergency call. There are ways in which we could insist on a public service button being on every single mobile phone. There are things that we can do to elevate the place of public service content. We may come on to the BBC-YouTube discussions, which are interesting, but that should not be seen as an opportunity for YouTube to zig-zag out of its prominence obligations for public service broadcasting, which we have already had with TV manufacturers and which we need to have with the social platforms. If you buy a new TV, you will get your Netflix tab, and on the handset you get Netflix, Amazon, Disney and maybe Apple, because they have paid, but you have to find the BBC app or the ITV app. You have to find and download those apps—they are not prominent or front screen. We need that. Those are changes that we can—and we should—insist on to make sure that content is visible.

That is really interesting. You have all identified the same sort of problem, I think. Can the BBC do something technically about the role of algorithms in driving the way that people consume the media, or is that a role for Government regulation?

It is a mix. As Pat has talked about, there is prominence legislation to ensure that manufacturers of large-screen televisions put public service content and players up—effectively, the new EPG—and enable access. There is also a question of whether we can create, cross-industry, something like a trustmark that says, “This content has come from a validated source—proper journalists work there, you can look up the address of the company and it has passed a couple of hurdles, in terms of the kind of source that it is.” You could introduce that across the industry. A number of news providers are starting to talk about how we might do that but, simplistically, it could be a trustmark, just like a kitemark. Of course, algorithmically, you could ensure that that content is sourced towards the top of the feed. That requires Government; it is technically not that complex.

Partly what we are talking about here is search optimisation. The BBC is working very hard on search optimisation and is doing better and better at it, but let us bear in mind that very successful search optimisation often depends on sensation, bizarre content and extreme opinions. Of course, the BBC is the antidote to that, so there is an inherent contradiction—not a contradiction, but a challenge—in search optimisation for something reliable and sensible. It is possibly very entertaining and informative, but there is a challenge there.

Just going back to the technical side of things, or the innovation side of things, the BBC has been technically innovative in the past. It had the first regular colour TV, DAB and, recently, the iPlayer. Sir Peter, you alluded to the fact that the BBC is being left behind technically now. Do you all think that is the case?

I do not think I said it was being left behind. I think what I was saying was that it is now subject to others that have invented the technological terrain in the last 10 years. That is why the BBC has to be distributed across platforms that are all foreign owned. Pat talked about that earlier in the session. It is not that it is left behind; it is now subject to other people’s technology.

That is partly because public service broadcasting content is regulated by Ofcom. It is regulated as a publisher or a broadcaster. Now, in order to reach people, you have to distribute that content on platforms that, hiding behind section 230 of American law, do not regard themselves as publishers or broadcasters. They say, “We simply provide a technical solution. It’s nothing to do with us where their content is.” Of course, they do promote the content using an algorithm. An algorithm is a set of lines of code that effectively acts like an editor because, as Peter mentioned, it pushes the salacious to the top of the feed. We here in the UK are not really challenging that; we are allowing that regime to continue. It is one of the things that we should think about as policymakers, as the landscape gets pushed so far that those are the only methods that public service broadcasters such as the BBC can use to reach the population. That is a question for us.

Thanks. Pat, the British Broadcasting Challenge says that innovation should be for the “public interest”. The Government has talked about having a public purpose of driving growth. Are they the same thing? Can I ask each of you what you think of the potential of this public purpose of driving growth?

They are not the same thing, but they do not have to be in opposition to each other. The public interest is not always about growth, in terms of economic growth; it can be social growth, social capital or connection. The BBC already drives significant economic growth. In fact, it is probably much easier to identify the economic growth that it drives through the nations and regions, and where it spends its money—how much money it spends, and how much it invests in apprenticeships and early career work. We are less good at measuring the broader value that it brings.

Members of the Committee might know that I have done an awful lot of work over the last 10 years on the creative industry economy, and particularly on the fact that the creative industries are organically arranged into about 55 clusters around the country—there are lots of micro-clusters, but 55 main clusters—specialising in different subsectors of the creative economy. The BBC has been an important partner in that. Think of its investment in Salford, the north-west, Cardiff and Glasgow, or the natural history investment in Bristol: these are significant interventions in local economies outside London. It is an important part of the growth story, as I alluded to in broad terms earlier.

Sorry to come back on that, but should it be a new public purpose then?

You can phrase it how you like; I think it is already there, because the BBC has a responsibility for regional production. My point earlier about it was that the “what” is in the charter, but not the “why”. The “why” is that we want to stimulate local economies and grow them, and grow opportunities for people living in those places. It is not a new responsibility; it is explaining the purpose more properly.

Some of that growth, as you have shown in those studies, Peter, comes from local companies that can get investment from Channel 4 or the BBC, and they can grow their own balance sheet, keep the rights to the programmes, and sell those programmes elsewhere in the world. That battle for rights in the creative community is absolutely key, because that is how you grow your company. The public service media infrastructure here is a fundamental part of that, so I think it may already be covered in another purpose, but it is absolutely key to what the BBC does.

On that point, do you think the BBC should do more to sweat the assets? If I think about my local BBC hub—that would be BBC South, based in Southampton—it has a lovely big building, the Southampton Guildhall. Whenever I go there—admittedly, it is on a Friday afternoon to pre-record the BBC’s “Politics South” programme—it feels a bit like a ghost ship. There are not many people there, there is not much going on and it is a big building. I am open to any of you replying, but do you feel that they are doing enough to sweat the assets regionally, and to attract innovation and local programme making into the sites that they already have?

I think they are in a constant dilemma at a time when they are trying to save money and considering how to do that. But if we linked the BBC and its investment around the regions more closely to the current Government’s industrial strategy, which in terms of the creative industries is all about investing in clusters around the country, that might give the BBC the opportunity, or even the permission, to make a greater investment, albeit on the very tight budget that they are operating on.

I imagine that it must be difficult to run an organisation where you continually have less to spend. We have definitely seen that the BBC has had to cut on news and we have seen those other announcements. I think that we have to ask a question. If news is fundamental and in some ways the most core purpose of the BBC, will that require more investment in journalists, not less? They have definitely lost some strength there in the cuts that they had to make, including experienced journalists. We also see in society that what people want is more control and power over decisions that are made locally, and they want that connection to their local information. We see that in how people react to local councillors and local decisions. When we feel as a society that we have lost control of things, we want to make changes closer to home, rather than further away, so I think that the local provision of BBC services is absolutely key. But the BBC will need money to invest in those things—it cannot cover everything.

With my old BBC hat on, I would say that that building was empty because they were all out working on stories. But the truth is that—

On a Friday afternoon?

Well, news never sleeps. The truth is that local services have been hit really hard and I think that is one of the things that the BBC has got wrong. The one thing that Netflix is never going to do is to provide a local set-up down by you. That is the one thing that I think Netflix is never going to do—a local set-up down by you. Money is part of it, but I also think that the BBC need to be imaginative about new ways of serving local audiences, and new ways of generating video and audio content for local audiences. And I think that they need to reinvest in local journalism. That is one of the cuts that they have made; I am sure they did not want to make it, but it is one that strikes at their purpose. Our courts are not being covered in the same way; our local newspapers have failed. We have the local reporter scheme, but most of that money seems to go to the big three companies. Maybe we could use some of that money instead to have local reporters who produce local newsletters and podcasts, but use BBC facilities, for example, as a means of production. I think that there are things they can do, but local has been one of the big casualties.

One of the disappointing things about the consultation is that the household levy was ruled out before it was even consulted on—and in that I feel the hand of the Treasury. There is a bit of me that wonders why the Treasury is so involved in the discussion around the BBC, given that the Treasury does not fund the BBC. It speaks to the bigger issues that we have around independence in governance and accountability. We have proposed a universal licence fee. We would prefer a household levy, but if that is off the table, we have proposed a universal licence fee. The principle is that—and people do not know this—the original licence fee existed before the BBC. It was a licence that you paid to receive a signal. The nature of the signal has changed over time: it was a radio signal and then it became a television signal. At some time, it became known as the “BBC” licence fee, but it is actually the licence fee. We believe that the licence fee should be applied now to your ability to capture live content and it does not matter what platform that is on. As Peter said, we believe that the BBC is a universal good and a public good. There is the argument that, “I don’t use it so I shouldn't pay for it,” but for the reasons Peter gave, there are lots of services that I pay for that I do not use. The public interest and the public good of having a secure information environment is bigger than my personal objection. We have advocated for a universal licence fee that is tied to your ability to receive the signal—so it is not tied to a TV set; it could be a mobile phone or a tablet. But we think that the household levy, which is essentially the licence fee by another name, and which they have in Germany and other countries, would be the most obvious thing to do.

I think Pat is right to suggest that a version of the licence fee will probably be the outcome of this charter renewal process. We could debate at great length whether that is a good or a bad thing, but if that is the outcome—and on balance, I favour it as the outcome—then we need to get the licence fee ready for the 2030s, technologically speaking. If, as is probable, there is the DTT switch-off in 2034, we now need to prepare the licence fee for an environment where it is infinitely more measurable as to who is receiving what than it was when you had detector vans going round the streets—which sounds rather like a Monty Python sketch in retrospect. That is because it will be entirely measurable as to who is watching what, and that is not even a secret, in the sense that all the platforms people subscribe to have that data. We need to prepare the licence fee for a system that works so that, as Pat says, anybody who is receiving—what shall I call them?—programmes via that means pays the licence fee, because it is a public good and they are enjoying parts of it at various different times. That is the key. Let us build in the plan for the 2030s now. It is all positive; it makes the licence fee much more practical, measurable and doable.

As I understand it, the German system worked out before us that linking something to a television would be a problem as technology evolved. They have moved to a household levy paid per household, flat or dwelling. The price is set independently. The reason they do that is because they believe that having that information available to you is part of society’s civic infrastructure and—to Pat’s point—you make a payment for that regardless of whether you use it or not. I imagine that once we are done with this round of the licence fee and we get to the DTT switch-off, we will move more towards something like that so that you still preserve the ability to have universal access but have a flat and fixed amount per dwelling. I can see that that is not going to happen this time round, but it is really worth considering over time because trying to link to the specific device or usage is going to be too complex if we want to preserve the quality of the output that we can all access.

I imagine that will happen when you move to an internet-delivered system—or an IPTV system. The challenge with that is switching off the analogue system. Part of the outcome of this will hopefully be the necessary investment that is required to get everybody on to universal broadband and high-speed internet. There are economic benefits from that, because it will free up a lot of spectrum that can be resold, repurposed and reused. The BBC can then introduce the same checks that we use on every other platform, including username, licence fee number and password, and off you go. There is also an argument that, because you do not log into the BBC in the same way as Netflix and others, you do not value it as much. When people actually have to log in and recognise their engagement with it, they might value it more.

If you made it a purely voluntary subscription service, it will be the thin end of the wedge, and you will be diminishing the public good that we have spoken about so far in this session. You could take that decision, but that is what you would be doing. If you made it solely dependent on advertising revenue, you would pretty well destroy the model of ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, which are the other public service broadcasters. That is pretty clear, and there is lots of evidence on it. That is not to rule out, as we heard in your earlier panel, ideas about a broader public streaming service beyond iPlayer, which we could talk about in more detail later, if you want. That broader public streaming service, if it existed, could have elements of advertising and subscription in it for specific areas of programming, and for particular reasons. However, as a general panacea, no.

That is because there is not necessarily more advertising money available in the market. If the BBC started to take advertising money, it would have to come from somewhere else. That is important to remember, because part of the strength we have here is a PSB system with multiple public service broadcasters in it. All the rest of them also compete at a higher level because of the BBC. ITV and Channel 4 spend lots on programming, and the whole system is better because the BBC also spends lots. Sometimes, that is lost on people in understanding why our system is so strong, as well as the commercial broadcasters. In other European nations, the public service broadcaster tends to have a much lower funding level, and therefore the whole quality of the market can be reduced.

You would damage Channel 4 and ITV somewhere near the waterline, if the BBC took advertising. You would also change the nature of the BBC. If you think about the world cup final, the same pictures are coming from the same host broadcaster, so why does the BBC always win? It always wins because there are no adverts and you can just stay in the moment. ITV’s coverage is perfectly good—it has great teams and all the rest of it—but people do not like advertising. What is Netflix’s USP? No adverts. It is interesting that Netflix offers a cheaper service with adverts, but it is nowhere near as popular as the expensive service without them. Dr Mahon will know from Channel 4 the number of people who have paid to avoid advertising on Channel 4.

You would be surprised that not that many people pay to avoid it. Sometimes, by having the adverts, people appreciate that they are getting it for free, but I also agree that that would fundamentally change the nature of the interaction with the BBC.

Just so I am clear, Pat, are you saying that your proposal is a household levy that would be based on the ability to receive high-speed broadband?

No, I am saying that it is a licence fee based on your ability to watch live television content. If you have a device that can watch live television content, you should pay the licence fee. It is not just the television; it could be a mobile phone or a tablet. However, when we get to the age of IPTV, or internet-provided BBC, if you are not going to subscribe, you will not be able to access the services. It then becomes a much clearer proposition, because if you subscribe, you have access.

The Government’s Green Paper basically fudged DTT to IPTV. Do you think the Government need to make a decision on IPTV before we can even think creatively about the licence fee?

Personally, yes, but they also need to decide how they are going to fund those people who currently cannot get high-speed internet. They have to be provided for. They tend to be rural, they tend to be remote and they tend to be poorer. Until you resolve that, you cannot, in all honesty, switch the signal off, but in switching it off, you create benefits because you free up all that spectrum.

Because you cannot move to conditional access—in other words, people logging in and logging out—until everyone has the infrastructure that means they can receive their signals that way so there is a two-way connection.

Do we know what the scale of the non-coverage is at the moment?

I am afraid I do not, but we can find out and come back to you.

That would be helpful.

I have a declaration of interest: Patrick is my constituent.

She is my MP.

I know where he lives. That sounds a bit scary.

No favourable statements, please.

I want to start with you, Pat, on the World Service. The British Broadcasting Challenge has called for the restoration of full funding. How do you think we can persuade Ministers to do that when there are so many other domestic priorities?

Because it is really important.

I get it—it is a soft power thing—but what arguments can we make to them?

You only have to look what happened in Iran. After taking the axe to the “Voice of America”, Trump bombed Iran and then had to stand up a service at very short notice to try to get back into Iran to get his messages in. Look at the work that BBC Persian has done during the conflict in the middle east. Talk to anybody at MI5 or MI6, and they will tell you that when you talk about soft power, the World Service is a key instrument. The thing is that the World Service was funded by the Foreign Office for 80 years. It is a relatively recent thing that it came over to the BBC. It came over in one of those leverage discussions—I think with George Osborne—and now what you have is a situation where people who live in the UK who do not consume the World Service in any great volume are being asked to pay for the World Service and lose their local radio station. I do not think that is fair. I think the Foreign Office needs to take it back and fund it at scale.

Okay. We will try. Sir Peter, you have said that doubling the World Service audience can be done for as little as £300 million. Why do you think that is not happening?

Exactly—why is it not happening? Thank you for the question; I think it is really important. The BBC World Service is our No. 1 soft power asset. It is of immense value in a very turbulent, difficult world where Britain has declining influence in other respects. Currently, it reaches 450 million listeners, and it receives just over £400 million. It got put up by £15 million, so it receives £415 million for the service, for reaching 450 million listeners. For £300 million, it has been calculated that it could double its audience to 900 million. The problem is that the bit of its funding that comes from the Government comes from the Foreign Office, and the Foreign Office got the biggest cut of any of the Ministries in the spending review at just over 5%. The Foreign Office does not have the firepower. It gave it £15 million more, but it hasn’t the firepower. We should be looking at the World Service in the context of soft power and hard power. I was not just being provocative when I suggested in a letter to the Financial Times that we should shift the funding of the World Service to the Ministry of Defence, because that £300 million represents no more than the sonar system on one nuclear submarine. Just think about that—think of the power you could achieve as part of our general strategy in world affairs by giving it £300 million to double its audience. We are missing a massive opportunity, and the opportunity is even greater—Pat alluded to this—because America has defunded the “Voice of America” and it is also defunding its radio stations in South America and Latin America. The opportunity is there. The door is open, and it is a very inexpensive way of Britain not only maintaining a certain position in the world but broadcasting its liberal democratic values. That is even more important than the influence of the country. We should be more concerned about that than anything else when we look at the politics of the world at the moment. There is a big opportunity, but it is being totally ignored at the moment.

I was monitoring the Hungarian election recently, and the media there, after 16 years, is so lopsided. Hopefully, it is moving back with the victory of the new guy. Does the World Service not have some naysayers? In the dodgy dossier, BBC Arabic came in for a lot of criticism.

It came into criticism over some of the behaviours and some of the things that were happening. I am not going to go into the weeds of the BBC’s internal disciplinary processes, but it is telling that the BBC reporters we see on television are only there on the basis that it does not go out on BBC Persian. The Iranians let them in on the understanding that it does not go out on the service that serves people in Iran, and that shows you the influence of BBC Persian in Iran; they want to actually block them.

That is seen as very valuable, and I think that it is uneven. I have been to see BBC Bangla before and, again, they had a role in the fall of that last Government, but some of the principles of the BBC are being diluted because, in America, you have to pay for it; it is behind a paywall and you cannot get things such as the iPlayer for free. That is a bit of a worry, is it not?

I think we are saying that we cannot win at AI as Britain because of the funding, where others are ahead of us. We cannot win, as Pat laid out, against Amazon, Google or Meta, but we can win with the World Service. For only £300 million, we could double the reach of it. That is incredible in terms of the power it could give us as Britain, not to dominate other countries but to give them valid, truth-based and factual information. It is worth seriously considering not only where the funding comes from but how it is boosted.

Also, think about where all that Londonistan stuff is coming from; AI is putting out a version of Britain that none of us understand or recognise. We are being defined by others, and we can choose to allow that to happen or define ourselves.

I feel that world news has less prominence on the BBC we can watch by turning on the telly. Programmes such as “Dateline London” are gone, and we see less and less of a lot of the other foreign coverage.

Cut the budget by 30% and things go.

Right, okay. I also want to ask about—I think it was covered in the opening questions as well—the tinkering with the governance structures and if that could be seen as fiddling while Rome burns. You said that the permanent charter and independent board are all good. How would your proposals with the British Broadcasting Challenge fix the different responsibilities of the BBC board, Ofcom and all those kinds of things?

I believe, and we believe, that there is a problem with the unified board structure. You have had two really testy hearings; you had the BBC here over the Trump dossier and you could not work out who was responsible for what, and you also had S4C here a couple years ago to try to work out what had happened there. Both of those were a result of structures where it is not entirely clear who is accountable, who is responsible, who is cheerleading and who is managing. We have suggested that you could go back to a two-tier system with a managing board and a governing body; at Cardiff University, we have an executive team and a board. That is what we are suggesting, and we also suggest that Ofcom then moves out of the regulation of BBC content—the board can do that because they are not involved in management decisions—and Ofcom deals with all the market impact stuff. The fundamental thing we want to get out of this is a truly independent BBC. We believe that we should end the process of board members being appointed by the Government. We believe that board members should be appointed by an independent body and its recommendations should come here, before the Select Committee, for democratic engagement. If the Secretary of State chooses to veto them, they only have very limited powers and have to make those reasons public. We believe that that helps to bridge the trust gap we have with the public, for whom one of the most important things about the BBC is independence from Government, yet only 40% believe that it is. We believe that independent appointments with an independent funding mechanism are how you build differentiation between the BBC and the Government. This Committee will play the role of considering nominees to that board because, at the moment, the only way you can get rid of a Government-appointed board member is through the King-in-Council on three really technical legal terms of incapacity, which makes it nigh-on-impossible. That makes no sense, and it fundamentally undermines trust in the BBC.

How many pre-appointment hearings would that mean our Committee would have to do?

There are 12 members of the board—

Asking for a friend.

I love a pre-appointment hearing. We have done so many in the past.

It would be nice to be asked, wouldn’t it?

Well, we’ve got nothing better to do, have we?

Alex and Sir Peter, what is your opinion of two-tier versus unitary? Also, how can you get rid of a chair who is not up to the job? Which of these structures would be better?

My instinct would be that the less baroque the arrangement, the better. We have agreed about everything so far, haven’t we, Pat? Which is quite dangerous.

Let’s see how this goes.

I have my reservations about multiple boards. You have an internal executive board anyway—that is how a chief executive or a director general runs their business, or indeed, the chief executive of Channel 4. They have their management board. I think you probably only need one board. I think Pat has said some very good things about appointments. I think it is probably reasonable for the Government to appoint the chair, as they do for a lot of other public institutions, but the other members of the board should be part of an independent process, not the same as the current practice, that is not really governed by the Government at all. I think that would strengthen the independence.

Channel 4 runs with a unitary board. I think you have been on it in the past, Peter? We didn’t overlap.

Yes, I have.

I was both CEO and editor-of-chief. The chair and the independent board members were appointed by Ofcom and signed off by the DCMS and that process worked very well. You have rolling tenures. You don’t appoint all at once, so that can see you through some changes in Government, which of course occur more frequently now than they used to. That means that you have changes in who made the appointments or who signed them off. But obviously we did not have the BBC system, which is that four members are appointed directly by the Government. I would suggest that it would be better for the perception of interference and the reality of independence if they were appointed independently. But I agree with Peter that the chair probably has to be signed off by the Government.

Did you have staff members on the board when you were at Channel 4?

No. Well—myself; chief content officer; the COO. But not in the sense of general staff members. Just executives.

Is there not an argument for that being a good thing? Part of the criticism of the new DG is that he has never made a programme? He is not a journalist.

I am sure that he will have a strong team and that strong executive team will have editorial experience. That is what you normally do as a chief executive—you bring in that experience around you.

Any comments on workers on boards?

Workers on boards is a good thing on the right board, but it depends on the nature of the organisation. If you are going to put a worker on the board, which worker? Which bit do they represent? On whose behalf do they speak? It is more complicated than it sounds. Can I pick up a final point on this independence thing? One of the areas that does not get much discussed is BBC Studios and its ability to borrow in order to invest and in order to grow. BBC Studios is not sleeping any more, but it is sort of a slumbering giant. Look at what is happening in America in terms of the amount of investment that is going into production entities in order to get scale. Currently, because of the governance arrangements—because there is so much Government involvement in terms of BBC appointments—the BBC’s borrowing is considered part of the public sector borrowing requirement, which absolutely constrains its ability to act in a commercial way. It is a bit half-pregnant, in terms of BBC Studios. One of the reasons, as I understand it, is this connection between how many of the roles are appointed by the Government, and the Government setting the fee. All of that then leads to the BBC then being within the public sector borrowing requirement, which then stifles its own growth. Consideration of how it could be set free, or how BBC Studios could be set free, could deliver more growth, more economic activity, and a lower call on the public purse.

Should there be a deputy director general? Tim Davie had a lot on his plate.

Yes, there should and he said he is going to appoint one.

Good.

I have students and elected representatives on the board at Cardiff University, so I know it is possible. It needs to be part of the culture of the whole institution, so that works all the way through.

I also chair the board of a university, and we are also happy to have students on the board. The experience—I would be interested to know if you agree with this—of having workers on boards, which is quite commonplace on the continent of Europe, is that a lot of the work, and indeed critical discussions, tend to get pushed down to the sub-committees of the company: audit and risk or performance sub-committees. It can, in some cases, make what is going on more obscure rather than more open, so you would need to ensure, were you going to do such a thing—particularly in a public institution like the BBC, where openness is really critical—that that was not the result, and that the law of unintended consequences did not intervene. That can happen in Europe.

I think it is a valid point. It is not something that we have looked at, but I am not going to argue with the principle.

Good—otherwise we will send Vicky in to bat.

Sir Peter, we have spoken about the BBC being one of the most trusted and prominent brands in the world. What is your view on the current level of strategic partnerships between the BBC and other PSBs?

I am glad you asked that question; this came up in your earlier panel. My personal view, and I think that of quite a lot of analysts, is that in the era of the domination of mainly American streaming services, most European countries can only expect to have at the most two economically healthy domestic broadcasters—possibly only one. If we want to have healthy public service broadcasting, we need to see more consolidation among our public service media. I declare an interest as an ITV shareholder, and I am an ex-chair of ITV, but I personally welcome the merger of ITV and Sky because I see it as part of that consolidation process. Then we move on to the BBC. You rightly ask about collaboration. Here is the key: if most programmes will in the future be delivered via streaming services, what does it take to have a successful streaming service? Well, you need to be able to commission drama at £4 million, £5 million or £6 million an hour, which is what premium drama costs now. Our public service broadcasters cannot afford that at the moment. You need to have a good library and the ability to acquire good programmes, and probably to have some sport, which is covered by the obligation of certain sporting events to be on public service broadcasting. I would like to see iPlayer extended. I would like to see more collaboration. I do not want to see the BBC swallow up Channel 4 because I think having multiple sources of commissioning and points of view is a good thing, but UKTV and Channel 4 already share advertising services. I would like to see UKTV and Channel 4 content branded as such on a broader streaming service. I think there could be huge benefits from that. In time, Channel 5 might join that too—who knows?

What would be the benefits of that to the UK commercial PSBs, and what might be the risks?

The benefits are that we will have a national champion streaming service that can compete with the other streaming services—particularly in commissioning power and acquisition, but also in branding. The bigger the brand of the streaming service, the more it can successfully promulgate public service programmes, which everyone giving evidence today says they believe in. The risk would be borne out in the fact that until now, the public service broadcasters have not been good at collaborating at all. It is human nature—you have your own organisation and your own brand; why would you want to share it? There are risks around that, but the benefits outweigh the risks, in my opinion. Alex may have a different view.

Thank you, Peter Bazalgette. We should always go to the question of what is good for the audience. At the moment, we have four PSBs in the UK. One of those is now owned by Americans. ITV is about to merge with Sky and will be owned by Americans. That is important. The landscape is changing very quickly. We might quite quickly be in a position where two PSBs that are focused on the output for UK audiences are funded differently. Then you have to ask, “Should they be separated?” Yes, probably, to keep the diversity of supply. Do they do different things for different groups? Yes, very much so. Are they funded differently? Yes. That is important because you need to look at whether the audience would get more or less if those things were put together. I think they get more through their being apart. I then go to, “Should you combine distribution?” To Peter’s point about whether you can reach more people at less cost with more content if you combine distribution in a souped-up player, I should say that I very much believe that you can get to more people like that. I spent a long time working on bringing UKTV content on to the Channel 4 player. That has now been achieved—after probably eight years of discussion, at a conservative guess. That is important because it is the beginning of asking, “How can you put more content together to reach broader audiences more easily with really good content?” The complexity of doing that on iPlayer will take some time, if that is what the BBC wishes to pursue. The BBC is a very large organisation. It has been said before that partnership is not something the BBC does with you; it is something they do to you. You have all heard that gag. Strategically, I think the answer for the audience is to combine resources on distribution, not on organisations. You heard in the earlier session that if you were to do that, you need to think about how you do it in a way where the considerations of how organisations partner are paid a lot of attention so that we end up with a stronger system and ensure that we continue to build a stronger system here, because it is one of our great assets.

One of the strengths of the current ecosystem is that there are different models. Channel 4 has advertising but no shareholders. ITV has advertising with shareholders. Sky is largely subscription with advertising. The BBC is totally different again. Channel 5 is already owned by Paramount Plus. They could easily get woven into whatever Paramount do, especially as they are going to own HBO and CNN. You can see that they will want to have their own mega app. Likewise, you can see that they may want to consolidate Peacock, which is NBC’s parent streaming service, Sky and ITV into one proposition. That leaves the BBC and Channel 4. I think there are benefits of scale and reach. I would not interfere with the business models. It is really important that Channel 4 continues to be Channel 4. You need that different voice in the market. It does things that the BBC cannot do, and that is really important. However, there are savings to be made. If you can get there by consolidating the back end and the platforms, you can extend the reach. That ultimately means more money for programmes, which is where we all want to end up.

We talked about the fact that there is an element of risk aversion. Looking at the exemplars of acquisitions, focus of content and economies of scale and how other actors are scaling up in the marketplace, do you feel that there is a blueprint for the BBC?

Most of the American ones are loaded with debt.

That is not the blueprint we want.

That is not the blueprint you want. You need an intelligent conversation between intelligent people about audiences.

If you look at those platforms—the Channel 4 player or what was the UKTV player on the BBC—as a broadcaster, you are paying to make them available in 30 different technical versions. How does it work on iPhone? How does it work on Samsung phone? How does it work on this kind of television? You are paying money to be technically ready for a version of your app in all those places. For example, if you combined distribution, could you reduce some of those costs, even while keeping the organisations completely separate and independent? There are questions for us about how that collaboration could benefit UK PSBs.

It also makes it regulatorily easier to say, “Take this one app as opposed to these two, three, four or five apps.”

What is the difference between that and the Kangaroo proposal?

Nothing.

Nothing—we blew it.

The only difference is that, if Kangaroo had happened, it would now be a world-beating, dominant product that would have billions of pounds to commission many dramas at £400 million an hour. It was the most massively wasted opportunity and condemnation of a competition authority ever invented or talked about in the history the world.

What he said.

You do not have to sit on the fence when you answer that!

Can I add a point about the iPlayer model? We could show some imagination in the way that BBC programmes are distributed, and in what revenue comes from them. Forty years ago, if a BBC programme was made, you would see it free to air—you would pay the licence fee for it, obviously—and you would see it three or four times if it got repeated on a channel. If you wanted to watch “Doctor Who” after that, you had to buy the DVD; it is a perfectly established principle of the past. The question is whether BBC content on the iPlayer should, after a certain window—30 days, 60 days or 120 days: take your pick—be supported either by advertising or by a payment method. It is perfectly reasonable for the licence fee to cover free-to-air delivery of programmes to licence fee payers, but after a certain point, because this principle was established many years ago, there could be additional revenues gained from it. I think the technology is now there.

That could help BBC studios make more money.

Yes. It is not a complete panacea, but it could add to the revenues.

Do not forget that they are monetising it with adverts on UKTV, and they are selling it and getting revenue through Amazon and other places, so the question would be—

It is the same principle, Pat.

I am saying that the principle exists; whether the money—

And on YouTube.

I do not know whether the gain would be significant, given that they are already monetising through similar mechanisms.

That brings us to the end. You have been really patient with all our questions today. You may have heard what I said to our previous panel: are there any questions that we should have asked you, any points that you wanted to land or anything that you want to put on our radar before we allow you to escape? Baz?

Let us get the higher purpose—the why—of the BBC into the charter and into the public debate: not what it does, but why it does it and what those public benefits are.

Push; be ambitious. This is a perilous moment, and we have to rise to the challenge. We should be ambitious, because this is one of the few areas where we are still world leading. There is a win for everybody if we get it right, and there are not many wins at the moment.