BBC cops it in Boris’s “Operation Save Big Dog”

After a calamitous few weeks for Boris Johnson, Operation Save Big Dog ground into gear today – a slew of populist policies designed to get backbench MPs and voters back on side in the wake of the “partygate” scandal and move the news agenda on from boozing and hypocrisy at the heart of government. One of those measures, announced by Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary, is the long-threatened and much-debated scrapping of the BBC license fee.

Everyone with a television or who watches iPlayer is currently required by law to pay the levy which raises £3.2bn a year from 27 million households. The new plan is to freeze the license fee at £159 a year until 2024, a real terms cut. It would then rise in line with inflation until 2027, at which point the fee would be scrapped and replaced with a different funding model, yet to be decided.

The move will mean hundreds of millions of pounds of lost funding in the next few years and an uncertain financial future for the Beeb.

While some on the Tory benches wished Dorries had gone further, critics have pointed out what the public stands to lose. Among them was BBC Breakfast presenter, Dan Walker, who posted a picture on Twitter showing all the myriad services the Beeb provides, along with the caption: “43p a day”.

Critics would say this misses the point. You may get a cornucopia of channels for your compulsory fee, but consumers pay for quality over quantity. They don’t subscribe to lots of content providers on the off-chance one of them throws up something they like.

Why shouldn’t the BBC be forced to balance the books like its competitors? As Chris Snowden of the IEA puts it, “A company that is confident in its product does not require legal compulsion.” The 200,000 households a year cancelling their license fee suggests many think of it as a bad deal.

Yet defenders of the license fee see the BBC as fundamentally different from the likes of Netflix, Disney and Amazon. It is a public service, which justifies its unique funding arrangement.

For instance, during lockdown the BBC put on the biggest educational programming drive in its history, reaching children with curriculum-related content who couldn’t access the internet. Valuable but commercially unviable broadcasting like this is unlikely to survive in a free market.

Many are pragmatic about the drawbacks of the license fee but see any other funding model (subscription service, part-privatisation, direct government funding) as opening up the BBC – which makes strenuous efforts to be impartial – to influence from advertisers, shareholders and political interests.

Besides, the Corporation already faces fierce creative competition from streaming giants pushing up the cost of programme-making and forcing the BBC to make hefty cuts behind the scenes.  

This latest move will turbo-charge the debate. But it’s worth remembering why we are talking about BBC funding at all. The government has thrown policies at the wall with the hope something will stick, deflecting heat from a prime minister still under intense pressure and who’s likely to be scrapped long before the license fee.