‘Bizarre’ BBC licence fee deal will harm programme making, says analyst

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jul/07/bizarre-bbc-licence-fee-deal-programme-making

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The government’s deal with the BBC over the licence fee was “bizarre” and will see programme making and journalism cut, according to evidence given to the Lords communications committee by industry analyst Claire Enders.

“I am very happy the BBC is doing the best it can, but any decline in income goes directly into programme making,” said Enders. “This decline will hit programming making, journalism, the numbers of people that can be trained.”

Enders said that no business would have its revenues set before deciding what it needed to do, and the process put the corporation at a huge disadvantage when competing against other broadcasters.

“The money side is, bizarrely, completely divorced from the purposes and the mission side,” she told the committee. “There isn’t a business that would say ‘I’m going to come up with a number here and say this is my yearly revenue, I’m going to cut my cloth to fit it’. You run a business by serving your customers.”

In a report published in February, the culture, media and sport select committee – then led by new culture secretary John Whittingdale who unveiled the latest deal – said any new settlement should be decided in a transparent way, following what has been described as a “shotgun” deal in 2010. Enders criticised the way the latest deal was done without public consultation for a second time, and said politicians were far less engaged with the BBC than the general public.

“The people who least consume [the BBC] and have the most bizarre ideas about it tend to be politicians – they are too busy,” she told the committee.

“Most of the public, if they really understood they never have any say in the BBC licence fee, and barely any say in what it does, because you can’t divorce the two… I think they would be very surprised,” said Enders.