Let’s not be coy, the demise of the Conservative government in the UK was a relief to the BBC. The relationship between the two was tense, at best, wilfully frictional at worst.The next Charter review begins this year, and the BBC will feel more relaxed about preserving the universal licence fee intact with a Labour government. But this is not an overly ideological government, it likes to think it is a problem-solving government. There is a problem with prison overcrowding, and the family and societal damage inflicted by imprisoning mothers is obvious. Imprisoning non-licence payers – which affects women disproportionately – is beyond unreasonable and the government has already signalled it will end it.The BBC argues this will increase non-payment. Probably so, but it is not like non-payment isn’t on the rise already. This is most prevalent among the young who don’t see the value when their consumption of BBC product is lower, and a lot of their consumption is on devices they don’t associate with a ‘broadcast’ licence fee.The BBC, and the government, faces some unpalatable choices: Drop the licence fee and go for ads or subscribers, or both; Blend the licence fee with either or both; Fund directly, perhaps by taxing other content providers? Or keep the licence fee only, or perhaps a smaller licence fee, in return for the BBC doing the very best of what others will not do?An historic BBC problem was that it couldn’t see a lawn without parking its tax funded tanks on it. That’s partly how it got so unpopular with commercial rivals, who – Mr Murdoch for example – had a lot of influence on government. It was dumb empire building that they could not afford either financially or politically.More recently they seemed to have learned their lesson, as they recognised that their funding was the equivalent of bringing a knife to a gun fight with the streamers. But there are still many very valuable things that they do very well, partly because of their method of funding.That’s why it was so disappointing to see them being ‘caught out’ spending public money to big up their news apps over commercial rivals in all the main app stores. The losers are often local news providers – a sector that Ofcom believes has already been badly damaged by BBC over-reach. The BBC is not short of targets where it could aim its publicly funded content to do a better job than others. Why does it so consistently aim at the wrong ones and, in doing so, risk a bullet to its own foot?
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