It's done what it set out to: be a cool modern Good Housekeeping for a certain kind of urban metropolitan sophisticate. They've pressed all the key buttons and it's done with that Cond?ast confidence. I would buy it and read it in the bath and I can't say that about many magazines.". It has been an interesting year. Twelve months ago, I and my colleagues on the Broadcasting Policy Group published a far-reaching report, Beyond The Charter, on the future of the BBC. It created something of an outcry and was widely attacked as being impossibly radical Yet already many of our ideas have become common currency It has been an interesting year.
Yet already many of our ideas have become common currency. Central to our argument was that it was public service programming, not the BBC, that needed attention. Our key objectives were plurality of supply and contestability of funding. The increasing dominance of the BBC in public service programming was unhealthy, and only competition offered transparency, comparability and accountability in the way public money was spent.Ofcom went some of the way down this road, proposing a new publicly-funded body, the Public Service Publisher But it failed to address the issue of accountability. Happily, the Burns Committee, set up by the Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, grasped this nettle, with a proposal very similar to the Public Broadcasting Authority, which we on the BPG had suggested. They came up with the Public Service Broadcasting Commission, which would receive the licence fee and allocate it on contestable principles between the BBC and other applicants.Burns followed the same logical path as the BPG, in recommending that this would be the body to which the BBC would be accountable for its public service offerings, with Ofcom regulating all other issues. Burns (like Ofcom and now last week's Green Paper) followed the BPG's proposal that the BBC Governors should become a mix of executives and non-executives, like Channel 4.However, the Green Paper chose one of the options rejected by Burns as a mechanism for BBC regulation - the BBC Trust. Burns had preferred a broad external body to avoid an inward-looking entity that might be neither equipped nor inclined to take full account of the wider creative economy or the concerns of commercial competitors.
The BPG's logic was very similar.The Green Paper also chose to guarantee the BBC its licence fee for 10 years, whereas Ofcom and Burns proposed a five-year review to coincide with the presumed switchover to digital in 2011/2. But before the BBC celebrates too loudly, it should reflect that governments cannot bind their successors. Labour unravelled the last BBC licence fee settlement.Michael Grade tried to find a version of the Governors that solved the regulator/cheerleader conundrum, but the Green Paper reflects the consensus that no single body can fulfil both functions. His role as chairman of the new trust will be small compensation.Grade also urged the Government to "follow the money", implying that guaranteed finance underpinned independence For the moment he has won that battle. But this risks "fetishising" BBC independence, elevating it to an absolute and primary requirement, irrespective of all other considerations.We all know that the BBC is capable of abusing its independence. It has announced reform of its unconvincing internal complaints procedures twice in 12 months.