The HQ of Ofcom, which could soon be regulating the BBC. Credit: Flickr / Will Master
The good folk at the Cambridge University Conservative Association must be a little disappointed. Having listened to culture secretary John Whittingdale tell them only last month that the disappearance of the BBC was “a tempting prospect”, they will now have noticed that his white paper on the future of the BBC is planning to do no such thing.
Instead, Whittingdale has praised the BBC for being a “revered national institution, and familiar treasured companion” and has produced a document that will, in large part, satisfy the executives in Old Broadcasting House. It awards the BBC an eleven-year charter – purposefully designed to insulate it from the politics of the electoral cycle – and increases licence fee revenue in line with inflation for at least the next five years. As trailed for some months, it scraps the much-maligned BBC Trust and replaces it with a twin structure: a unitary board that will oversee the strategy, activity and everyday output of the BBC and an external regulator in the shape of Ofcom.
