flickr.Robert Sharp / English PEN. Some rights reserved.This week Culture Secretary John Whittingdale dropped what appears to be a bombshell about the financial settlement agreed with the BBC in the Summer. “What happened in July was not the licence fee settlement,” he told the Media Show’s Steve Hewlett. “We made it quite clear that the future level of the Licence Fee would be dependent on the outcome of Charter Review.” This apparent reversal of Whittingdale’s previous position will come as something of a surprise to the BBC whose Director-General Lord Hall told staff in July that: “Now we have fixed the funding settlement, the debate moves on to what the BBC does with that funding.”
At the time the Government did nothing to correct the impression widely shared by the BBC, the Trust and the media that a definitive licence fee settlement had been reached. Indeed, Whittingdale told the House of Commons the agreement gave the BBC: “some of the guarantees it needs about its future financing and the system by which the licence fee is raised.” (Note that “some”)
The debate then focussed on the question of whether the BBC should assume responsibility for implementing Government social policy (the free TV licences for the over-75s) and financial implications of the settlement: was the Corporation about to be cut to ribbons, or had it emerged relatively unscathed?
