Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has told MPs the government is committed to ensuring the BBC is adequately and sustainably funded for the future.
Options could include expanding the scope of the Licence Fee to cover watching content on commercial streaming services, requiring the BBC to increase the commercialisation of its output and services, or imposing “a charge on top” of subscriptions to services such as Netflix.
However Nandy reiterated her opposition to imposing a direct levy on the streamers, moving from the current Licence Fee to a new household tax or levy, or funding the BBC from general taxation.
She made the comments while appearing before Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport committee to answer questions about her department’s ongoing review of the BBC’s Royal Charter.
The periodic review includes the broadcaster’s financing, remit and operating model and has been used by previous governments to set obligations to help with the digital switchover and to open up BBC’s pay to public scrutiny, a move BBC management fiercely resisted.
As part of the current review, the government issued a public consultation which appeared to suggest the Licence Fee will continue to play a major part in the BBC’s funding during the next Charter period.
Parallel to the review, the committee has been conducting its own work on the same subject, during which it’s spoken to broadcast executives, BBC management, producers and other industry experts.
During Monday’s meeting committee members raised several points stemming from those earlier sessions with Nandy.
The minister said she was “looking at” a range of options and stressed that none of her comments should be interpreted as the government having decided on any specific funding model, insisting it “genuinely” has not formed a final view.
While accepting there were “limits” to the potential commercialisation of BBC services, she said there was scope for the broadcaster to do “more” in this area including by increased licensing of its archives to third parties or making the archive available “for a fee” to AI platforms.
However she said “all of this rests on the BBC having sufficient income to invest in the short term.”
Asked by one committee member about her suggestion of imposing a charge on top of streaming services, Nandy said officials were still modelling its likely impact.
Separately she agreed there were “fair challenges” about the BBC’s use of public money to compete with commercial broadcasters to buy the rights to US shows, but said that in her view the BBC is “not just the last resort to compensate for market failure”.
Nandy also used the appearance to reconfirm that “every decade” the BBC’s funding, obligations and operating model will still be reviewed by ministers despite her previous commitment to creating a permanent Charter.
Under current arrangements, if changes to the Charter aren’t agreed in time the BBC would cease to exist and the Culture secretary would be empowered to dispose of its assets.
Nandy said that references to a permanent Charter simply means the BBC would not come to an end in such a scenario but doesn’t in any way limit the freedom of future governments to carry out reviews of how the BBC operates or is funded.
Asked about moving responsibility for setting the level of the Licence Fee from ministers to an independent body, Nandy said ministerial control meant the decision was taken with a wider awareness of household finances and pressures, and appeared to suggest that a new body might not approach the matter in the same way.
The idea is often proposed as a way of limiting the role a future government which is hostile to the BBC would play in its future. However Nandy said while some parties might not share her support for the corporation, that was simply the nature of democracy.