The House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s report on the BBC Royal Charter Review contains an important recognition: the media environment in which the BBC operates has changed fundamentally.
Audiences have more choices, viewing habits are fragmenting, fewer households are paying the television licence fee, and television, audio and online media are converging. The Committee describes the Charter Review as a significant fork in the road for the BBC and argues that simply allowing the Corporation to diminish is not an adequate response.
Decentered Media agrees that doing nothing is not an adequate response. Where we differ is over the direction of travel.
The Committee repeatedly identifies legitimate public-policy problems and then considers giving the BBC another responsibility for dealing with them. Innovation, the creator economy, media literacy, artificial intelligence literacy, misinformation, international commercial expansion, regional economic development, local news and technological development all come within the gravitational field of the BBC.
The danger is that the Charter Review becomes an exercise in preserving the scale of the BBC rather than asking a more fundamental question: what public purposes should publicly supported media fulfil in the twenty-first century, and which organisations are best placed to fulfil them? That distinction matters.
Public service media is a purpose. The BBC is an institution. The two should not be treated as synonymous.
Restore The BBC’s Core Purpose
Decentered Media’s starting point is not that the BBC should be dismantled or subjected to an institutional axe. Quite the opposite.
The BBC should be restored to a clear and defensible role as a major producer and commissioner of programme content for audiences across the United Kingdom, together with the distinctive international public-service function provided by the BBC World Service.
News, current affairs, drama, documentary, entertainment, children’s programming, radio, cultural programming and other forms of public-service content are recognisably within that remit.
The problem comes when the BBC is expected to become simultaneously a broadcaster, technology laboratory, industrial development agency, media-literacy organisation, international commercial conglomerate, regional regeneration mechanism and arbiter of the wider media ecology.
Institutional expansion of this kind eventually creates a question of legitimacy. If a public institution has privileged access to compulsory or quasi-compulsory funding, the boundaries around what that institution is expected to do should be clearer, not progressively wider.
The BBC Should Not Be An Industrial Development Agency
The Committee recognises some of this difficulty. It does not support creating a BBC public purpose explicitly based on economic growth, although it proposes a new purpose around innovation and technology. It also discusses the BBC’s contribution to skills, production and the wider creative economy. Decentered Media would draw the boundary more firmly.
The BBC should cease to be used as an industrial development agency. There are legitimate reasons for government to support independent production, regional creative economies, production infrastructure, technical experimentation, training and new media enterprises. But these activities should be undertaken through bodies established independently of the BBC.
Public investment intended to develop the media economy should be contestable and plural:
- If production infrastructure is required in the English regions and nations, create independent facilities.
- If early-stage creative enterprises require investment, establish appropriate development funds.
- If new forms of civic technology need research and experimentation, commission them independently.
- If local journalism requires support, create mechanisms through which a diversity of organisations can participate.
Public money intended to develop an industrial ecology should not automatically be routed through its largest incumbent institution.
Scale Has Consequences
The size of the BBC cannot be treated as neutral. A very large publicly supported organisation operating simultaneously in television, radio, online publishing, podcasting, streaming, news, entertainment, education and international production inevitably changes the market around it.
The Committee acknowledges one manifestation of this issue when discussing local journalism. It says the BBC should support rather than undercut or replace other regulated news providers. It also records disagreement about the extent to which BBC expansion has displaced commercial local journalism. That is an important discussion, but it should be widened beyond newspapers.
Independent podcasts, community broadcasters, civic media organisations, specialist publishers, local video producers and emerging digital services all operate within the same attention economy. When public resources, skills, infrastructure and commissioning power are disproportionately concentrated in one organisation, smaller organisations find it more difficult to establish the critical mass necessary to survive.
This is particularly significant because the United Kingdom has chronically underinvested in the social and civic market for alternative forms of media. The question is therefore not simply whether the BBC individually produces worthwhile programmes. It plainly does.
The question is what else could exist if part of the public investment presently concentrated around one institutional centre was distributed through a wider ecology.
Universality Does Not Mean Universal Consumption
This distinction becomes particularly important when considering funding. The Committee recognises that the existing television licence is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Audiences no longer organise their media consumption around possession of a television receiver, while substantial numbers of households declare that they do not require a television licence. The report therefore discusses broadening the funding base and retaining a household levy as a possible longer-term option.
Decentered Media believes a mandatory household levy would create a serious problem of democratic legitimacy. If a future levy is introduced, there should be a straightforward opt-out. A householder should be able to say that they do not wish to subscribe to BBC services. That declaration should be sufficient.
There should be no subsequent interrogation about what programmes they watch, which devices they own or which online services they access. People who opt out should not be repeatedly pursued to demonstrate that their decision is legitimate. This principle matters because public service and compulsory consumption are different concepts.
A society can recognise the importance of public-service media without requiring every citizen to maintain a compulsory subscription relationship with one media institution.
The Right To Apostasy
Discussions about the BBC sometimes take on an almost ecclesiastical character. The institution is spoken about as though supporting it is one of the obligations of national membership. Because the BBC has historically been important, everyone should contribute. Because it provides programmes that many people value, everyone should finance them. Because it is described as universal, withdrawing from it requires justification.
A liberal democracy should be wary of this assumption.
Apostasy is an important democratic principle.
People must be free to withdraw their support from institutions, traditions and cultural practices that other citizens continue to regard highly. That does not require hostility towards the BBC. A person might recognise its historical importance and acknowledge the quality of much of its output while deciding that its services no longer form a meaningful part of their own media life. That choice should be legitimate.
Compelling people to finance a media service they have consciously chosen not to use risks weakening rather than strengthening public consent for public-service broadcasting.
The Myth Of The Whole Nation Watching
Arguments for BBC universality frequently turn towards major entertainment programmes that supposedly demonstrate its capacity to bring the nation together. Strictly Come Dancing and The Traitors are obvious examples. Both are successful programmes. But their success should be put in demographic proportion.
BARB records the highest-rated regular The Traitors episode in 2025 at 9.98 million viewers and Strictly Come Dancing at 8.49 million. The exceptional Celebrity Traitors finale achieved 14.94 million. The Strictly figure is also part of a broader declining pattern. BARB recorded its final at 12.86 million in 2018 and 12.2 million in 2021. The equivalent figures were 10.06 million in 2023 and 9.89 million in 2024 before dropping to 8.49 million in 2025. BARB’s methodology changed in 2025, so those figures should not be regarded as a perfect continuous statistical series, but the direction of audience fragmentation is difficult to ignore.
The Celebrity Traitors result demonstrates that genuinely large shared audiences can still occasionally occur. That is worth recognising.
But exceptional programmes should not be confused with universal reach. Modern Britain has a plural media culture. People watch broadcasters, streaming services and online creators; listen to podcasts and radio; participate in specialist networks; and increasingly assemble their own combinations of media.
Public policy should accommodate that plurality rather than continually expanding one institution in an attempt to recover a mass-media environment that has already changed.
Media Literacy Should Be Independent
The Committee also envisages a greater BBC role in responding to misinformation and disinformation, including activity connected with media and AI literacy. Decentered Media regards this as another example of assigning a legitimate public purpose to the wrong institutional structure.
Media literacy should principally be supported through an independent confederation of civil-society organisations, educators, libraries, researchers, community media organisations, civic media projects and independent media providers. This would distribute expertise rather than centralise it.
It would also provide a lifeline for organisations that already undertake practical media-literacy work but receive little systematic public investment. Community media teaches media literacy by enabling people to make media.
Independent journalism teaches it by exposing readers to processes of evidence, verification and correction. Libraries, schools, universities and civic organisations bring different forms of trusted relationships and expertise.
A plural system is especially important when media literacy touches contested questions about information, authority and trust. The organisation producing national news should not simultaneously become the dominant institution responsible for teaching citizens how to evaluate the media environment in which its own journalism operates.
Parliamentary Accountability Must Mean Something
The Committee proposes making the next Royal Charter permanent rather than allowing it to expire after another fixed term. Its reasoning is that periodic existential Charter negotiations leave the BBC vulnerable to political pressure. It nevertheless proposes periodic reviews of funding and public purposes. This is a halfway position.
Periodic review is welcome, but it is inadequate if Parliament’s democratic supervisory role is simultaneously weakened. There is an important distinction between editorial independence and institutional independence.
Government ministers should not decide which stories BBC journalists report, how those stories are framed or which political arguments broadcasters regard as credible. But it does not follow that a publicly supported national institution should operate beyond meaningful democratic supervision of its purposes, funding, scale and governance. Nor should political appointment automatically be regarded as illegitimate.
Governments derive authority from democratic elections. Where the state owns, finances, guarantees or maintains foundational national institutions, democratic government inevitably has a legitimate interest in determining their broad purposes and holding their leadership to account. This principle is already familiar in other foundational sectors. Rail, water, power and other essential national resources are subject to political direction, regulation or public accountability precisely because decisions about their structure and purpose have public consequences.
That principle does not require day-to-day political management. Neither does it justify partisan interference in journalism. It means that institutional independence cannot become a doctrine under which publicly supported organisations define their own purposes indefinitely.
If Parliament is to approve the constitutional basis of the BBC, parliamentary oversight must have substantive purpose. A permanent Charter should therefore strengthen external democratic scrutiny rather than turn periodic review into a procedural formality. No publicly supported institution should become, in effect, its own judge, jury and executioner when defining whether its activities serve the public interest.
From Centralisation To Federation
There is another structural possibility that deserves considerably more attention than it receives in conventional BBC debates. Instead of regarding the BBC as an increasingly integrated national organisation operating downwards from London and several large production centres, the Corporation could gradually become a federation of substantially autonomous regional and national public-service media providers.
The guiding principle would be distribution rather than concentration. Resources, commissioning authority, editorial capacity and institutional responsibility could be pushed downwards. Regions and nations could develop public-service media around their own civic, cultural and democratic requirements while participating in a common federation for genuinely UK-wide services.
Local public-service provision would cease to be an adjunct of a national broadcaster. It would become one of the foundations from which the wider system was built. This distributionist approach would be compatible with maintaining UK-wide news, major national programming and the World Service. What would change is the assumption that organisational coherence requires the concentration of institutional power. Such a model would also make partnerships with independent, community and civic providers considerably easier to imagine.
Public Purpose Before Institution
The fundamental problem with the Committee report is therefore one of categories. It spends considerable effort asking what the BBC of the future should do. The prior question should be what publicly supported media in the United Kingdom is for.
- Trusted information may be a public purpose.
- Local civic communication may be a public purpose.
- Cultural expression, education, accountability, creative experimentation, universal availability of important information and opportunities for communities to represent themselves may all justify forms of public intervention.
But establishing those purposes does not establish that the BBC should deliver all of them. The institution should follow the purpose.
The purpose should not be constructed around the institution.
This is not an argument for taking an axe to the BBC. It is an argument for restoring the BBC to a role that can command clearer democratic legitimacy: making and commissioning high-quality programme content for UK audiences, providing trusted national services, maintaining an appropriately funded World Service, and participating alongside other organisations in a genuinely plural public-service media ecology.
The future of public-service media should not be a bigger BBC. It should be a more distributed media settlement in which national, regional, local, independent, civic and community providers each have meaningful room to exist. Building that system from the ground up, rather than continually extending a single institution from the centre outwards, should be the guiding principle of the next Charter settlement.