In much of Eastern Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, governments attempted to make daily life affordable by setting prices for essentials. The stated intention was straightforward: protect households from volatility, maintain stability, and keep basic goods within reach. The lived experience was often different. Where prices could not move to reflect scarcity, scarcity did not disappear. It moved into queues, rationing, informal networks, and a steady growth in administrative discretion about who got what, when, and on what terms.
This is not a claim that today’s Britain resembles a command economy. It is a question about institutional logic. When a system treats price and allocation as matters for central decision, rather than outcomes of decentralised exchange, it tends to generate secondary consequences that are not always visible in the official story. The costs reappear elsewhere: in enforcement, in governance burden, in reduced responsiveness, and in the gradual normalisation of “workarounds” as part of everyday life.
It is worth asking whether UK media policy, and the BBC in particular, still carries some of this institutional logic. Not in the content, but in the structure. Not by explicit censorship, but by a centrally governed model of provision coupled to a compulsory funding mechanism that is, in practice, difficult for citizens to refuse without legal risk.
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A Statutory Charge, Not A Voluntary Exchange
The TV licence is not a subscription that a household chooses because it prefers one service over another. It is a statutory requirement triggered by defined types of use, enforced through a legal regime in which evasion remains a criminal offence under the Communications Act 2003. The Perry Review sets out this basis and the scale of penalties, and Parliament continues to scrutinise the effectiveness and legitimacy of enforcement practice as viewing habits fragment. The Public Accounts Committee has recently warned that the traditional enforcement model is becoming less effective and has not translated into improved compliance outcomes.
Whatever one’s view of the BBC’s public purposes, this is an unusual arrangement in a modern media market. A citizen can dislike a private streaming service and walk away. They can switch news brands. They can stop paying. That right to exit is not a minor feature of markets. It is one of the key ways that providers are disciplined to remain responsive, legible, and accountable to those they serve.
When payment is compelled through law, the relationship changes. The customer becomes something closer to a captive funder. The provider becomes something closer to a protected incumbent. And public argument tends to drift away from performance and toward entitlement: what the institution “must” be allowed to do because it is the institution.
The news that YouTube has passed all BBC Television services combined in the UK, indicates that the shift to a post-scarcity model of media engagement is well underway.
Central Governance Produces Central Incentives
The BBC’s constitutional basis remains the Royal Charter and the Framework Agreement, with external regulation by Ofcom within an operating framework. The BBC is not run by a “central committee” in any literal sense. It has a unitary board and well-defined governance arrangements. But the policy question is not whether the BBC resembles a party-state structure. The question is whether the BBC is still treated, in UK media policy, as the central instrument through which the state fulfils a public purpose that could be met through multiple providers under conditions of fair competition and genuine plurality.
Put simply: are we regulating media to protect citizens, or to protect an institution?
One of the recurring critiques of price control systems is that they often begin with an understandable goal and end with a growing apparatus of compensations: subsidies to patch supply, rationing to patch demand, inspectors to patch evasion, discretionary exemptions to patch politics, and a long chain of administrative fixes that, over time, can become the system’s main product.
Media policy can fall into a similar pattern. If the BBC is positioned as the primary carrier of public purpose, the policy environment can quietly tilt to preserve its dominance: spectrum access, prominence regimes, market shaping, and a set of “common sense” assumptions about what must remain protected. These assumptions may be sincere. They may also suppress competition that could serve the public just as well, or better, in a more distributed way.
The Charter Renewal Is A Chance To Test A Serious Alternative
The Government’s Green Paper, Britain’s Story: The Next Chapter, begins the current process of Charter Review and consultation. The current Charter expires on 31 December 2027, with any new Charter intended to take effect from 1 January 2028. The consultation window runs to 10 March 2026. This creates a clear civic moment: a formal opportunity to ask whether the BBC’s funding and governance model should still be treated as the “default setting” for public purpose media.
The discussion tends to polarise quickly. Some argue that only a compulsory levy can secure universality and independence from commercial pressure. Others argue that compulsory funding creates a structural injustice: compelled payment for a service that many citizens do not use in the way the law presumes, or do not value in the way the institution describes. Both positions can be held in good faith. The question that matters for Charter Renewal is more specific.
Is it still necessary for one institution to occupy a privileged position in law, in order for citizens to receive high-quality information, education, culture, and entertainment?
If the answer is “yes,” the burden of proof should be high and evidence-based, because the arrangement is not neutral. It shapes the whole ecosystem.
If the answer is “no,” the conclusion is not that “public purpose” disappears. It is that public purpose becomes a regulatory outcome rather than an institutional entitlement. Which is a very different starting point.
Competition As A Public Interest Tool, Not A Market Slogan
In Western economies, the broad move away from routine price setting and toward competitive markets is now commonly defended on pragmatic grounds. Competition is not magic, and it does not eliminate social obligations. But it can outperform central control at discovering demand, supporting innovation, and preventing stagnation. Crucially, it can reduce the need for enforcement and bureaucratic discretion because people can exit and choose alternatives.
These issues are discussed in Roger Bolton’s Beeb Watch interview with Professor Lee Edwards of the Media Reform Coalition, who favour a structured process of institutional management of opinion and interests in relation to media.
In UK communications regulation, competition is not an afterthought. Ofcom’s general duties include furthering the interests of citizens and consumers, and, where appropriate, promoting competition. Ofcom also has a well-established role in supporting plurality and preventing undue influence, with policy tools linked to media ownership rules and public interest interventions in media mergers.
This is the basis for a serious proposition: we can aim for public purpose outcomes through competitive, plural supply, with the state acting chiefly to ensure openness, diversity, and fair access to distribution, rather than acting as the sponsor and protector of a single dominant provider.
If that sounds abstract, it becomes concrete when translated into everyday questions. What would it mean to treat the BBC as one provider among many, competing on merit, while ensuring that certain outcomes remain protected by regulation? Those outcomes could include diversity of viewpoints, wide availability of trusted news and civic information, cultural expression, education, accessibility, and resilience against concentrated ownership or vertically integrated gatekeeping.
We can then ask a harder question: if the public outcomes can be specified, measured, and protected, why does one institution require a compulsory funding privilege to deliver them?
What Would A Post-Compulsion Settlement Need To Solve?
Removing compulsion is not the same as “abolishing the BBC.” It is about withdrawing a legal privilege and redesigning the market and regulatory settlement around citizen outcomes. But any credible alternative would need to address practical issues that supporters of the current model will rightly raise.
One is universality. In a purely subscription market, services can cluster around profitable demographics. Another is the risk of consolidation. Competition can fail if a few dominant firms capture distribution channels, advertising markets, and attention. A third is the strategic role of prominence and platforms. Even if content supply is plural, control of discovery can become a new form of centralisation.
These are not arguments for an enforced licence fee. They are arguments for a regulator with a clear mandate and transparent tools to prevent protectionism, break up or limit undue concentration, and keep supply chains open. In other words, they are arguments for robust competition policy and media plurality rules, properly applied to contemporary platform dynamics.
It is striking that many of the strongest defences of the BBC ultimately depend on a low expectation of what regulation could do if it were designed for a genuinely distributed media economy. The implied claim is often that the UK cannot secure diversity, quality, and resilience without a protected incumbent. That claim deserves scrutiny because it places the institution above the system.
From “Public Service Media” To “Public Purpose Media”
There is a further conceptual shift worth testing. “Public service” language can quietly presume a designated provider. “Public purpose” language starts with outcomes and then asks what mix of providers, governance arrangements, and market structures can best deliver them.
In a public purpose model, the role of the state is not to act as a sponsor of a single voice. It is to protect the conditions under which many voices can thrive without capture, without monopoly, and without vertical integration closing off routes to audiences. It is to ensure that the information environment remains contestable, and that citizens are not pushed into a single institutional relationship to receive what should be a distributed civic resource.
This is where the analogy with price controls becomes useful again. If the public goal is affordability, the question is not only “what price do we set?” It is “what happens to supply, quality, and accountability once the price mechanism is overridden?” In media, if the public goal is civic value, the question is not only “what must the BBC be?” It is “what happens to plurality, innovation, and trust when one institution sits inside a privileged funding and regulatory settlement?”
The Civic Question: Are We Protecting Citizens, Or Protecting A Settlement?
Charter Renewal is often framed as an argument about the BBC’s identity. It may be more useful to frame it as an argument about the UK’s tolerance for centralised control in a domain that shapes culture, politics, and public understanding.
A modern, confident democracy should be capable of designing a media environment where public purpose is achieved without compelled payment to a single provider. It should be capable of enforcing open and fair competition, preventing excessive concentration, and sustaining plurality through clear regulatory tests rather than inherited institutional privilege.
The argument for removing the last vestiges of state control of media is not a claim that the state has no role. It is a claim that the state’s role should be to keep the system open and diverse, not to protect a single institution through compulsion and settlement design.
So the discussion to have during this Charter Review is not a simple “for or against the BBC.” It is a design question.
If citizens could take their business elsewhere in a genuinely free market exchange, and if Ofcom and wider competition policy were sharpened to prevent protectionism, ownership concentration, and vertically integrated choke points, would we be more likely to see a resilient, trustworthy, plural media ecology?
Or do we believe, in practice, that civic media value depends on an exceptional institution that must be insulated from the disciplines of choice?
That is the question a serious Charter Renewal should be prepared to answer in public.
Endnotes
1 UK Government consultation page for Britain’s Story: The Next Chapter (BBC Royal Charter Review Green Paper, published 16 December 2025, consultation closes 10 March 2026).
2 Accessible PDF of the Green Paper confirming Charter expiry (31 December 2027) and proposed start date for a new Charter (1 January 2028).
3 BBC Charter and Framework Agreement publication page (including updates recorded in December 2025).
4 House of Commons Library briefing on the future of the BBC licence fee (including current consultation deadline).
5 Perry Review: legal basis of TV licence evasion as a criminal offence under the Communications Act 2003 and the maximum fine level referenced in the report.
6 Public Accounts Committee statement on BBC licence fee collection and enforcement becoming less effective (including reported volume of visits and outcomes).
7 Communications Act 2003 explanatory notes on Ofcom’s general duties: furthering citizen and consumer interests, including promoting competition where appropriate.
8 Ofcom overview page on media plurality and the rationale of ownership rules to protect diversity of viewpoints and prevent undue influence.
9 DCMS consultation outcome page on updating the media mergers regime, referencing Ofcom’s plurality duty under section 3 of the Communications Act 2003.