The current BBC Charter Review should not be treated as a narrow exercise in institutional maintenance. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport opened the present consultation on 16 December 2025, it closes on 10 March 2026, and it is intended to inform a new Charter from 1 January 2028, when the current Charter period ends on 31 December 2027. That timetable matters because it offers a rare chance to ask a bigger question than the one now being posed most often. The issue is not only what the BBC needs in order to survive, but what the United Kingdom needs from public purpose media as a whole.
If Charter Renewal is framed only in terms of protecting the BBC’s internal arrangements, then the process will be too limited for the communications environment we now inhabit. The Green Paper asks important questions about trust, accountability, representation, growth and sustainable funding. Those are valid concerns. But they should not be confined to the BBC alone. If public money, public legitimacy and public policy are to be mobilised in defence of public purpose media, then that settlement should extend beyond one corporation and include the wider not-for-private-profit media sector, including independent, civic and community media as production and distribution platforms in their own right.
This matters because the old rationale for broadcasting policy was built on scarcity. Access to the airwaves was limited. Distribution was expensive. Production tools were concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of professional institutions. Under those conditions, gatekeeping could be justified as a practical necessity. That is no longer the whole picture. The UK has moved into a post-broadcast environment in which digital production tools, streaming platforms and low-cost distribution have disrupted inherited flows of communication and invalidated older assumptions about fixed trade-offs in access, quality and control.
Technology has changed the terms of the argument. The central challenge is no longer simply how to manage scarcity. It is how to support a trustworthy, plural and socially useful communications ecology under conditions of relative abundance. Digital life is increasingly defined by a surplus of information and opportunity, which means that policy attention must shift from gatekeeping alone towards governance, accountability and shared public benefit. Community and civic media, in this view, are not anomalies at the edge of the system. They are practical expressions of what a more open media settlement could look like.
That is why the Charter Review should not only ask how to future-proof the BBC. It should ask how to future-proof public purpose media in the round. The BBC remains important. It is a major national institution with a constitutional role, public obligations and substantial reach. But it is not identical with public purpose media itself. A healthy communications system requires more than a single, quasi-state institution, however valued that institution may be. It requires a wider ecology in which citizens, associations, co-operatives, charities, community benefit societies and social enterprises can also establish viable and sustainable media platforms that serve public needs without having to conform to either corporate media logics or Whitehall-led institutional templates.
Community media practice already illustrates this possibility. Community media is rooted in participation, self-determination, mutual support, accountability and meaningful self-representation. It is valuable precisely because it allows people and communities to make media for themselves, rather than waiting to be represented by others. In that sense, community media is not a supplement to democracy. It is one of the ways democratic communication is practised.
This has immediate relevance for Charter Renewal. If the justification for continued state backing of the BBC rests on the claim that trusted media is necessary for democratic life, social understanding and public accountability, then the same justification should support the not-for-private-profit media sector more generally. It should support citizens’ capacity to establish and sustain their own media institutions. It should support shared technical infrastructure, training, distribution pathways, governance support, innovation funds and development models that are open to non-corporate, civic and community-led providers. Public purpose should not be monopolised by one institution. It should be distributed across an ecology.
There is already evidence within UK media policy that such an approach is viable. Community radio, for example, is founded on a not-for-profit basis and is required to demonstrate social gain, enable participation and remain accountable to the communities it serves. It is one of the clearest examples in British broadcasting of a regulated media model tied explicitly to public benefit rather than private return.
Yet policy attention and public subsidy do not follow this logic consistently. Community and civic media are often excluded from the very funding and policy arrangements that claim to support public interest journalism and local media resilience. One of the most widely discussed examples is the BBC Local News Partnership. While funded through the licence fee and presented as a support mechanism for local journalism, it has largely directed resources towards established commercial providers without equivalent investment in capacity building for community and civic media.
This is precisely the kind of question the Charter Review ought to confront. If licence-fee funding, or any successor public funding model, is used to support wider media activity beyond the BBC’s own direct operations, then the conditions attached to that support should be broader than institutional convenience. They should ask whether public resources are developing plural capacity across the whole system. They should ask who is able to access production tools, distribution routes and organisational support. They should ask whether public purpose funding is reinforcing existing hierarchies, or helping new public purpose providers to emerge.
There is also a democratic argument here that is too often ignored. To gain influence within the BBC, an individual generally has to enter the organisation, work within its corporate structure, and spend years accumulating the credibility, status and internal access needed to shape decisions. That may be appropriate within a large institution, but it is not an adequate model of public participation in media.
Citizens may instead wish to build their own independent, self-funded and self-regulated platforms. They may want a local audio service, a civic reporting network, a co-operative publication, or a place-based digital platform that is close to the communities it serves. Policy should not regard such ambitions as peripheral. They are part of the democratic substance of media plurality.
Alternative ownership models already exist that could support this development. Community shares, platform co-operatives, social enterprises and charitable ownership structures can give audiences and contributors a real stake in the media platforms they depend on, while offering alternatives to both investor-driven corporate media and centralised institutional control.
The point, therefore, is not anti-BBC. It is anti-monopoly in the field of public purpose. The BBC should continue to exist as a major national institution, but its renewal should be tied to a wider settlement in which not-for-private-profit media can also flourish. The Charter should therefore be used to articulate a broader public purpose media framework, one that protects BBC independence while also extending legitimacy, support and developmental opportunity to external systems.
That means recognising community and civic media as part of the foundational media ecology of the UK, not as an afterthought to be mentioned only when local trust collapses or commercial provision fails.
Such a shift would be entirely consistent with the wider language of social value that runs through many policy discussions about media and public life. Community and civic media enhance deliberation, participation, representation, belonging, learning and accountability. They are not reducible to content supply. They are institutions of social infrastructure that make it possible for people to communicate in ways that are open, rooted, reciprocal and development-oriented.
The Charter Review should therefore give as much attention to the external system as it gives to the internal system. Questions of governance inside the BBC matter. Questions of funding, regulation and accountability matter. But so do questions of ecosystem design beyond the BBC. Who gets support to make media? Who can own and govern media? Which platforms are recognised as serving public purposes? Which forms of local and civic production are treated as worthy of investment?
If the review fails to ask those questions, it will mistake institutional preservation for systemic reform.
The more ambitious alternative is clear. Renew the BBC, certainly. But renew it as part of a broader public purpose media settlement. Use Charter Renewal to establish principles by which public funding and public recognition can also strengthen independent, civic and community media. Support shared infrastructure and open development pathways for not-for-private-profit media. Accept that in a changed technological environment, citizens should not only receive public service media. They should also be able to create, own, govern and sustain media institutions of their own.
That is what parity of esteem would look like in a foundational media ecology.
Endnotes
Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Britain’s Story: The Next Chapter – BBC Royal Charter Review, Green Paper and Public Consultation. Published 16 December 2025. Consultation open until 10 March 2026.
Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Government launches Charter Review to future-proof the BBC. Published 16 December 2025.
Department for Culture, Media and Sport. BBC Charter and Framework Agreement. Current Charter expires on 31 December 2027.
Watson, R. Community Media Development Problems. Discussion of the shift from scarcity-based broadcasting policy to a post-broadcast digital environment.
Watson, R., Cook, C. and colleagues. When the Goal Is Not to Scale. Analysis of community and civic media development and the limitations of current policy frameworks.
Watson, R. Media for Social Gain and Innovation. Review of social value frameworks and their relevance for community and civic media development.