The Jockey Club was granted a Royal Charter in 1970. The Chartered Institution of Wastes Management followed in 2001. Neither is required to come begging every decade for the honour to be renewed. That absurdity is reserved for the BBC.
A vanishingly small share of the BBC’s audience—which is nearly all of the UK population—could tell you why a Royal Charter is necessary for the BBC’s continuance, or even what a Royal Charter is. But the process of having to reapply for a medieval seal of certification weighs heavily on the organisation, even in the best of times.
And these are not the best of times. The BBC has just lost its director general and head of news in a double decapitation which no one professed to support. Its board of directors is widely perceived to be dysfunctional, its staff demoralised. Its independence has been called into question by both right and left, and by overtly political appointments at the top. Its funding mechanism has to change, yet no alternative is on the table.
A populist current affairs rival, GB News, is snapping at its heels while the supposed regulator of public service broadcasting, Ofcom, is either asleep at the wheel or paralysed by indecision about its own remit.
One of GB News’s highly paid presenters (and shareholders) is Nigel Farage, a potential future prime minister who has repeatedly vowed to “defund” a “slimmed down” BBC and would begin by abolishing the licence fee. Meanwhile, it is not clear whether the current government is paying close attention.
In a parallel political universe it’s possible to imagine that a British Broadcasting Corporation (emphasis added) would have appeal for the right as well as the left. The clue’s in the first word. Who, in their right mind, would want our national conversations and flow of information in the hands (and algorithms) of a tiny number of libertarian, in-it-for-themselves tech bro multibillionaires?
Who, looking across the pond, would want the UK to morph into a country where the elites are well served for good, trustworthy news while the rest frenetically thrash around with whatever is left?
Who, looking at the spread of news deserts created by broken business models, would want to add to the swirl of mis- and disinformation by hobbling a funding system that does offer universally available professionally generated news at a local—as well as national and international—level?
Who, thinking about AI’s startling ability to bamboozle, trick and confuse us, would want to weaken what is still the most trusted platform—the only one which has both the skill and scale to try to keep a polarised society rooted in a basis of agreed facts?
Why, knowing that Russia, China, the Gulf states and Iran are dramatically strengthening their soft power through broadcasting and social media, would anyone seek to enfeeble the World Service?
And so on. The Labour government has just over three years to secure the future of the BBC. It could start by ending the 10-year bodge in which the BBC, unlike the Jockey Club, is in a never-ending cycle of having to make a case for its own existence. Give it a Forever Charter.
Then it should ensure greater political independence by ending the practice of the government appointing more than a third of the BBC board. We’ve seen that movie, and it doesn’t end well.
Still with the board, is it really fit for the purpose of making nuanced editorial judgements? Isn’t it time to abolish the strange little Editorial Standards and Guidance committee—a pantomime horse of executives and non-executives —and replace it with something worthy of a great international news organisation? If you really need external advice on editorial standards, can’t you do better than Michael Prescott, some guy who’s worked in corporate PR for 25 years?
Many public service broadcasters have faced the challenge of moving to a new universal funding model. Commission a review of those transitions and pick one. The government has a massive working majority: use it.
In the longer term, it would be imaginative to explore more radical schemes to entrench the BBC’s independence. Giving every 16-year-old a share in a mutualised BBC at the same time as they got the right to vote might be one.
But there is enough to be getting on with now. In the following pages we invited a few people who have seen the BBC from the inside to contribute their thoughts. It coincides with the government publishing a green paper. Let the debate begin.
I was in the library at Yale when a former BBC colleague texted me: “Prescott, Gibb and Shah in front of the Select Committee.” I put my headphones on, clicked the link and watched.
I saw Michael Prescott, a former independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards committee, describe himself as a “centrist dad”, wearing a strange smile that gradually hardened into a grin of barely suppressed irritation as the MPs’ questions moved from benign to mildly probing. It was Prescott’s leaked memo, which raised concerns about BBC impartiality, that led to the resignation of director general Tim Davie and CEO Deborah Turness—and the committee hearing itself.
We then moved on to Robbie Gibb and Samir Shah, respectively a member and the chair of the BBC board. Their performance—well-rehearsed, polished, at times defensive—was disheartening: lengthy self-referential evasions, a shocking lack of self-awareness and a faintly patronising tone towards a group of MPs, who looked incredulous at times.
These men will not save the BBC, and the BBC desperately needs saving from deliberate internal and external attempts to weaken its independence and authority.
The erosion and destruction of public service broadcasting in the United States is a cautionary tale. All direct and indirect funding to NPR and PBS is being terminated. Donald Trump has directed Congress to claw back $1.1bn in funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a non-profit organisation created in the 1960s to support and fund public media in the US. A lifeline to hundreds of radio and TV stations that serve their local communities, it has begun winding down its operations. That cannot be allowed to happen in the UK.
The BBC must stand firm against those who seek to erode it; those who may, in the near future, want to turn it into a government mouthpiece. It also needs to rediscover the gumption to fight. And who best to support that fight but its audiences—both those who remain with it and those who have turned away?
The BBC has been haemorrhaging younger audiences and remains stubbornly disconnected from Britain’s ethnic minority communities, not just in viewership but in staffing and storytelling priorities. These are communities whose experiences are filtered through institutional nervousness rather than reported with confidence. The BBC has failed to genuinely engage with them, and they do not see the BBC as a shared civic space but as a cautious, establishment institution that speaks to an older, narrower idea of the nation.
The BBC needs to make itself indispensable again. It must reimagine what public service means in an age of scepticism and fragmentation. It must become not a monument to national broadcasting, but a living, plural, universal and courageous public forum.
A Starmer government could stabilise the BBC’s finances and shield it from partisan interference. Still, the more complex work must come from within: a new, independently appointed governance structure could protect its journalism and redefine its relationship with its audiences, both domestic and global.
Then there’s the World Service. It has become a budgetary millstone, starved of resources and internally perceived to be weighing down the domestic journalism. It should enrich the BBC, but instead exists in an uncomfortable halfway house: chronically underfunded yet expected to serve diplomatic objectives and semi-detached from the domestic newsroom. The question of who should fund it—and whether it genuinely integrates with or merely sits alongside the BBC’s other journalism—remains unresolved.
Most importantly, the BBC must rediscover confidence in its journalism. Caution has calcified into timidity. The last-minute decision to delete one sentence in Rutger Bregman’s Reith lecture, apparently because it criticised the US president, and despite its prior editorial approval, belied the oft repeated mantra of “journalism without fear or favour”.
Impartiality sits at the heart of this crisis. Audiences lose trust when coverage feels cautious to the point of equivocation. The challenge isn’t to seek artificial symmetry or “balance” between opposing positions or viewpoints, but to demonstrate transparent, clear-eyed journalism which follows the evidence wherever it leads, even when conclusions are uncomfortable. Performative impartiality must give way to intellectual honesty and editorial courage.
The BBC won’t survive by playing it safe but by being indispensable, relevant and universal. That means serving all of the UK, not just the UK it has traditionally been most comfortable addressing.
The BBC’s future depends less on political protection than on whether it believes it can genuinely matter again—and whether it dares to act on that belief.
Liliane Landor was the senior controller of BBC News International Services from 2021 until 2024
All institutions or organisations have an ethos: how they behave. Less attention is generally paid to pathos: how they feel. All the evidence points to the BBC being a deeply unhappy organisation, its pathos crying out for understanding and support.
It might be healed by transforming the language it uses about itself, which has been heavily bureaucratised in recent decades. For instance, the BBC should talk of “trust”, a human quality, rather than “accountability”, which is a managerial one. It should believe in “openness” rather than “transparency”; deal with “audiences” rather than with “markets”; commit to “excellence” rather than to “quality control”; work by “values” as well as “objectives”.
The next stage is to assert the primacy of creating “programmes” over the bureaucratic reductiveness of mere “products”. Such differences of category matter; they hide fundamental differences of approach. Why not commit to “pragmatism” as a necessary ingredient of “strategy”? For good measure, every organisation needs “systems”, actual descriptions of how they work, which are surely preferable to the sterile notions of mere “process”. Above all, the BBC should restore “impartiality” to its place in the editorial pantheon—a professional discipline and obligation—as a counter to the personal indulgences of “activism”. And the BBC needs to acquire a sense of danger, which it seems to lack, and which may explain its slow reactions to moments of difficulty which then become occasions of crisis.
Not everyone will accept my antitheses, but I believe they could help creativity flourish rather than being straitjacketed into narrow management formulae. For words set directions, define purposes, embody attitudes and feelings; they should liberate rather than confine. They are also subtle and expressive, not bludgeons to determine behaviour.
If the BBC could talk to itself in a human rather than a bureaucratic way, how might it address the audience, society and its paymasters? It could offer eight principles through which it would justify its existence. For example, that the BBC:
- makes good programmes;
- reports the world openly, accurately and honestly; treats people decently;
- is curious, searching and unafraid of ideas;
- makes mistakes but aims to put them right;
- paints a picture of the national community and captures and listens to its many voices;
- makes audiences laugh;
- will not lie to you.
BBC staff would work to that; audiences everywhere would listen to that; licence fee payers would pay for that.
Perhaps it’s also time to add to the Reithian trinity of BBC Purpose: “To inform, educate and entertain”. In this spirit, I offer a BBC that commits to being “imaginative, original and surprising”.
John Tusa was managing director of the BBC World Service from 1986 to 1992
BBC: those three letters have afforded me open doors in countless countries, instant respect and the great gift of an enriching and exciting career. But much more importantly, I am among millions all over the world who have benefitted from, and who have been educated, informed and entertained by, an institution that carries the imprimatur of excellence; the corporation and public service broadcasting at its best.
At its worst, and in particular when it comes to its news division and coverage of politics, the BBC is too easily browbeaten and cowed, too craven, to the right more than to the left. This underpins so many of its crises, including the current existential one, and is rooted in its obsession with impartiality—not in and of itself (it is a noble aim) but with the perception of impartiality. It has become a mantra chanted as an excuse to hide behind cowardice. Even when something is self-evidently true, the BBC will err on the side of, well, both sides!
Two recent examples relating to race and racism come to mind: the Corporation’s disappointing response to Gary Lineker pointing out racist language used by a home secretary. And in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by an American police officer, telling black members of staff (in news and current affairs) they couldn’t attend Black Lives Matter marches or demonstrations about controversial issues because it would violate impartiality. Why wouldn’t the BBC be against racism? What “other side” does it feel it should fairly represent in order to fulfil its notion of impartiality?
These examples, and so many others, highlight an obsession with being perceived as biased. Culturally, the corporation cleaves towards the establishment and whatever orthodoxy prevails. That, too, is a weakness. And this partly informed how it covered 7th October 2023, and Israel’s response in Gaza. As a result, trust in the BBC diminished profoundly.
If the BBC was a stick of rock, I would want the word “courage” running through it. The corporation is often frightened of looking weak, and always ends up actually being weak; little demonstrates impotence more than bleating about principles you are too frightened to defend. That’s why courage is so important. Courage and confidence to stand for something, instead of just saying you do.
The BBC’s metrics of success don’t work in a polarised world: that if no one complains, we have succeeded, or if all sides criticise us then we are doing a good job.
In the wake of the Reith lecture scandal and allegations that the BBC is being silenced by fear of further retribution by the White House, there is only one response. When power attempts to silence or manipulate a free media, you have to shout louder, or you are not as free as you think you are.
In a different era, Malcolm X suggested another response to fear orchestrated by the White House: “A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.”
Razia Iqbal worked at the BBC for 34 years. She is now a professor at Princeton University
Without prestige and trust, the BBC is nothing—and its survival hinges on champions who understand what credibility looks like in the 2020s.
The idea of radical transparency would make most BBC middle-managers nauseous, but in the age of algorithms, institutional failures and economic anxiety, audiences no longer tolerate organisations that consider themselves beyond reproach. Taking a week to respond to the Prescott memo leak, cloaking resignations in formal statements, and holding internal meetings where staff questions about a political appointee go ignored, are symptoms of an institution that has learned little from the social media age.
For several years now, individuals have conferred trust to brands rather than the other way round; for the BBC, this is existentially destabilising. Insiders assume amplifying familiar talent on BBC platforms is enough, while outsiders live on content feeds where BBC journalists are absent, obeying the corporation’s social media guidelines, which quash the critical and dampen the ambitious. You will rarely find BBC journalists in comment sections, now increasingly used by audiences to fact check, or fronting vertical video formats in which they can own a beat and community. You cannot trust what you don’t see, and you can easily attack what no one appears to be defending.
This same absence extends to the BBC’s power players—the heads of news, the director generals—who should be as visible as their on-air staff, and willing to be held accountable. Instead of answers, the public gets faceless BBC press statements. Individual journalists can’t humanise themselves around their values, which are completely distinct to their views or opinions, because they live in terror of partiality accusations—usually around being seen as too left wing, rather than right-wing, reflecting the faction that moans the loudest on X.
Instead, right-wing figures like Nigel Farage flourish in this ecosystem. They turn up on vertical video and TV. They speak like normal people. They have a sense of humour (gasp!). They respond with great agility to algorithmic incentives to ragebait, and monetise. Farage is credible to many because he visibly defends his values, not because what he’s saying is necessarily factually accurate.
I support calls for the BBC to have a Citizens’ Assembly, giving the organisation a public mandate and scrutiny beyond the board, Ofcom and government. But transparency also comes from the news deliverers and decision-makers themselves. One day, there will be a director general like Instagram’s Adam Mosseri: a C-suite exec who knows no one will trust him if he isn’t visible to his audience. Today’s successful founders “build in public”; to restore its image, the BBC must rebuild in public. Can you imagine BBC leaders who turned up on camera and on social media, rather than hosting endless private meetings and clandestinely communicating with favoured sycophants in group chats?
The BBC demands radical transparency of those it holds to account. In 2026, it would do well to take its own advice.
Sophia Smith Galer is a journalist, author and creator behind the scriptwriting app Sophiana. She worked at the BBC from 2017 to 2021
I think I started at the BBC around 38 years ago, a presenter on a youth music show on Radio Scotland with someone called Eddie Mair, who was hotly tipped to go and do great things. And now I’m back at the BBC, on Radio 4, doing my podcast. So I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen both Labour and Conservative governments ditch directors general or put pressure on BBC News to get it right. I’ve seen people being hauled into Number 10 and dressed down.
I’ve seen the strange cycle we go through every 10 years of trying to rethink, and renegotiate, the Royal Charter—and I’ve detected, in the three years running up to that moment, the caution at the BBC about the government of the day. It makes me acutely aware of how closely this supposedly independent entity is subconsciously or overtly influenced by government. That’s not right for a truly independent media organisation.
I’ve also seen how UK creative industries are lauded across the world. We’ve never been busier. It’s terribly hard to book an actor for a show these days, because they’re so busy over in Shepperton spending five months shouting at some green thing for a Marvel movie. It’s great everyone has got work—but my worry is that all the productions are American. We’ve hollowed out what we do best and sold it to the highest bidder.
The BBC was once the sun at the centre of the industry: finding the next talent and training them up with the skills they needed, including the camera team, the sound team, the editors. How are we going to do that now? And how are we going to commit ourselves to producing not just high-quality drama but also fact-checking and analysis? How do we preserve the sense of community that something like the BBC nurtures?
My worry is that we’ll end up making lots and lots of shows for Netflix and Amazon rather than the BBC. We can cash those cheques, but at the end of the day we’ll have nothing solid to show for it.
We’re now at a tipping point. Various party leaders, like Nigel Farage, are talking about getting rid of the licence fee, but are not suggesting anything in its place.
Politicians have a misconception that the BBC is some kind of annoying artefact that really ought to be monitored, regulated and brought down to size. But the truth is that it’s an outstanding international success story. Our creative industries are more valuable than the car and oil industries put together. If it were a weapons system, the government would be out defending it and selling it abroad.
The best way of regulating the BBC is to free it up and put an independent body as part of its oversight, as opposed to the government.
MPs should look at the facts and figures about how crucial the BBC is to our economy, as well as to our schools and our education and to our creative industries. It’s not something that is an afterthought—it’s a principal component of what Britain is best at, and we wash it away at our peril.
Armando Iannucci is a writer, director, producer and comic. This is an edited version of remarks he made at the House of Lords on 3rd December
So many BBC crises have been inflated by the commentariat, politicians and the corporation itself that it’s sometimes hard to assess the extent of the damage. This crisis is a code alpha—not because of the notorious Panorama edit of the Trump speech to a crowd that later became the mob on 6th January 2021, nor even because the BBC failed to acknowledge the real error early enough, but because a very good director general, Tim Davie, has had enough after only five years. The BBC needed him for longer.
The chair of the BBC board, Samir Shah, is a seriously conscientious, decent and able man who now has to fill not one position but, apparently, three. A director general, a deputy director general to oversee the BBC’s journalism and a head of news who will have to be happy reporting to the deputy rather than the person at the top of the organisation. This is a very tall order because, apart from anything else, the lifespan of these top jobs in the BBC has become short—a fact that is itself a commentary on the disproportion and dyspepsia of so much of the debate about the place.
The BBC remains a great national institution and the top jobs will eventually be filled, but that won’t solve anything unless the unitary board works better. Currently, the full-time executives sit side-by-side with the part-time non-executives—people who are there, properly, to provide outside perspectives in the public interest. Some of these non-execs appear to have shattered the guardrails that previously helped shape the discussion about the BBC’s voluminous output.
No doubt the non-execs will feel that they are well-intentioned. But that does not mean their diagnoses of the BBC’s shortcomings are well-informed and wise. There are simply not enough editorial heavyweights among them—and so the way is cleared for those that display the most plumage.
The BBC deserves people on the board who understand the value of doubt as well as the benefits of occasional certainty; who can exercise self-control in debate and action; who can resist over-statement while still being able to challenge the BBC’s top brass. Without being in the room, it is hard to know—but there is a lot to suggest that the necessary alchemy is in short supply. And that might be down to an appointments system, with politicians involved, that is neither rigorous nor sufficiently scrupulous. Unless the politicians behave with appropriate seriousness they should be taken out of the system altogether.
Mark Damazer is a former BBC editor of television news programmes and controller of Radio 4. He was subsequently a BBC trustee
Postwar Britain was dominated by two acronyms: the NHS and the BBC. Nigel Lawson once observed that the former was the closest thing the British had to a national religion. The BBC never quite achieved that fervour, but it wasn’t far behind. In shaping the national conversation, it was hegemonic—if not always loved.
That world has gone, and some of that is for the good. Rupert Murdoch and others were right: the BBC’s dominance made British broadcasting stodgy, stolid, even banal. As the global streaming behemoths have emerged, the BBC has lacked both the resources and the agility to keep up. David Attenborough, the closest the UK has to a secular saint, once said the BBC was the best broadcaster in the world—but is it still? Even when its news division was under fire, it could once rely on drama and entertainment to uphold its reputation. Now Netflix can release the final season of Stranger Things to 60m viewers in five days. How can the BBC compete? And what of the things the BBC is often praised as doing uniquely well? Traitors is made by an external production company and bought in. Eurovision is broadcast across the continent. Wimbledon could be handled by any competent commercial network.
The truth is that the list of things only the BBC can do is now vanishingly small. At its top sits the very thing Tim Davie appeared to value least: genuinely world-class news and current affairs. There are almost no British journalistic institutions with both truly global reach and no commercial master. Which is why the corporation’s inability to rise to the Panorama-Trump moment felt so dispiriting.
There are reforms the Starmer government could enact to future-proof the BBC. A new funding model is sorely needed, as the licence fee is now an anachronism. The removal of political appointees from the BBC board. But no structural tinkering can substitute for what is most needed: leadership and courage. The BBC must abandon the ersatz, self-defeating view of impartiality it has absorbed from its enemies, the belief that controversy is always bad; that complaints are a measure of failure; that perception can be managed. These assumptions lead inexorably to safety, banality and irrelevance. The BBC must prove again that it is essential.
The only values that ought to matter are accuracy, genuine impartiality and the protection of democratic principles. Impartiality should be a liberating, fearless doctrine. When was the last time any BBC leader treated it as such, rather than as an impediment to be navigated? Another national treasure, John Cleese, once said: “The BBC has spent too long trying to offend no one and ended up pleasing no one.” Only the BBC can decide to stop.
Lewis Goodall is a host of The News Agents podcast and former BBC journalist
