Source : The Scotsman

Government ministers are temporary, their term of office frequently brief. Institutions endure over decades, even centuries. Yet ministers - here today and gone tomorrow - make decisions which, for good or ill, determine the future of these enduring institutions. This is one of the peculiarities of our system of parliamentary and Cabinet government, and it imposes a responsibility on ministers of which they should be peculiarly conscious, and one they cannot lightly discharge.

The BBC is one such institution; Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, one such minister. Her department has commissioned Lord Burns to carry out an assessment of the structure and working of the BBC. On Monday, she told the House of Commons’ culture, media and sport select committee, which is conducting its own inquiry into the renewal of the BBC charter, that the corporation’s system of governance was "unsustainable". "The status quo," she said, "is not an option". It sounds as if she is pre-empting Lord Burns’s report.

Her evidence to the select committee concentrated on three issues: the governance of the BBC, the question of the licence fee and the future role of the BBC now that a plethora of channels is available on both radio and television.

The governing structure of the BBC was fixed early and has not changed in essentials. The board of governors is responsible for laying down general policy, for overseeing output and for appointing (and, if necessary, removing) the director general who is, in effect, the BBC’s chief executive.

The governors are not, or have only rarely been, broadcasting professionals, though some recently appointed members have greater broadcasting experience. They are meant to be independent of the government, while taking its views into consideration, and of the broadcasting professionals themselves.

This isn’t an unusual structure. Indeed, it’s the same as that within which our national museums and galleries operate. Admittedly, there are certain peculiarities in the case of BBC governors. The corporation’s output is now so huge and various that it is impossible for any governor to be aware of all of it.

The criticism of the governors, voiced at the time of the Hutton report, is directed at their dual function: as defenders of the BBC, protecting it from outside (ie, government) interference and pressure, and as the regulators of broadcasting content and the conduct of broadcasters.

Though Ms Jowell has given no hint as to the exact reform she, and her department, think desirable, it seems probable that she will want to end this dual function, perhaps by appointing a separate regulatory board.

The BBC, as everyone knows, is financed by the licence fee, which puts it at arm’s length from the government of the day, thus ensuring its political independence, even though it is parliament which determines the level of the fee. In reality, this is a television household tax, and many have thought it anomalous and unjust ever since ITV came into being half a century ago. The anomaly and injustice look even less defensible today because of the multiplicity of channels available. Why, it is asked, should people who don’t tune in to the BBC pay it a tax?

Ms Jowell called the licence fee the "default option" and said there had to be a "better alternative" for it to be replaced. No-one has yet come up with that alternative; the Thatcher and Major governments both sought one, and couldn’t find it. Public-service broadcasting should be publicly financed, and, as a means of doing this, the licence fee seems preferable to a direct Treasury grant - which would bring the BBC into a closer and more dependent relationship with the government of the day.

As for the unfairness of the licence fee, or television tax, the truth is, of course, that most of us pay taxes for services we don’t use, the healthy contributing to the cost of the NHS, childless couples paying for the education of other people’s children, the employed supporting the unemployed, and so forth.

Ms Jowell was perhaps at her most controversial when discussing BBC programme-making and buying. "I don’t think," she said, "that the BBC should be investing licence-payers’ money in those areas already served by commercial forces."

She said this while defending the BBC’s two new digital channels, BBC Three and BBC Four, in response to concerns raised in a report by Professor Patrick Barwise about their "very low" viewing figures. BBC Four, which shows mainly arts and current affairs programmes, is watched by "just 1.4 million people a week" (Actually, this seems to me a quite satisfactory number, especially given that its programmes start only at seven in the evening).

The minister’s defence of minority channels makes sense. The fact is that all channels now cater for minorities. Only in very exceptional circumstances will there ever be truly national programmes again.

But this doesn’t mean that the BBC should abandon attempts to attract large audiences, or stop competing with "commercial forces". It’s one thing to say that the BBC’s digital channels "exist to cater to the diverse interests of licence-fee payers"; quite another to suggest that the BBC should withdraw from the popular market-place and no longer show programmes such as The Simpsons, soaps, sport or even - carrying Ms Jowell’s argument to its logical conclusion - news. Such a withdrawal would make the licence fee, or television household tax, utterly indefensible and unsustainable.

If the BBC is to remain, in any sense, what it has been - that is, a national institution - then it must broadcast. Otherwise, the "continuing conversation" with licence fee payers, which Ms Jowell declares to be necessary, will simply dry up. There won’t be enough of them watching the BBC, or listening to it, for such a conversation to be rewarding.

When the Culture Secretary tells us that the BBC should not be "scrambling" after high ratings, because doing this inevitably pushes it towards the "middle ground" and away from the "distinctiveness" to which it should be aspiring, I would reply that, whether scrambling for high ratings or not, the middle ground is just where the BBC should be much of the time, because that is where most people live.

A national broadcaster has to address itself to a national audience, or at least try to find such an audience, difficult as that is in today’s fragmented culture and in the crowded market of the airwaves.

In truth, Ms Jowell seems to me to be setting out a bogus choice. Given the number of channels that are now at the BBC’s disposal, the two ambitions - seeking the middle ground and offering "distinctiveness" - are not incompatible.

She is quite right to defend BBC Three and BBC Four. These digital channels, still in any case feeling their way, show the corporation’s awareness of an opportunity to appeal to particular minority interests which have been long, if understandably, neglected by programme makers. One might even say that this is not only an opportunity; it is also, for a public- service broadcaster, an obligation.

But it is quite unnecessary for Ms Jowell to knock, if only by implication, BBC One, which is aimed, wisely and properly, at a wider audience. It is not only that it is that wider audience which contributes most to the financing of the BBC, though this is important. There is a starker truth.

If the BBC ever abandons the middle ground, it will not be long before the clamour to abolish the licence fee and destroy the BBC as we have known it becomes overwhelming.

© The Scotsman