British Broadcasting Veterans Andrew Neil & Greg Dyke Tear Apart “Straitjacket” BBC Licence Fee, Suggest New Models

Max Goldbart
·3 min read
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British broadcaster Andrew Neil and former Director General Greg Dyke have torn apart the BBC licence fee, with Neil calling it a “straitjacket” and urging the corporation to think about new models.

Speaking to a UK House Lords of Committee, Neil, who presented BBC shows for 25 years, said questions need to be asked over whether a funding mechanism that was created “when Lenin was rolling out his economic plan and Warren Harding won a landslide in the U.S. presidential election” still works.

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Neil set out his alternative to the £159 ($198.45) annual licence fee, which makes around £3.75BN ($4.7BN) per year but is being frozen for the next two years – a move by the UK government that is set to lose the corporation around £1.5BN ($1.9BN) by 2027.

A Commission For Public Service Broadcasting would be directly financed by the UK taxpayer acting “as a gate between politicians and broadcasters,” according to Neil’s plan, with the Commission’s pot used to fund less commercial genres such as news, documentaries and children’s. The BBC would then be free to make money out of subscription revenue in a hybrid model for its more commercial shows such as big entertainment and drama tentpoles.

Neil, who failed miserably in his attempts to launch Discovery-backed British news channel GB News and has since moved to Channel 4, acknowledged that his suggestion can’t be taken up by 2027, when the licence fee will either be abolished or kept on, as not enough of the country has access to broadband.

“The most comfortable way out is to continue with the licence fee,” he added. “It will be trebles all around in [BBC headquarters] New Broadcasting House if this happens but the BBC may not even have the structure to survive. The licence fee is a wonderful asset but it’s also a straitjacket because even £5BN ($6.2BN) is not enough to run a full TV network with ambition these days.”

Dyke, who ran the BBC from 2000 to 2004, agreed that “no one would have invented the licence fee today.”

“You’d be laughed out the room if you came up with the idea to charge people £150 per year to receive radio and TV, but if you get rid of it, you have to think of something better,” he said.

Dyke challenged the BBC to come up with a “licence fee-plus scenario” and said he “knows people who work in senior levels of the BBC who are adamant that it doesn’t work.”

Neil went on to criticize BBC dramas such as Line of Duty for being “like a nursery’s tea party” compared to international hits including Gomorrah or Breaking Bad but then appeared to contradict himself by showering praise on the British production sector, which produces virtually all BBC drama.

Responding to the claim that the BBC is biased towards left-wing metropolitan elites, he agreed this is the case but said it is unintentional.

“I don’t think there is any intentional bias but the very nature of the BBC being a metropolitan institution makes it biased in the sense that it reflects the biases of the metropolitan world. And it doesn’t make a difference if you move staff from London to places like Manchester and Glasgow as these parts of the country are even more left-wing.”

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