Isn’t It Time To Spin-Off The BBC?

After just 54 days on the job George Entwistle’s resignation as Director General of the British Broadcasting Corporation or BBC has many speculating over who will take up the top job.

Without getting into the subject of the £1.3 million payoff Entwistle is slated to receive and rather than join in the guessing game about who might take over the DG post, I think it’s time for the BBC to be made into a Public Limited Company (PLC)—allowing it to raise funds from stakeholders, investors and the general public on a voluntary basis.

Currently the BBC is a semi-autonomous public service (albeit one that the British public is required to pay for) broadcaster that operates under a Royal Charter (renewed every 10 years; running until 31 December 2016) and a Licence and Agreement from the Home Secretary and is effectively owned by The Crown. Royal Charter companies are not obliged to register any documents with Companies House, but information about the BBC is able on their website.

Within the United Kingdom the BBC’s work is funded principally by an annual television licence fee, which is charged to all British households, companies and organisations using any type of equipment to record and/or receive live television broadcasts, whether or not they actually use or benefit from the BBC’s output. The level of the fee is set annually by the British Government and agreed by Parliament (currently £145.50 per year per household since April 2010).

According to the BBC’s 2011/12 Annual Report its income can be broken down, as follows:

— £3,606.3 million in licence fees collected from householders;
— £222 million from BBC Commercial Businesses;
— £279.4 million from government grants (i.e. public money);
— £271.9 million from other income, such as providing content to overseas broadcasters and concert ticket sales;

One might compare this to the £5.9 billion in annual revenue for British Sky Broadcasting; suggesting that the general public is willing to pay for broadcasting that isn’t forced down their throat.

With a history of controversies reaching back to the 1930s, ending most recently with the allegations about a BBC presenter, the late Jimmy Savile, and now a former politician being falsely implicated in a Welsh child abuse scandal, one is left to wonder whether the British public should continue to be forced to fund such scandals.

If the BBC operated as a private sector company it would have been driven out of business by now.

http://www.wirenews.co/op-ed/uk/5533/isn-t-it-time-to-spin-off-the-bbc