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Daily Mail
7 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
BBC Director General Tim Davie pushes for higher licence fee - weeks after it rose to £174.50
BBC boss Tim Davie has suggested the licence fee should be hiked - just weeks after it rose to a new high of £174.50. The Director General has pushed for the Government - including Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy - to give extra backing to the corporation for its services, as he complained about a decade of 'grinding' cuts. His words came after a series of controversies surrounding the BBC which is financed by the licence fee anyone in Britain owning a television must pay. Mr Davie, 58, who took the top BBC job in September 2020, has been in post for a period which has included the conviction of BBC1 newsreader Huw Edwards over child sexual abuse images. He spoke last month at a conference amid criticism for Gary Lineker, who was the BBC's highest paid presenter on £1.3million a year before his departure ahead of schedule. Former England football captain Lineker, 64, presented his last edition of Match Of The Day last month, as previously planned as his BBC contract approached its end. He was earmarked to continue with the corporation next season fronting coverage of both the FA Cup and the 2026 World Cup. But his time with the BBC instead finished following widespread condemnation for his sharing on Instagram of a pro-Palestine video that included a rat emoji. That prompted criticisms that he had shared what was an anti-Semitic trope about Jewish people previously widely promoted by Nazi Germany. Lineker apologised for the post, which he deleted, saying he had not spotted the emoji and that he would 'never knowingly share anything anti-Semitic', adding: 'It goes against everything I believe in.' Days before Lineker's departure was announced, Davie told reporters at the Lowry arts centre in Salford: 'The BBC's reputation is held by everyone and when someone makes a mistake, it costs us. 'And I think we absolutely need people to be the exemplars of BBC values and follow our social media policies, simple as that.' He has now been speaking about about future BBC funding, appearing to give a signal over the licence fee which contributes to two thirds of the BBC's income. The annual charge was recently raised to £174.50, having garnered the BBC about £3.7billion last year and will rise in line with inflation to 2027. But Mr Davie has now called for more financial support from the Government, as he carped against funding cuts in recent years - amid a series of BBC News job losses. The BBC Director General was speaking at the Deloitte and Enders Media and Telecoms conference in central London. What is the annual TV licence fee and who needs to pay it? The licence fee was introduced in June 1946, when television broadcasts resumed following the Second World War. If you watch or record broadcasted TV programmes, you must have a TV licence either through purchase or given free to those receiving pension credit and 75 years or older. All forms of transmission include using the BBC iPlayer on a smart television, laptops and tablets. The annual fee, reported to be worth more than £3billion to the BBC, currently costs £169.50 - but this will rise to £174.50 next April. The cost pays for TV, radio and online programmes and services including iPlayer, Radio 1, CBeebies and the World Service. It also funds Welsh language TV channel S4C and local TV channels. He said: 'I do want universal funding and I want proper investment and not begrudging, grinding cuts to the BBC, which you've had in the last 10 years, which have just not helped. The BBC has said that its licence fee revenue has fallen by 30 per cent in real terms from 2010 to 2020 after various freezes and cuts. And the number of British households paying the licence fee is believed to have slumped by about half a million last year - against a backdrop of rival competition from streaming sites such as Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video. Mr Davie told the conference in London of his worries about a 'mainstream weaponisation where people don't care' about the BBC, the Telegraph reported. Culture Secretary Ms Nandy said in April this year the BBC TV licence fee was unenforceable and unfairly targeted women. She told the Telegraph there were 'problems' with the charge and that 'fewer and fewer people are paying it'. She said: 'We're about to kick off the charter review and as part of that we're reviewing the licence fee.' Ms Nandy has previously said she could be open to replacing the flat licence fee with a sliding payment scale after a suggestion by the BBC's new chairman Samir Shah. She has ruled out the licence fee being replaced by general taxation.
Telegraph
20-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Foreign state ownership is a systemic threat to a free press
Last week I received an unexpected invitation to meet with Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary. I assumed it was to tell me that the Government was finally going to ask the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to end the uncertainty over the ownership of The Telegraph. I had raised the issue in the Lords on a number of occasions and was grateful for her courtesy. Instead I was astonished to learn that she had issued a press release announcing that the Government intended to reverse the decision taken by Parliament last year to ban foreign governments from owning or co-owning British newspapers. Her department, no doubt cheered on by the Foreign Office, had clearly surrendered to the lobbying from sovereign wealth funds, foreign governments and investors and extended the concession for ownership by sovereign wealth funds from 5pc to 15pc and included in that concession any foreign government, however odious their regime. It was only last year that a cross-party rebellion led by the redoubtable Baroness Stowell resulted in both Houses of Parliament amending primary legislation to place an absolute prohibition on foreign state ownership or control of British newspapers. A duty was imposed on the Culture Secretary under the amended Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act to block media mergers where a foreign power was deemed to have control or significant influence. Opinion polls showed more than two thirds of the public supported a ban. This was now to be reversed using secondary legislation. The text of the regulations were not available and it was unclear whether several foreign governments could each own 15pc of any newspaper. The Government says that this would only apply to passive investors, but it is utterly naive to believe that a 15pc holding would not result in a degree of influence. The CMA takes 15pc as a starting level to consider scrutiny for material influence in takeover bids. This threshold is unarguably a serious undermining of the safeguards Parliament voted for and a cynical manipulation of the statutory instrument which was intended to provide for a 5pc holding for existing sovereign wealth funds. Allowing foreign governments to hold stakes in national newspapers is a systemic threat to a free press and a free press is a necessary condition for a free country. We have a saying in Scotland that he who pays the piper calls the tune. Autocratic governments intent on acquiring stakes in our media are seeking influence opportunities not investment opportunities. Of course they are prepared to pay handsomely to achieve that. If permitted there is a potential unwelcome conflict of interest created between journalists and their employers. The Government's proposals are not some technical adjustment. They open the door to state-funded media and undermine independent journalism. At a time of great geopolitical upheaval, the Government should be strengthening media independence not trading it away for foreign capital. Now Parliament must act to reassert the protections enshrined in the legislation and make it clear that foreign governments have no place in ownership of our national media.
