Culture secretary defends the BBC but confirms top-slicing is a priority
Culture secretary Ben Bradshaw has confirmed that the BBC’s licence fee will be top-sliced to pay for regional news services and children’s programming.
If Labour win next week’s general election, Bradsaw said top-slicing will be a priority, as well as dismantling the BBC Trust, which he claims is holding back the corporation.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4, Bradshaw said top-slicing is a “good idea that has widespread support- to continue to use a very small fraction of the licence fee, which is currently used to pay for digital switchover which is not otherwise and would not otherwise be available to the BBC.
“We think [top-slicing] is the best way of securing the future of ITV [regional news]. There may even by arguments for using parts of the licence fee to help secure the future of children’s broadcasting, which people feel very strongly about.
“We already have the biggest intervention in the market in Europe in the form of the licence fee. It has never been exclusively the property of the BBC either by legislation or by practice.
“We are in a new world. The public cares deeply about regional news on ITV and they also care deeply about children’s programming, which is in real crisis in this country.
“We already spend 3% of the licence fee now not on the BBC but on digital switchover because we have agreed that is a public good. It seems to me to make absolute sense post 2012 to continue to ringfence that portion of public money to secure these things that the public wants.”
Although, he added: “If someone comes up with a better idea we are still open to it.”
On the BBC Trust, Bradshaw said: “It ties the hands of BBC management to go out there fighting for the BBC. You get the worst of both worlds. You don’t get very good cheerleading and you don’t get very good regulation.
“I’d far rather have BBC management that was proud, robust, going out there fighting the Murdochs, fighting the Tory party, fighting the enemies of the BBC and free to do so and not looking over their shoulder at the trust.
“When you have a powerful international media organisation that has got into bed with a political party, that wants to govern this country after 6 May, and they have a clear agenda of hostility towards the BBC and furthering the commercial interests of the Murdoch empire, why shouldn’t the BBC and people who care about the BBC be able to defend themselves?”