Suspicious forecasting skills
How is it that almost all published consultancy reports somehow manage to come up with conclusions that chime with the instincts of their paymasters?
It is easy now to see chapters of the Government white paper on the BBC emerging in firm outline from the mist.
Obviously the coup de grâce is on the way for the much-maligned BBC Trust after long being in the condemned cell. And with a helpful kick from consultants Oliver & Ohlbaum and Oxera the BBC will be frog-marched in the direction of greater “distinctiveness” in its programmes.
Popular BBC programmes have always offended the free market to the extent that they might limit the ability to accumulate profits.
Naturally “distinctive”, as opposed to mediocre, commonplace and copycat is a very good thing. In the mind of the Government, if not necessarily Marl Oliver, a former BBC strategy wonk, here distinctive is code for more minority programmes with attendant smaller audiences, making the BBC a lesser and ultimately a smaller thing.
Oliver & Ohlbaum is an intellectually respectable consultancy and knows how to avoid going too far, and sprinkles its work with appropriate caveats.
But it still conforms to an unexplained mystery. How is it that almost all consultancy reports, or at least the published ones, somehow manage to come up with conclusions that chime with the instincts of their paymasters, in this case John Whittingdale, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport?
Perhaps it’s time for an academic to explore whether this phenomenon is statistically significant or not.
The report takes 243-pages to suggest that “greater distinctiveness” in the programmes of BBC 1, Radio 1 and Radio 2 “could” – Mark Oliver is a legendary fan of the splendid word “could” which provides cover for a multitudes of possibilities – mean between £81 million and £115 million a year by 2027 for the commercial sector.
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You have got to admire forecasting skills that can distinguish between £80 million and £81 million a decade hence.
The report, whose main beneficiary would obviously be ITV, can actually be summed up in very few words: make the BBC broadcast more minority programmes in prime time and the BBC’s ratings and share of audience will decline to the financial benefit of the Corporation’s commercial rivals.
One of the main outrages committed by the BBC is judged not so much by the counter-scheduling of entertainment shows such as Strictly Come Dancing, but the BBC’s damnable practice of running popular crime dramas such as Silent Witness against ITV offerings.
O&O has the decency to admit to the audience decline that would follow from its recommendations. As a result BBC1’s share of audience would fall below 20 per cent and BBC radio’s share would be less that 50 per cent.
Alas, then the crystal ball gets a bit murky and it is tricky trying to work out just how far below such thresholds they would actually fall.
With an exquisite sense of timing the report has come out just as ITV announced its financial results for 2015.
Flayed to within an inch of its life by distressingly popular BBC programmes ITV only managed an under-lying 18 per cent rise in profits to £865 million last year. Revenues were limited to a 15 per cent increase to £2.97 billion and shareholders are to get an unexpected £400 million dividend boost on top of the final dividend of 4.1p, itself ahead of market forecasts. Tough times indeed.
ITV is so obviously flush with cash that it, and other commercial broadcasters, should perhaps be required to contribute to the £700 million a year government-imposed burden on the BBC by making it responsible for free licence fees for the over 75s.
David Clementi, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England, also came up with the correct answer so far as the Government is concerned in his report into the governance of the BBC, and by recommending the abolition of the BBC Trust – in effect performing the last rites.
The game was up long ago when Rona Fairhead, who chairs the BBC Trust, declared the body unfit for purpose because of the inevitable conflicts between operational decisions and governance.
Surprisingly complex matters of principle lurk just beneath the surface of what seems the obvious need to terminate a 10-year “mistake”.
Asked for her thoughts at the Voice of the Viewer and Listener conference last year, Dame Colette Bowe, who used to chair Ofcom, insisted that many of the things the BBC Trust did, representing the interests of viewers and setting the tone and purpose of channels, were not properly regulatory issues at all.
Now we are going to have all BBC regulation handled by Ofcom, a large increase in its workload.
As Ofcom chief executive Sharon White said yesterday, with a marked note of caution, Ofcom deals with about 25,000 complaints a year compared with the 250,000 received by the BBC.
It was noted by The Guardian that what Clementi was proposing was an end to 94 years of BBC self-regulation.
Everything else – the Dame Colette stuff – would be handled, according to Sir David’s proposals, by a unitary BBC board with a majority of non-executive directors and a strong full-time chairman. This was the very system abandoned a decade ago in the search for greater separation and independence for BBC governors or trustees.
The future dangers will replicate the old – a strong idiosyncratic chairman will run the show as he or she likes, or less than strong non-executives will be given the run-around by cunning BBC executives.
At least as Sir David noted, under his proposals there would be “no hiding place” from responsibility for the multiple BBC cock-ups that the future will inevitably bring.
Next up a government appointed commission, which failed to come up with the “right” answer, or at least the expected one.
The commission set up to review the Freedom of Information Act, stacked with people who have attacked it in the past, and probably chosen for that very reason, actually came out and said it was working well and “no legal changes” were required.
Campaigners will be disappointed that FoI will not be therefore extended to private companies carrying out public work or limiting government use of vetoes.
Given that charges for FoI requests and an extension of the veto was possible this has to go down as a decent score draw.
None of these stories appeared to have been deemed worthy of mention in The New Day but welcome anyway to the first new standalone national newspaper for nearly 30 years.
Whether its nice shiny white paper and decent investigations will be enough to persuade people to pay 50p once the discount period is over is uncertain, but congratulations to Trinity Mirror for having the courage to innovate.