Turn the BBC into a Cooperative
The television license is a tax in everything but name but advert-free, non-profit television should always be an option for consumers. Turning the BBC from a government-owned corporation into a consumer-owned cooperative would mean nothing about its current high quality content would change – just the unfair aspect of how it is funded.
As it is currently structured, the funding of the BBC creates a lot of losers. I love BBC programming but I rarely watch any BBC channels beyond BBC One and Two. I hardly ever watch sport and do not have access to BBC Three and Four. If you only use your TV to play video games and watch X-Factor on ITV, the license fee means you lose out entirely.
Many regard spending £145.50 year on television as frivolous spending they would never normally do unless made to do so – especially in an economic climate where a great deal of us are watching the pennies more closely. As a consumer I should only have to pay for the services I use. Likewise other people should not have to pay for television I enjoy and value if they don’t enjoy and value it themselves. That is unfair.
In many respects the BBC is broken. It is wasteful and has no incentive to cut back on that unnecessary spending. In recent years I believe that a lot of legitimate criticism of the BBC would have been avoided had the BBC taken more time to appreciate what their audience wanted. This would certainly have prevented instances where the BBC overstaffed events, such as Glastonbury and the Dale Farm Eviction.
Currently 20% of BBC funding comes from sources other than the license fee. Those sources could be expanded and this other revenue – coupled with efficiency savings – can take care of niche channels like BBC Parliament and other innovation and experimentation.
Were the BBC a cooperative, members would pay a yearly fee for the service in lieu of commercial advertising. Logistically speaking this may mean the small matter of having a BBC box in your living room. But rather than a flat license fee for everyone this would allow for a variety of membership options, ranging from cheap ‘Basic’ and ‘Student’ options to expensive options with more channels or packages specifically geared towards your interests.
Being a cooperative would mean the BBC would be owned by the individuals who choose to be members rather than being the jurisdiction of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. The members would be democratically enabled thus; the BBC would be more accountable to its audience. I predict that this would result in the content of the BBC becoming much higher quality and the organisation itself becoming leaner and more efficient.
Turning the Beeb into a cooperative is a win-win situation. If you were given the opportunity to preserve something that you enjoy and value, whilst at the same time making it more fair, efficient, democratically accountable and – most importantly – more liberal – it would be silly not to do so.
Sign the e-petition here:
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/28826
February 7th, 2012 at 3:07 pm
Sara,
Good petition. I’ve signed.
What happens to BBC radio though? Are these funded by the cooperative? If so how do you prevent people who are not members of the BBC Coop listening in?
I think the only option really is to sell off the various BBC radio stations so they become commercial broadcasters. I suppose you could make a case for the BBC world service staying in the state sector and funded by govt subsidy (I wouldn’t make that argument, but one could make that argument).
February 7th, 2012 at 4:33 pm
This would make complete sense if the point of the BBC were to be a commercially successful broadcaster, but it isn’t. The BBC is like a museum or a library: everyone is coersed into supporting the institution to promote the preservation of and access to works of cultural significance, thereby closing (to some extent) the oppertunity gap.
BBC Radio 3 is the sole supplier of quality music, untainted by the the kind of ideology which permiates Classic FM, who tries to sell classical music to its audience as a status symbol. Radio 3 has no such compensatory baggage: it is unapologetic in being completely uninterested in shoring up the consumer’s ego. Instead, it recruits academic commentators and accumulates citations which allow anyone interested, or who wishes to be interested, to follow their passion.
This service is not sacrosanct, but nor is it commercially viable. The BBC will need to adapt to changing circumstances, technologies, constraints, but the marketisation of its service will damage its ability to carry out its mission to promote culture to everyone, regardless of background.
If cost-benefit analysis is the only concern, it isn’t worth having a BBC. Any commercial broadcaster could do the same as a marketised BBC, so why not just abolish it: after all, the Natural History channel will cater to the documentory market, MTV can pick up the teens, and so on.
What we would lose in terms of culture is immeasurable, which is a part of the problem. The contribution to the public discourse the BBC makes is unquantifiable, so there is no way to make a genuine cost-benefit analysis until you take it down to the level of the individual whose relationship with the Beeb will vary: but even if a man only watches BBC2, how enriched will his life have been by friends who watch BBC4?
Since the BBC’s future Director General looks set to reduce the catch-all, focus-group oriented programming in favour of higher brow faire, the BBC’s contribution to culture will soon be a non-issue. Far more pressing is the threat posed to culture by the remote nature of our artistic class, as I explore here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdTroslvvR4
February 7th, 2012 at 5:42 pm
Outt of interest: what evidence do you have for your assertion that the BBC sent “too many people” to Glastonbury or Dale Farm? Or did you lazily C&V from a newspaper known to be hostile to the BBC?
(Disclosure: I work for the Beeb)
February 7th, 2012 at 7:38 pm
The process could start by allowing the licence fee payers to elect members of the BBC trust each year. It would be interesting how they would respond to that type of chalenge in their governance structure.
February 7th, 2012 at 9:38 pm
Might I indulge in a little thought experiment.
Imagine a society in which it was illegal for you to purchase a newspaper, magazine or book without a newspaper/magazine/book licence. That it was illegal for you to visit the cinema without a cinema licence, attend a play without a theatre licence, buy music or attend concerts without a music licence. Imagine that all the revenues from these licences were used to fund state journalists, writers, performers, actors to satisfy the cultural needs of the population according to the tastes of a self-selected elite. That you were forced to pay for these events and publications even if you didn’t attend/buy the works of the state producer.
Could we call such a society, free and open?
February 7th, 2012 at 10:15 pm
Lotus: I buy a licence every time I go to the cinema. It’s called a ticket, and a proportion of the VAT does go to the Department of Sport and Culture, among others.
In fact, every time I buy anything from a supermarket which has been advertised, be it Cilit Bang or Walkers Crisps, I end up paying for ITV and Channel 4, among others. The BBC, Virgin and Sky use a subscription model rather than a hidden costs model: the difference with the BBC is that the BBC is a national industry. As I say, this is more than justified by the societal contribution. Liberty doesn’t come into it: just as liberty doesn’t come into questions of whether we need state education, a standing army, or a police force.
February 7th, 2012 at 10:35 pm
Toby MacDonald:
Define what you mean by state education?
February 7th, 2012 at 10:50 pm
Toby MacDonnell,
What absolute rubbish, when you go to the cinema, you choose to go there and pay if you wish. The same when you buy something in a supermarket. It’s your choice.
I subscribe to Sky because I want to not because I am coerced into paying for something I don’t watch. If I don’t like Sky I cancel my subscription and I don’t watch it. That looks like freedom of choice to me. Can you explain what societal contribution the BBC makes. It’s television for gods sake and as for having an army, police force or state education these are essential, watching television isn’t. Please don’t tell me the BBC output is superior to every other channel because it clearly isn’t.
February 7th, 2012 at 10:51 pm
Psi: I think of state education as state sponcered education. I don’t mind who provides it, provided that no-one is deprived of access. Free schools, vouchers, whatever works.
February 7th, 2012 at 11:13 pm
Stu: The BBC’s function is the same as that of a museum, a libary or a gallery. Not everything is to everyone’s taste, but the option to access a wide range of cultural materials extends people’s liberty to explore works that would otherwise be off limits. Just like roads and road taxes (if only they were used properly).
February 8th, 2012 at 9:58 am
This video tells you everything you need to know about the BBC at 7:38 in…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJfSS0ZXYdo
“Staff meeting to reduce the carbon footprint of our ethnically diverse disability access policy for single parent mothers”
February 10th, 2012 at 3:24 pm
Toby,
Thanks for the cinema analogy; I will expand it properly so that it is truly analogous to the TV licence fee.
If going to the cineman was analogous to the TV licence fee, then first you would have been required to purchase a Cinema Licence at £145.50 before viewing one single film.
Had you not been in possesion of a Cinema Licence when viewing the film, you would have broken the law and been liable for a fine and imprisonment for non-payment of the fine.
Furthermore at the cinema, out of the 10 screens there would be 5 showing films for which you pay and 5 screens showing films that are free and funded out of the Cinema Licence (this reflects the market share for TV). Even if you never viewed the “free” films you would still be legally required to buy a Cinema Licence to view the other “pay films” despite the fact the companies making and distributing the pay films receive no share of the Cinema Licence revenues.
Your Cinema Licence would cost you the same, whether you watched 1 film or 100 films per year.
Furthermore, some of the revenues from the Cinema Licence would be siphoned off to pay for free plays at state theatres. The state theatres would compete directly with commercial theatres and be subsidised entirely from the Cinema Licence. Thus theatre-goers would be subsidised by cinema-goers. So even if you didn’t have a Cinema Licence you could quite legally attend the free plays at state theatres at other peoples’ expense. (The free state theatres being analogous to radio).
VAT. Your VAT on a cinema ticket is a complete non-sequitur (see above).
Advertising. You are free to chose products that are advertised on TV or not. You were not coerced into buying those products, nor were you obliged to posess a licence to buy those products on pain of a fine and imprisonment.
February 10th, 2012 at 4:11 pm
Oh and another thing…..
The commercial film companies would not only have to compete with the obligatory Cinema Licence funded film company, they would also have to compete in the “pay” market with a state-owned, state-guranteed film company (Channel 4).
Furthermore the Cinema Licence-funded free film company would also publish a free daily and Sunday newspaper to compete directly and unfairly with the newspaper publishing industry…..(for “newspaper” read BBC website).
The British Film Corporation would have guranteed revenues of £3billion p.a. and be accountable to no-one but themselves. Nice work if you can get it!
February 11th, 2012 at 12:04 am
Allow me to elaborate on the point of the cinema licence and commercial broadcaster analogies: the point was that all costs need to be recouped somehow, regardless of medium, and then even in the private sector money is skimmed by the state to support British productions. Private enterprise may not use a subscription model, but buying a ticket or raising funds through advertising is functionally no different from buying a licence.
In each case money is exchanged for the privilage of access to a medium, even if the terms of the exchange vary (access to one film, access to television for a year, or an arbitrary extra charge on your groceries even if you don’t watch television). All serve to cover the costs of production, licence, broadcasting, and state-sponsered products: the piper must be paid, but the particulars do matter, as you demonstrate.
It is worth conceeding that state broadcasters hold a substancial sway over the British public’s media consumption, and that this does set the bar high for private broadcasters such as Sky and Virgin, as well as other news providers.
Sky and Virgin make their money by catering to niche audiences by offering specific channels, like Sky Sports, which offers programming they have competed for in an open market place and aquired through wise usage of scarce resources: that is the nature of a mixed market.
Newspapers, however, are not being outcompeted by a free BBC website: the truth is that as a medium, newspapers are outdated and paywalls are the only model demonstrated to be profitable in online news publishing. Personally, I find the BBC news reports lax on analysis (due to their neutrality) and subscribe to The Economist, a paper which is doing very well by competiting for a specific niche in an open market, much like Sky and Virgin. The BBC is not actively preventing other services from coming into existance, and with the outsourcing of production, it’s not preventing the rise of private production companies, either.
The crux of this debate does not rest on the question of the mixed market. The BBC is not a commercial venture and making arguements on the basis of commercial viability is a category error. The purpose of the BBC is to present a greater range of choices so that people are not limited to consuming only what the market provides.
While the market would normally regulate provision, the BBC is protected to some extent from the obligation to make popular things: it trades off its cheap popularist programming in exchange for the funds to pay for its quality documentories and dramas. By setting the licence fee, government determines how the BBC focuses on its mission to inform, educate, and entertain: if it kills off its popular programming, it loses popularity with the fee payer and risks extinction. If it kills off its broader programming, it fails in its mission. The next director general will be taking a huge pay hit as a result: the licence system is working well because the BBC pioritises its collective self-image over individual profit.
Returning to your distopian fantasy about cinema licencing, the flip side to the analogy as you discribed is that the quality of cinema faire will be superior. Rather than being the same story in a different guise over and over again produced by an overseas film factory, there would be a huge number of witty and smart films which appeal to a broad audience and broaden the range of cultural interaction which would otherwise be a bland diet of monoculture. Instead of getting a choice between action, horror, romance and comedy shot through with a single cultural standard of behabiour (and in particularly creative films, a mix of those genres) we will be presented with a choice between action, comedy, musical, opera, documentory, docu-drama and otherwise marginalised media.
Increasing the variety of cultural faire is as much as part of liberty as enabling people the choice of opting in and the choice of what to see. Even in a society with only cinema, without television, this arguement would stand: the only reason a licence is not applied to cinema is because licence-funded television already fills this niche. If you want to see what television would look like if we didn’t have a licence fee, look at cinema. Every great film you remember seeing is the exception rather than the rule.
Of course, I don’t think the BBC will go into the 21st century unreformed. In a world where we can increasingly go without television due to the internet, the terms of the licence will have to change. I also expect that in tough times, the BBC’s role as an educational resource will be re-interpreted: perhaps one day, rather than paying presenters to front niche content, volenteers with a passion will enter into a contract with the BBC to use its production facilities to make the programmes they wish existed.
While the debate surrounding the BBC may not be about commercial competition, use of the BBC’s resources are of public interest. I think the co-operative solution is counter to the spirit and purpose of the BBC: I think reduction of the licence fee to force more creative use of the resources is a much more productive endevour, but on the condition that the organisation not degrade to the extent that television lovers in the industry will be loathe to work for it. On that front, I think the government has made the right move.
February 12th, 2012 at 11:19 am
Toby,
“raising funds through advertising is functionally no different from buying a licence.” This is only true if the “licence” is voluntary ie. a subscription. This is not the case with the TV licence.
“Newspapers, however, are not being outcompeted by a free BBC website: the truth is that as a medium, newspapers are outdated and paywalls are the only model demonstrated to be profitable in online news publishing.” Here you contradict yourself in one single sentence. You are right newspapers are outdated and paywalls are indeed the only model demonstrated to be profitable in online news publishing, which is why the BBC website is competing unfairly with newspapers and preventing the press from transferring to this model. Why buy subscription to an online news and comment website when you get it free from the TV licence funded BBC website. This is a clear-cut case of the BBC competing unfairly with other media industries and reducing media plurality.
“Returning to your distopian fantasy about cinema licencing” I’m glad that agree with me that the cinema licencing model I described was dystopian; it was exactly analogous to the TV licence, which you must therefore also agree is also dystopian.
“the only reason a licence is not applied to cinema is because licence-funded television already fills this niche” The niche of high-brow cultural programming does not require a £3 billion per year compulsory TV tax to be channelled through the inefficient, plurality-killing monolith that is the BBC. The age of the internet makes the TV licence a complete and utter anachronism.
February 12th, 2012 at 8:20 pm
Advertising and the licence fee are no more nor less volentary than each other. If I were to say it was unfair that I were subsidising an ITV I didn’t watch when buying Cornflakes, the obvious reply is that ITV won’t get any cornflake money unless there were a market for ITV. This is the same as the BBC: politicians could not allow the BBC to go unchecked if there were no market for it, and if it were not working in the interests of its mission to inform, educate and entertain. Can you imagine £3 billion going into an organisation with no impact on anything at all whatsoever?
Newspapers can be profitable online with paywalls: the Financial Times, The Economist, The Times and others are all profitable because a) they are behind a paywall and b) they have the analysis the BBC lacks. Papers become profitable when they offer a distinct thread to their reporting: papers only get crushed against the BBC website when they haven’t got a paywall (like the Guardian) and a distinct narrative. The papers that fail in the mixed market are the ones who a) can’t get a readership b) if they do get a readership they can’t extract money from them, which is hardly a huge market distortion.
Perhaps if I had put “distopian” in inverted commas my sarcasm might have come across more obviously. But I do agree with you that the internet may bring some serious changes to the way we achieve the ends of the BBC in the future, but I don’t think that moment is now. Most people still own, use and watch television, and of those a sizable proportion watch the BBC. Perhaps one day the BBC will be abolished in favour of Youtube: after all, the absence of quality control will allow anyone to produce any programming they like, including the programming presently produced by the BBC. But until the world is ready for that niche, I believe that £3 billion a year into an organisation which possess the twin virtues of plurality of programming and popularity is worth it.
February 12th, 2012 at 10:55 pm
Read Toby’s posts again, but substitute “ice-cream” where he writes “programme”…
“The British Ice Cream Corporation (BICC) will be funded by an Ice Cream licence fee.”
“The purpose of the BICC is to present a greater range of choices [of ice cream] so that people are not limited to consuming only what the market provides.”
February 13th, 2012 at 1:11 am
You can pretend that I said ice cream to make your arguement work, but in order to do so you have to pretend that programming, like ice cream, is a purely heidonistic indulgence without any kind of intellectual or emotional position in the public discource.
February 13th, 2012 at 10:17 am
Toby is now playing the “my industry is special – unlike any other industry” card.
Everyone thinks their own topic / industry / hobby is special and unlike anything else. And needs some kind of special deal to keep quality and choice.
Of course Ice Cream is not like Garden Gnomes or Shoes or Plumbing Supplies. Perish the thought. We need an ice cream licence fee and we need it now. Think of the children.
February 14th, 2012 at 10:14 am
The case for making the BBC a cooperative is, to my mind, wholly unpersuasive. Nothing in the OP suggests that the reason for the BBC’s existence would be enhanced by it being a cooperative. If the author isn’t in favour of the BBC being paid for by a tax, and if the arguments here presented are valid, then the BBC would still benefit just as much, if not more so, from being a private, for-profit company with niche programming. An odd post.
March 6th, 2012 at 7:29 pm
The BBC is rubbish, and they know it; or they wouldn’t feel the need to threaten me with very large fines if i dont give then £140 per year for the right to watch sky.
It extortion plain and simple.