Funding the BBC

SIR – Claire Enders (Letters, May 29) is rightly respected as a leading analyst of UK media. However, she has long had a blind spot about replacing the BBC licence fee.

The proposal she misrepresents is that the licence fee should be replaced by a mixture of public funding and subscription. The public funding would pay for the BBC’s public-service output: news, current affairs, regional content, religion, arts, children’s, education and many documentaries. These are the genres long recognised as not being supplied in sufficient quantity by the market, and so require public funding. Such output would continue to be broadcast free-to-air, with no need for encryption.

Meanwhile, access to the BBC’s entertainment output would indeed require payment of a subscription, probably in the region of £10 per month. There are multiple ways in which this content could be secured by would-be consumers. Ms Enders is wrong to suggest that people would need to pay £17.99 a month for a new smart television or £33 a month for a Sky package in order to receive a BBC subscription service (though the households currently paying those sums voluntarily could easily add on the BBC for a modest amount).

The easiest way for the BBC to reach potential customers would be to upgrade standard Digital Terrestrial Television set-top boxes by adding a conditional access module – the mechanism that the BBC deliberately blocked 20 years ago when it took responsibility for the Freeview transmission system. It would be strongly in the BBC’s interest to fund these upgrades, and right to reverse a policy designed to frustrate an attempt to introduce subscription funding.

There is no public policy requirement for every household to be able to gain access to one more entertainment service, even if it is supplied by the BBC. Millions have chosen to subscribe to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Sky and Virgin Media without any pressure to do so. If some choose to do without, so be it: that is the essence of consumer choice. David Elstein

Former CEO, Channel 5

London SW15