Getting worse...

And the 10% cut the BBC faces in cash terms over the next five years is really a cut of 19.9%, says the Office for Budget Responsibility, even with more licences and a CPI link.......

Our forecast for BBC licence fee receipts has been revised up by around £0.1 billion a year from 2016-17 onwards, reflecting a small increase in our assumption of the proportion of households who are licence fee payers. This partly reverses a larger downward change we made in March. Our forecast for licence fee receipts is not affected by the Budget decision to stop reimbursing the BBC for the cost of free TV licences for over-75s. 

Based on the evidence presented to us by the Treasury, we have certified the Government’s costing and have therefore reduced our BBC spending forecast by amounts rising from £0.2 billion (5.0 per cent) in 2018-19 to £0.7 billion (17.7 per cent) in 2020-21. Chart 4.12 shows the pre- and post-measures forecasts for BBC current spending in real terms. The forecast assumes that the licence fee rises in line with CPI inflation over the period of the next charter, beginning in 2017-18, on which basis real spending would fall by 19.9 per cent between 2015-16 and 2020-21, compared to a 0.8 per cent real fall in assumed total public services spending over the same period.