Universality

The BBC's in-house former Labour minister, James Purnell, clad solely in the Nike loincloth of London Marathon training, has been cast into the pit of The Spectator, to face the lions of licence-fee abolition.

In his article, he makes it clear he's not a candidate to follow Lord Hall as Director-General: "I love my job running radio and services for children too much".

He reveals that, in the Charter Review of 2016/17, both the BBC and Culture Secretary John Whittingdale supported moving the licence fee to a household fee "but that was vetoed higher up".  To those who accuse the BBC of expansionism, he points out that since 2010, money available to spend on UK services has fallen by a quarter. "That we’ve managed to continue to improve services and we remain the biggest provider of media for young people in the UK is because of as radical an improvement in efficiency as any I’ve seen in the public sector."

"That the BBC works today is a good argument for not ripping up its foundations. The BBC works, in part, because of the licence fee: it gives us a moral duty to serve everyone as well as ensuring that everyone benefits. A BBC that didn’t reach everyone would no longer be able to bring the country together and play its part in ensuring our culture is in our hands, not those of tech billionaires in the US and China.

"The licence fee may well need to be modernised. But my conservative instinct is that some form of universal fee will continue to be the best way of funding us. That, however, is an argument for another year."