On all sides

Nadine Dorries, together with her new bessie, Sarah "Peloton" Healey, is keeping the pressure on the BBC.  A mid-term Charter Review is baked into current agreements between the DCMS and the BBC Board. It was always going to look at "governance and regulatory arrangements", so the BBC can't complain. 

But the scope of the review, announced this morning, to be led by DCMS officials and completed 'at pace' within a year, allows them to judge successful governance by outputs, and suggest changes: 

•  Editorial standards and impartiality: assessing the effectiveness of the BBC’s governance mechanisms (including changes made in the light of the Serota Review) in ensuring compliance with its editorial standards including impartiality requirements, and the regulatory arrangements for the enforcement of the BBC’s content standards
• Complaints: the way the BBC handles complaints through its BBC First system, the Editorial Complaints Unit (ECU), transparency of complaints resolution, and Ofcom’s framework for assessing BBC complaints as part of ensuring effective oversight of the BBC and its relationship with licence fee payers
• Commercial governance and regulation: whether the governance and regulatory arrangements of the BBC’s commercial subsidiaries ensure the effective functioning of the BBC’s commercial subsidiaries in accordance with its Charter obligations and appropriately support the BBC’s ability to maximise revenue in support of its public service activities
• Competition and market impact: evaluating how the BBC and Ofcom assess the market impact and public value of the BBC in an evolving marketplace and how that relates to the wider UK media ecology, including with regard to commercial radio and local news sectors and other content makers and distributors
• Diversity: evaluating how well the BBC’s governance arrangements deliver on the duty for the BBC and its output to reflect the entirety of the whole United Kingdom, including how it ensures diverse perspectives and interests are taken into account, and its duty to enter partnerships with other organisations throughout the UK, and also the extent of Ofcom’s regulation of these requirements
• Transparency: assessing the way in which BBC governance mechanisms support the BBC’s duty to demonstrate high standards of openness and transparency in the BBC’s reporting of progress against key commitments and performance against the above themes, and the extent of Ofcom’s regulation of that transparency