Disappointingly blinkered thinking from the Lords Committee reporting on funding of the BBC, which pushes the debate towards a hybrid future featuring a posh people's Waitrose/National Trust/BBC with guaranteed tea room access by subscription; and a dull news/quizzes/EastEnders/antiques/cooking channel, simulcast on radio, funded by either an addition to council tax or an hypothecated piece of income tax.
The council tax idea has its roots in Europe, but is based on an old-fashioned idea that each house has one or two tellies, and families watch together. As we're constantly told, the future is personalisation. The UK has the second-highest smartphone penetration rate in the world at 78.9%; in 2021, 99 per cent of people who are 16 to 34 years old owned a smartphone; these are devices capable of 'casting' to much larger screens at high quality.
A mechanism by which an element of income tax goes to fund the BBC is not going to be foolproof from Government interference, but, with care and thought, might be more transparent than the arbitrary, Treasury-defined licence fee settlements of the past 15 years.
Hybrid ? No thank you. Give everybody what good stuff you can afford.
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