Future service licence reviews - a two-edged sword?

[Guest]

Here's an extract from Lord Patten's RTS Fleming Memorial speech today:

We will now think again about Service Licences. These are probably the most important part of the governance system. They define the essence of each BBC service. By 2012 the Trust will have completed a full assessment of the performance of every service. And at that point we will look again at the licences and will try to re-cast them in a simpler format.

The current quotas and targets are useful in guaranteeing minimum levels of public service output. And they provide some certainty and transparency for the rest of the industry. But they can be a crude tool. We want to be sure they do not inhibit creativity. So we will remove any that we think are unnecessary.

I think I can understand the intention of the last sentence, but I could also see how the removal of service licence 'specifics' could be used by station controllers to act in a unilateral fashion that might not be welcomed by a service's core audience.

Russ

[french frank]

I think I can understand the intention of the last sentence, but I could also see how the removal of service licence 'specifics' could be used by station controllers to act in a unilateral fashion that might not be welcomed by a service's core audience.

They do that already, don't they? They axe the messageboards and the Trust says, oh, dear, well we'd better delete messageboards from the service licence, hadn't we?

In this last review, as far as I can see the Trust collaborated with management and rubber-stamped their proposals. Can't be 100% sure about that because we're not allowed to see management's submission, so we don't know exactly what their proposals were for R3, what their arguments were, what their evidence was.

Service licences haven't been around that long and I'm not convinced they are much of a guarantee of quality.

[french frank]

I'm not much impressed by his chosen quote, either:

"Broadcasting represents a job of entertaining, informing and educating the nation, and should therefore be distinctly regarded as a public service."

The Reithian ideal, on the other hand, was to 'inform, educate and entertain' - in that order.

Other quotes:

"Reith talked about it being 'better to over-estimate the mentality of the public than to under-estimate it'. "

"Above all, we should pay greatest heed to any justified assertion that we are guilty of descending to a tasteless common denominator. Were that to be true, it would be a real act of treason to all that we are supposed to stand for."

[Russ]

They do that already, don't they?

Indeed they do. There is evidence that Service Licences have been altered by the Executive without public consultation, and that these alterations were done prior to the Trust rubber-stamping such changes, and that changes have made that the Trust didn't even mention had been changed. I don't think Service Licences are intended to be a guarantee of 'quality', but at least where they did contain specific objectives or criteria, we had yardsticks against which we could complain if changes were made. What worries me about what is being proposed is that we won't have any objective criteria at all.

Russ