From The Sunday Times August 2, 2009

The BBC should get its tanks off our lawn

Increasingly the question is being asked: what is the BBC for? Not encroaching on territory that belongs naturally to the commercial sector, according to Ed Vaizey, the Conservatives’ arts and media spokesman. He wants a Tory government to consider making the BBC give up Radio 1, its pop music station, and sell the FM frequency to a private radio operator. Radio 1 has been a cuckoo in the broadcasting nest since it was founded. Set up to replace the pirate radio stations, it does not cater for the audience originally intended and hampers commercial competitors.

The BBC monopolises the national FM frequencies, using four of the five available, the only commercial one being Classic FM. The Radio 1 frequency would give a private firm the chance to create a national FM pop station.

The implications of Mr Vaizey’s thinking go beyond Radio 1. He wants the BBC to disclose all salaries, staff and “talent” above £100,000. But he also wants to address the wider question of how far a dominant BBC restricts competition and undermines the private sector in radio, television and, increasingly, print.

The licence fee, a tax levied on almost every home, provides the BBC with financial muscle that is the envy of commercial rivals. As recent disclosures about BBC expenses and salaries revealed, its executives spend this bounty of taxpayers’ money lavishly.

The Tories have recognised the dangers of a BBC expanding beyond its public service remit. Jeremy Hunt, the shadow culture secretary, warned last year that the corporation’s £68m plan to extend local news services “would be a disaster, and certainly not in the public interest” because of its deleterious impact on regional newspapers.

Commercial broadcasters have always had to live with the BBC and we should not forget that the corporation produces many fine programmes and radio channels. But with the advent of the internet, the BBC has in effect become a newspaper publisher. This makes it a direct competitor of newspapers, none of which is subsidised by taxpayers.

At the moment most newspapers give away their content online for free. But this cannot continue and soon all of them will have to charge for it in some form. When that happens, the BBC “newspaper”, which of course will remain free, will gain a huge advantage. As we can see from our report in the Business section today, The Observer, the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, is under threat of closure. This underlines the crisis facing the industry. The BBC cannot be allowed to push it over the edge. Fewer newspapers would be bad for democracy. The BBC should stick to broadcasting and leave the written word to newspapers and their online commercial rivals.