Cable Forum - View Single Post - BBC licence fee to be reviewed by Conservatives

**Hugh** · 18-02-2020, 15:59

As above - viewable link.

Quote:

Boris Johnson is at odds with his senior Downing Street advisers, including Dominic Cummings, over plans to scrap the BBC licence fee and replace it with a voluntary subscription system, The Times has learnt.

The prime minister favours “reform rather than revolution” and is significantly less gung ho about abandoning the licence fee than Mr Cummings, his chief special adviser, who is said to be “ideological” about the issue.

It has also emerged that John Whittingdale, a minister appointed last week to help to oversee the reforms, said that moving to a subscription model was “politically utterly impossible”.

The culture minister said in an interview the day before he was appointed that the only way to move to a subscription system would be to “turn off Freeview and move it all online”. However, Freeview, Britain’s largest television platform, used by 18 million homes, does not have the technology to switch off particular stations for non-subscribers.

“There are large parts of the country that haven’t got broadband or indeed choose not to pay for it,” Mr Whittingdale, also a former culture secretary, told a podcast by The Critic magazine. “You are turning round to all those households that don’t have fast broadband and saying, ‘You can’t get the BBC any more.’ Politically that would be utterly impossible. It is just not possible to make the BBC a voluntary subscription service for as long as it is broadcast on Freeview. We are some way off being able to switch off Freeview and put it all online.”