BBC News: BBC director general defends licence fee deal

Fairhead also said it is the Trust’s presumption that the government will not seek to impose further costs on the BBC during the Charter Period.

“Now we actually get every single element of it briefed deliberately and then he has the chutzpah to pretend this is a proper process”.

“It’s not the Government’s BBC, it’s the viewers’ BBC and the listeners’ BBC“.

It was unclear how the BBC would tackle the practicalities of making people pay for iPlayer, although it could adopt a scheme to insert a particular licence fee code to allow access.

Tony Hall, director-general of the BBC, added: “We have secured the right deal for the BBC in hard economic circumstances for the country”.

In reply, Mr Whittingdale said he had answered Mr Bryant’s questions in his original statement. The BBC said it would have “control over the policy” from that date onwards but could not commit to maintaining the free licences. The conservatives had pledged to retain the subsidy in its manifesto and promised it would be honoured during this parliament before the BBC becomes responsible after 2020.

The BBC does not report the number of unique users to the BBC iPlayer, preferring to talk in terms of 276 million requests for television programmes in May 2015.

Only a few days after it announced 1,000 job cuts as part of a new round of restructuring, the broadcaster has now been told it must fund free licence fees for over-75s.

Under the proposals the BBC’s contribution will be phased in from 2018/19 with the BBC taking on the full costs from 2020/21.

He said he feared for the BBC’s independence, telling Newsnight: “The more times it is beaten up by government, the harder it is for it to be bold”.

She said: “The Trust has a specific duty to represent the interests of licence fee payers”.

‘The licence fee as it is now structured means the BBC does not have a long-term guaranteed revenue stream, because in ten years more and more people are going to be using catch-up services. “We will want to make sure the public are at the centre of that debate”. “He has broken that promise today and I’m extremely disappointed”, he said.

Hall told the BBC the deal was a good one for the corporation’s future, but some have criticised the lack of transparency and suggested the trade-offs would not benefit the BBC.

“But it does not rule out any option which we will consider during the process of charter review”. “But it is also a publicly-funded body, so it is right that it, like other parts of the public sector, should make savings”. Some have called on a Netflix-style subscription model, allowing households not to pay for the BBC if they did not wish to watch its programs.

The Chancellor said yesterday that the changes were vital, because the licence fee would “slowly disappear” if it continued to be charged exclusively on television sets.