Would the BBC work better as a company, charity, instead of a new Royal charter?
BBC, plc 2017
In a set of articles earlier in the year, I investigated the BBC as a public company, sometimes run by subscription and other times by adverts and by subscription.
British Broadcasting Charity
One option that must be on the table is the change in the BBC from having a Royal Charter to being a charity.
The claims for the BBC's Royal Charter seem to be rather bust these days. Aside from the democratic implications in the 21st century of the head of state being able to make law by proclamation, the claimed benefits are long since gone.
The last three Prime Ministers have done away with once-treasured the BBC News independence.
Tony Blair used the strategy of a judge-lead whitewash (using the logic "the Prime Minister cannot lie because he is the Prime Minister") to weaken the independent broadcaster.
Gordon Brown, by providing "free" TV Licences to pensioners allowed the state to co-opt a sizable part of the funds supposedly hypothecated from the TV Fee. He could have provided pensioners with a £150 uplift in their pensions.
This pensioner allocation was used by Prime Minister David Cameron to strong arm DG Thompson into cutting back the BBC in an egregious funding settlement.
It is clear that the BBC is no longer independent of government, the Royal Charter special guarantee no longer respected by Ministers "of the Crown".
So, perhaps it would be sensible to do away with the 10-year cycle of renegotiation and move the Broadcaster to the status of the British Broadcasting Charity, and hope that the Charity Commission can provide a better protection for our national broadcaster than elderly monarch does.
Mike B Do not call me handwaver...... i seen it in black and white.... so its totaly up to you to find out.... am not giving you examples........... its high time bbc to go privated and properly run.... not hiring people then sack them give them lovley pay off then hire them again!!! crazy
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RE taxis should be paid by the person needing to get there.... not the expense of tv licence...
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10:21 PM
Rob: You claim your not handwaving, and then proceed to handwave, all over again.
' i seen it in black and white'. I dont know what you've seen in balck and white (you refuse to tell us), but if you mean how much senior people at the BBC are paid, thats easy. Its on the BBC website, right down to what they claim for expenses. However, context is everything, so once again, I ask the question, if they are overpaid, in relation to who?
Could you bother to give any examples? No. You replied 'so its totaly up to you to find out.... am not giving you examples' . So yes, your just handwaving.
And on the matter of taxi's, having been on TV years ago (largely to make up the numbers on Kilroy), they wanted us in the studio, which was in Teddington, and I certainly wasn't going to get there under my own steam at an ungodly time of the morning. So they picked us up by taxi. Which was reasonable, considering there would have been about five people in the presence of the orange one in the studio when the show went out live, if they had not provided transport.
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4:18 PM
Redirect Notice
Redirect Notice
thats where i find my source!!!
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6:55 PM
rob: Only Vampire Willow gets away with saying 'bored now'. What you really mean is 'you keep asking a question that I seemingly cannot or do not want to answer'.
You can apparently use Google, although simply searching for 'BBC + Waste + Money' and posting whatever is on the first page is pretty basic, and ssooo 2004.
However, you kind of miss the target, even while avoiding the original question. The Express article is a bit rubbish(big surprise). Its makes into a big pile pretty much all BBC spending that anyone has ever questioned, to get to the £350m. There are also a lot of quotes from Tory MP's, which are big on outrage. Time will tell whether the relocation to Salford Quay will work, but its not a 'disaster'.
As far as payoffs are concerned, I've already said that they were a huge mistake and should never have happened. The failure of the DMI project is also a disgrace, although not all of it is down to the BBC, since it had to be brought back inhouse after Siemens failed to complete it in 2009. The BBC did make a mess of it, as this article makes plain
The BBC DMI project - what went wrong?
However, its not alone in making a mess of a computer project, as this article points out: BBC's DMI project failure is a warning to all organisations
The BBC deserves a kicking for these messups, and I have no problem pointing them out. However, this is old news, and a distraction from the original question.
You asserted that 'BBC bosses (are).. on over inflated wages'. I'm just asking for facts to back that up. Still nada from you in terms of real evidence. Shouldn't you be able to Google at least something vaguely relevant?
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3:53 PM
Free TV, yes please. I rather have advert than cough up another £100 for BBC
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9:19 PM
Personally, I'd rather pay less than £3 per week for TV without inane and interrupting adverts - but I'd rather it was factually correct and not as biased as we see today from the BBC.
My attention span is actually several hours and not just a few minutes so I don't like my enjoyment being interrupted every few minutes by so-called adverts that I have no interest in at all.
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