Written evidence submitted by Reset Tech

Introduction to Reset Tech

Reset Tech is a public policy organisation advocating for technology that protects children, consumers, and public safety. Our highly experienced team of researchers, policy experts, storytellers, and operational specialists work across the UK, Europe, Canada, and the United States.

Executive summary

Over the last six months, Reset Tech has been developing a set of detailed proposals to support the Government’s Charter Review process. We have submitted a full response to the Green Paper’s consultation. This submission to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee’s inquiry into BBC Royal Charter Review expands on key themes from that response, with additional detail, evidence, audience research and modelling. It broadly follows the order set out in the Committee’s call for evidence, with a section covering each of the nine areas below.

1. Our vision is for a universal BBC set up for long-term success as an essential part of our democracy, culture and creative economy, with expanded public purposes in news, learning and education, the creative economy and bringing the benefits of emerging technologies to the public. To achieve this we anticipate changes in the BBC’s scale and scope to accelerate the UK’s digital economy; turbocharge the UK’s creative economy; and safeguard the UK’s information economy.
    
2. The future funding of the BBC is the central debate for this Charter Review. If nothing is done to reform the BBC’s funding model, the result will be a death spiral for public service media and the end of the BBC five years into a new Charter. We propose a diversified long-term funding model that sustains the BBC for decades, while making it 25% less expensive for the great majority of households, by:

○        Creating additional commercial income streams by adding UKTV and public service broadcasters to iPlayer and through licensing deals with AI firms

○        Reforming the UK’s business charging regime to be more in line with countries like Germany, or levying a small charge on sales of new media devices

○        Setting a base level of productive efficiency of 1% per annum

○        Transferring £500m a year of top-sliced BBC costs back to Government: namely the BBC World Service, S4C and free TV licences for over-75s on pension credit

○        Making the licence fee universal again, either through a household levy, or by reforming the current fee to cover consumption of any video by a household

○        Cutting the reformed licence fee by £50 per household (25%), which reduces the cost for non-evading households and, together with the measures listed above, still increases the BBC’s spending power compared to today

○        These changes would mean a BBC that provides significantly more value to audiences for less cost per household.
 

Reinventing the BBC for tomorrow’s media landscape will enable it to remain relevant and attract young audiences into the future. Our proposals include the following:

3. A BBC AI service - ChatBBC - setting standards and leading the market. ChatBBC would be a safe, transparent and reliable interactive knowledge resource and a trusted agentic tool - a public service personal curator for the digital world
4. Open BBC products that host and support other public service media to help them compete effectively with global tech giants, creating UK platforms for British video, audio and news and supporting a managed transition from traditional TV distribution (DTT) to TV via the internet (IPTV) in a way that supports UK public service broadcasting
5. New partnerships with YouTube and other third-party platforms to distribute BBC content and invest in a new generation of creative talent. This would require Government intervention on prominence, as proposed in Ofcom’s Transmission Critical report
6. Increased funding for entertaining, educational British programming for children and an enhanced formal learning offer around media literacy and citizenship.

In addition, we propose:

7. A BBC that is more independent from Government and more accountable to the public who own it and pay for it, through a perpetual Charter, an Independent Appointments Commission, an Independent Funding Commission, a periodic Operational Review, and a standing Citizen’s Panel to engage audiences in BBC governance and strategy
8. A World Service that reaches double today’s audience in a new strategic partnership funded by the Government, filling the void left by the closure of American impartial media
9. A positive role for the BBC in supporting the UK’s local news ecology, through a new five-point partnership plan for local news across the UK.

We have supported our proposals with an extensive programme of qualitative and quantitative audience research and testing with our partners at More in Common, highlights of which are included in this response. We would welcome the opportunity to discuss all of these ideas with the Committee at a critical time for information security and public service broadcasting.

1              A universal BBC

The creative industries are one of the UK’s greatest assets – admired worldwide, attracting visitors and investors to the UK, amplifying soft power, supporting digital innovation, growing the economy, and making life in the UK better. The BBC is the foundation of this success. Securing its long-term future is essential in growing a creative industries sector that drives the success of Global Britain and builds on its history and heritage to inform, educate and entertain the world.

Our aim is to increase the impact of public service media in the UK by safeguarding:

●        Entertaining and engaging British content used by everyone in the UK, easily accessible and prominently visible, showcasing Britain’s distinct cultures and heritage

●        Trusted, accurate, verified, independent and impartial news used regularly by the great majority of the UK population and increasing numbers around the world.

We propose that the BBC Charter Review process should secure a universally used public service BBC for a generation in a way that supports the whole British media sector. We will aim to maintain the BBC as a broad, popular organisation used regularly by nearly everyone in the UK, to avoid the marginalisation of niche, market failure public service broadcasters in other countries - a BBC that is an essential part of our democracy, culture and economy.

Our audience research with More in Common shows that the British public support this view of the BBC. In a nationally representative survey of over 4,000 adults, the BBC continues to be the most-used news provider in the UK by far, and among the most trusted - a unique position:

Trust versus frequent usage of selected news sources (% saying trust a great deal/fair amount/some)

Source: More in Common for Reset Tech, 20 - 27 February 2026, 4,095 GB adults.

When the public is asked what they think about the BBC, they provide a broad range of answers that include news, entertainment, public service and combinations of all of these. The British public sees the BBC as a broad-based universal provider.

When you think about the BBC, what do you generally think of it as? (% selecting each answer)

Source: More in Common for Reset Tech, 20 - 27 February 2026, 4,095 GB adults.

Similarly, the public value a broad range of output from the BBC. When asked what they would miss most if the BBC disappeared tomorrow, drama, factual programmes, news and sport are the most popular answers, with no one genre of output dominating the value the BBC provides to audiences.

If the BBC disappeared tomorrow, what would you miss most? Select your top 3

Source: More in Common for Reset Tech, 20 - 27 February 2026, 4,095 GB adults.

This broad, multigenre offering provides the public with universal value. More in Common asked the public who do they think gets more or less value from the BBC than the average person. While people generally think older adults get more from the BBC than younger adults, the most common answer for each group is ‘about the same’, showing that the general public still sees the BBC as providing value to many different audiences. Perceptions of the value each group gets from the BBC are broadly similar across all ages and audience groups.

For each of the following groups, state whether you think they get more or less than the average person out of the BBC (all responses)

Source: More in Common for Reset Tech, 20 - 27 February 2026, 4,095 GB adults.

BBC Charter Review proposals

We propose three major areas of activity to reinvent the BBC and keep it as a universal service providing value to all audiences for the next Charter. These areas are expanded on at greater length in the rest of this document.

1. Accelerate the UK’s digital economy. The BBC should develop its own AI service – a ChatBBC – underpinned by transparent, open public service algorithms (section 3 of this document). The BBC should open its major products – iPlayer, Sounds, News & Sport – to other public service and UK media providers to help them compete effectively with global tech giants (section 4). It should distribute its content more widely on to third-party platforms, supported by Government action on prominence (section 5). This should be supported by reinstating the 2007 Charter purpose, removed in 2017, to ‘deliver to the public the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services’.
    
2. Turbocharge the UK’s creative economy. The BBC should increase high-end production outside London in video and audio and engage in a new, much deeper partnership with the growing creator economy in the UK (section 5). It should support UK children by providing them with trusted British programming, education and news output which reflects them and their lives and helps them learn how to judge fact from fiction online and navigate the online world safely (section 6).
    
3. Safeguard the UK’s information economy. The BBC should strengthen on-the-ground journalistic capacity locally across the UK and around the world, as others withdraw. It should double the audience of the BBC World Service over the next decade through a new funding and strategic partnership with the Government (section 8). It should play a key role in supporting a thriving ecosystem of local news across the UK, through a new five-point partnership plan (section 9). This should be accompanied by expanding the first public purpose to support a healthy information environment.

These ideas will only be possible with the reform and modernisation of the BBC’s funding to enable it to grow while minimising the direct impact on UK households (section 2). It is also critical to reverse the trend of the last fifteen years and make the BBC more independent from Government and more accountable to the public who own it and pay for it (section 7).

Changes to the BBC’s public purposes

To support these proposals, the BBC’s purposes should be updated to ensure that they are fit for the digital age:

1. We support expanding the first public purpose. Accuracy and trust should now have equal prominence alongside impartiality. We also support the BBC having a formal role in supporting a healthy information environment. This would be preferable to a new negative purpose to ‘counter misinformation and disinformation’, which, while well-intentioned, risks undermining the independence of the BBC. The role of fact-checking and verification around mis/disinformation has become associated with accusations of bias. It would require the BBC to act as an arbiter of truth, rather than focusing on its mandate to provide impartial, accurate information. It exposes the BBC to the risk of being seen as institutionally partisan, particularly outside the UK.
    
2. The BBC’s second public purpose should also be expanded. We support a direct reference under this purpose to media literacy, the means by which the public can develop a critical understanding of the media and information environment. ‘Critical AI literacy’ - i.e. the ability independently to test, verify and sense-check AI outputs - should also be understood as a key component of media literacy, as well as functional digital and AI skills. By including these references under this purpose, we would avoid adding it to the first public purpose and being misinterpreted as countering mis/disinformation.
    
3. We provisionally support expanding the fourth purpose to support the creative economy. This would serve to strengthen the unique public service role of the BBC and help justify our proposals for universal public funding. However, this should be subordinate to the BBC’s main role to inform, educate and entertain audiences. Where supporting the creative economy would be in tension with that role - for instance, by fragmenting BBC funding across too many small parts of the UK and undermining critical mass in regional creative centres of excellence - the BBC’s audience focus must come first.
    
4. We would propose reinstating the 2007 Charter purpose (removed in 2017) to ‘deliver to the public the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services’. This should explicitly link to the idea of a universal BBC to reinforce the importance of BBC content and services being available to all, free at the point of access. This purpose should also enable the BBC to take a lead in Artificial Intelligence. We outline proposals in section 3 for a BBC that plays an important role in the UK AI market and provides a free, safe, trusted alternative to US-dominated commercial AI services.

Once these purposes are agreed, they should be set as part of the BBC’s new permanent Charter, as we recommend later in section 7. The BBC’s Mission and Public Purposes would be beyond the scope of the regular Operational Reviews we propose and would not be able to be regularly amended by an individual government of the day. However, the BBC will still need to adapt and evolve its strategy and operations in response to changes in society, technology, demographics and media use. Therefore, the Government should aim to reduce the length of and detail in each current public purpose, moving any necessary obligations to the accompanying Operational Agreement.

We note that in the 2007 Charter the BBC’s purposes were listed in headline form only:

The Public Purposes of the BBC are as follows— (a) sustaining citizenship and civil society; (b) promoting education and learning; (c) stimulating creativity and cultural excellence; (d) representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities; (e) bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK; (f) in promoting its other purposes, helping to deliver to the public the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services and, in addition, taking a leading role in the switchover to digital television.

For a permanent Charter, this headline form of expression would be preferable to the detailed, prescriptive and now obsolescent language in the 2017 Charter.

2              Sustainable, long-term funding

In this section, we set out proposals to diversify and stabilise the BBC’s long-term funding model to future-proof it for decades. This approach would make it 25% less expensive for the great majority of households with an immediate £50 reduction, while restoring some of the BBC’s lost funding from the last fifteen years to allow it to invest more into the creative economy and across the UK.

Context

The future funding of the BBC is the central debate for this Charter Review. If nothing is done to reform the BBC’s funding model, the result will be a death spiral for public service media and the end of the BBC five years into a new Charter.

The BBC’s income has been in long-term decline. In real terms the BBC’s licence fee income has fallen by 24% since the start of this Charter, which equates to the BBC having around £1.2 billion less in real terms from licence fee income in 2024/25 than in 2016/17. This is due to fewer households falling within the licence fee rules, as well as the cost of funding free TV licences for over 75s, and freezes in the price of the licence fee at a time of high inflation[1].

Currently, a TV licence is required for any reception of live TV on any device, and for use of BBC iPlayer. As viewing has shifted first to TV-on-demand and then to video sharing platforms, the number of licences in force has fallen. Over the last decade, therefore, the TV licence has moved from being compulsory to optional for an increasing number of households.

Source: House of Commons Library, TV Licence Fee Statistics, June 2025

The BBC’s latest Annual Report shows another fall of c300k licences in 24/25, reaching 23.8 million licences in force at the year-end[2].

As the number of licences falls so the BBC’s public funding falls in real terms, despite the linking of the licence fee to CPI. This means that the BBC then spends less on content, which further reduces its ability to attract audiences to viewing that requires a TV licence. In other words, the BBC has entered a vicious circle which will accelerate. An extrapolation of the current trend by Reset Tech shows that a licence fee with today’s scope could be being paid for by fewer than 40% of UK households ten years into a new Charter.

Several models have been proposed to address this crisis in the financial sustainability of the BBC: advertising, subscription, a household levy, reform of the current TV licence fee, and a diversified approach. Each is reviewed in brief here:

Advertising: No credible media analysts believe advertising funding could substitute for public funding. An advertising-funded BBC would not be viable at its current scale, and would destroy UK commercial TV and radio. Independent analysis[3] has shown that the doubling of radio advertising inventory and the c40% increase in TV inventory would drive advertising prices sharply down. The result would be a £1.2bn shortfall compared to the current licence fee. The resulting severe impacts on commercial radio, ITV, Channel 4, Five and Sky would render much of the UK media sector commercially unviable.

Subscription: Similarly, no credible media analysts support a switch to a subscription service, as it would generate insufficient income, damage commercial media and contradict the BBC’s universal mission[4]:

●        A subscription BBC is no longer a universal BBC and remakes the BBC into a service only for the affluent. The moment premium content is placed behind a paywall, the precious century-long principle that quality and truth are available to everyone regardless of ability to pay would be abolished

●        Subscription models have far higher income-generation costs (marketing, customer service and technology) and not everyone would subscribe. The result would be more than half of the population paying double for the same service

●        Subscription would require every device used to access BBC services to have conditional access technology. In television it would require turning off the BBC on Freeview, which is connected to the main TV set in approximately 13 million homes. For radio it is technically impossible.

Household Levy: A universal household levy, in operation in Germany and Switzerland, would apply a licence fee regardless of viewing behaviour or device ownership. It would be the simplest solution to BBC funding. Collection and enforcement would also be simpler and more efficient as there would be no need to determine which households are using a TV set, or for what purpose. However, despite the strong arguments in its favour, the Government appears to have ruled out this option in the Green Paper.

BBC Charter Review proposals

Ruling out these three approaches requires novel and ambitious solutions to achieve the Green Paper’s main aims of:

●        Reducing the direct impact on households

●        Restoring some of the BBC’s lost funding from the last two decades to invest more into the creative economy and across the UK

●        Stabilising the BBC’s funding so that it does not enter the vicious circle described above.

Our proposal is to diversify the BBC’s funding model to reduce the per-household charge. We have modelled, for instance, adding the following income streams by the year 2032/33, five years into a new Charter to allow for a period of transition:

1. Government funding to replace licence fee funding for World Service (£250m), S4C (£100m) and free TV licences for over-75s with Pension Credit (£175m): £525m p.a.
    
2. Reforming the UK’s relatively generous business charging regime to be more in line with countries like Germany, with exemptions for small businesses. Alternatively, a levy of between 2% and 4% could be levied on sales of new media devices such as TVs, PCs, tablets and mobile phones costing over £100, reflecting the huge proliferation of such devices used to consume BBC and other UK media services. A device levy would place a larger share of costs on affluent households and would have the virtue of being collected once at point of sale with revenues flowing directly to the Treasury like VAT: £300m-600m p.a.
    
3. Additional BBC Studios commercial dividend / investment in programming, including by adding UKTV to iPlayer as part of opening up the BBC’s online products to support the whole PSB and UK content sector (see section 4 later): £150m p.a.

4. Licensing deals with AI firms in return for fair use of BBC content, plus platform access fees for opening the BBC’s public service platforms to commercial players (without unduly reducing the incentive for commercial media partners to join): £100m p.a.
    
5. Setting a base level of productive efficiency that avoids impacts on audiences of 1% per annum. These savings effectively add to the BBC’s spending power by reducing costs, and amount to the equivalent of c5% extra funding by 32/33: £220m p.a.
    

This diversification of funding would make it possible to reform the current TV licence fee to become an ‘audiovisual licence’. This would use secondary legislation to expand the definition of ‘live TV’, as was used in 2016 to include BBC iPlayer. Different versions are possible, but in the most future-proofed version, it would bring broadcaster video-on-demand, premium video streamers and video-sharing platforms into the definition – the latest change in a century of updating licence definitions to reflect the newest technology used to receive media. It would increase licensable households to close to 27-28m and allow the continuation of an opt-out for households not consuming online video. With the right data sharing, over time it would be possible to replace the current analogue collection system with digital enforcement, as TV Licensing would know which households were using online video.

This reform would also open up the possibility of TV providers bundling a discounted TV licence with their commercial subscription offers for family or household accounts, as an incentive to take their service, something that is not currently legally possible. Data sharing as part of this bundling would accelerate the modernisation of compliance and enforcement.

In our modelling, the combination of diversified funding and the extended household base from an audiovisual licence could reduce the charge per household by £50, from c£174.50 today to c£125 in real terms – a reduction of a quarter – while still providing the BBC with increased spending power compared to today and stabilised funding over the long term. In addition, up to 25% of the BBC’s public funding would now be progressively targeted towards richer households – without asking them to pay any more directly – through the device levy/business charging and Government funding.

We would be happy to take the Committee through our proposals and modelling in more detail.

Audience views on BBC funding

As part of our research with our partners at More in Common we have tested a variety of funding mechanisms and trade-offs with the UK public in a quantitative survey. However, we recognise that this is a complex area of policy-making with no straightforward answers. We present these findings as background context, and our next phase of research will be exploring the pros, cons and trade-offs of each model in qualitative groups.

Firstly, we tested the various alternative funding options put forward in the Government’s Green Paper, as well as funding through taxation. While advertising came out highest among the options - unsurprising as it involves no direct payment by respondents - no one model secured above 30% support. This would indicate a relatively even spread of opinion among the population where it remains possible to make a case for any of these.

Which funding model for the BBC would you personally prefer?

Source: More in Common for Reset Tech, 20 - 27 February 2026, 4,095 GB adults.

Taxation is not a popular option to replace the licence fee. When presented with the risk that funding the BBC in the UK through taxes would increase the influence the Government of the day has over the BBC and its programming, a licence fee is seen as a better option.

Which of the following would you prefer for the BBC?

Source: More in Common for Reset Tech, 20 - 27 February 2026, 4,095 GB adults.

When More in Common tested subscription models, more people than not thought that a subscription-based BBC would cost more than the current licence fee - 42% of Britons expect it to cost more than the current fee, against only 18% who think it would cost less. Given the additional subscriber costs and loss of revenue from those choosing not to subscribe, this would certainly be the case. We tested audiences’ response to this scenario and it is clear that more of the public than not would prefer a more universal funding method that reduced costs for everyone.

Which of the following would you prefer for the BBC?

Source: More in Common for Reset Tech, 20 - 27 February 2026, 4,095 GB adults.

If the BBC adopted a subscription model, where audiences had to pay a monthly subscription to be able to access any BBC content, only 33% probably would subscribe in principle, compared to 50% who would probably not. If the BBC subscription cost more than the licence fee currently does, only 21% would probably subscribe in principle, with 64% saying they probably would not subscribe. When tested with a willingness to pay question, some of those saying they would not subscribe would be willing to pay £5 or £10 per month. But overall, of all those who are willing to pay for a BBC subscription, the mean maximum amount they would be willing to pay is £13.14 per month, similar to the current licence fee.

It is clear that those who state a preference for the subscription model tend not to want to subscribe themselves. The majority (53%) of those who select the subscription model as their funding preference say they probably would not subscribe to such a model, compared to 38% who say they probably would.

In conclusion, audiences do not seem to have unified or fixed views on future BBC funding, which is unsurprising as they have not been yet engaged in a public debate. There is a natural tendency to prefer solutions that cost households the least money, while preserving BBC independence. This supports our proposed approach, which is to diversify BBC funding while reducing the cost for the great majority of households and avoiding adverse impacts on the rest of the sector.

* * *

The next four sections of this document set out our proposals to reinvent the BBC for tomorrow’s media landscape, to help it stay relevant to all audiences over the long term and increase the value it provides.

3              ChatBBC

In this section, we set out our proposals for a BBC AI chatbot - ChatBBC - that demonstrates the value of public service artificial intelligence. This would be a safe, transparent and trustworthy interactive knowledge resource and a trusted agentic tool - a public service personal curator for the digital world.

Context

Artificial intelligence is becoming a part of daily life, despite low levels of trust among the public. 69% of people in the UK use AI for work, study or personally, but just 42% say they are willing to trust AI. Almost three-quarters (72%) say they are unsure online content can be trusted as it may be AI-generated. An even greater proportion (78%) are concerned about negative outcomes from AI.

AI literacy is not keeping pace with adoption, and the UK is falling behind other countries. Only a quarter (27%) of people in the UK say they have AI education or training. Despite that almost half (48%) believe they can use AI tools effectively, though a smaller proportion (36%) feel they have the skills and knowledge to use it appropriately. The UK is falling behind many other countries when it comes to AI training and literacy: out of 47 countries surveyed, the UK is in the bottom third for AI literacy and training[5].

AI is also changing the information ecosystem in which democracies and public service media operate. There are three key concerns:

1. Disintermediation: generative AI-driven services are providing people with answers to search queries and news about current events, meaning they do not click through and visit authentic and trusted sources. In the year since Google launched AI Overviews, news searches resulting in no clicks rose from 56% to 69%[6]. As web browsers, news feeds and AI assistants in mobile devices begin to integrate similar forms of generative summaries, the main routes for discovery of public service journalism will dwindle and the business model of advertising-supported news will collapse.
    
2. Distortion: AI-generated text often distorts news publishers’ content with errors, poor sourcing and misattribution – up to 45% of the time, according to a 2025 study by the EBU[7]. Editorial control is moving away from publishers to AI mediators, and becoming less visible, public and accountable. The public has little ability to question, debate, and challenge the editorial decisions of AI companies that shape the information they receive. People rarely understand that AI is only as good as the data that trained it, the safeguards for veracity built into the models, and the good will of corporate owners to avoid biases. As use of AI chatbots grows, so does the risk that their models direct users in undesirable ways (e.g. serving commercial or politically partial motivations, or towards sycophantic echo chambers). Despite high levels of mistrust in AI, the rapid integration of chatbots into popular search and social media services creates a ubiquity that invests AI with an authority for credibility that it has not earned.
    
3. Exploitation: generative AI has lowered the barriers to producing and sharing mis- and dis-information at scale, guiding children into age-inappropriate content, and flooding the market with scams. This is accelerating the pollution of the information ecosystem. The longer-term systemic risk is that this could leave people believing they are unable to trust any information online or any source of news[8].

For public service media organisations, this moment is critical. The range of use cases for AI is growing as journalists use these technologies more, ranging from semi-automated fact-checking, to interview transcription, proofreading, visualisation, and metadata tagging, to AI-assisted document processing and archive analysis. PSBs are uniquely positioned to take a lead in harnessing these technologies for public benefit, shaping the debate around what good looks like for AI in journalism and taking advantage of the opportunities AI presents.

In the UK, the PSBs’ mandate and funding models, higher levels of audience trust, relative stability, and track record of investment in innovation gives them the means to take a leading role in shaping the AI market itself, and to help the public understand AI and develop critical capacities to navigate the shifting information and technology environment.

BBC Charter Review proposals

We propose that the BBC takes a leading role in offering public service AI products in the UK market. Only the BBC has the reach, skills, credibility, data and trust to show citizens there is a model for AI delivery based on public service values as an alternative to US-dominated commercial AI services.

1. We are developing a concept for a new BBC AI service – ChatBBC – underpinned by a commitment to transparency and strong guardrails to protect both safety and quality. ChatBBC will live across all the BBC’s products and across all devices, providing a free, safe, trusted, accurate knowledge resource that covers topics from news to health, from education to entertainment.
   
   Our expansive vision for ChatBBC would build on work that the BBC has already underway to create an LLM aligned with BBC editorial values that fine-tunes open-source and open-weight models trained using BBC data, and has constitutional alignment with BBC editorial guidelines and public purposes. ChatBBC would not be a general purpose LLM competing with mass-market commercial products. Rather, it would focus on delivering market-leading quality in giving accurate answers to questions about news, entertainment and current events; educational support for children; and high-quality information about local areas, health and wellbeing.
   
   ChatBBC would also aspire to move beyond today’s chatbot services, providing agentic tools to serve the public. In the near future, AI agents will serve as personal curators in the digital world, filtering and selecting information and entertainment from the bewildering variety of content on offer. Not only will ChatBBC provide focused knowledge resources, it will also be able to serve as an individualised steward of digital markets, guided by BBC values. We envisage the BBC could offer a trustworthy AI digital curation tool in a market otherwise skewed by commercial imperatives.
   
   A children’s version of ChatBBC (both knowledge resource and agentic curator) could be created that will be safe for under-16s to use and have a strong focus on media literacy to respond to the increasing role AI will play in the way young people access information. ChatBBC could be a pioneering model for other great British institutions that have access to their own content and data and share the same public service values.
    
2. We recommend that the Government supports the BBC as it explores commercial partnerships with AI providers to provide revenue streams and support the development of ChatBBC. We anticipate that other AI models will be able to use BBC material for training purposes, subject to mutually agreed licensing agreements and attribution. This will provide a revenue stream for the BBC and improve the outputs of other models by ensuring that BBC content (and not simply whatever is scraped from the open web and social media) shapes outputs of large language models.
    
3. BBC Research and Development should play a critical role in supporting an AI-led BBC. BBC R&D has a long and proud history in researching and developing advanced and emerging media technologies for the benefit of the BBC and the broader industry. Like all parts of the BBC, R&D has suffered budget cuts over the last fifteen years as public funding for the BBC has been reduced. Stabilising and expanding public funding for the BBC will enable a re-expansion of BBC R&D for the benefit of the whole industry (see section 2).
    
4. The BBC should develop a comprehensive media literacy programme as part of its formal learning purpose, to help equip young people with an intuitive level of media literacy, sufficient to tell the difference between what is trusted and safe and what is not, and how to think critically about what they are watching and reading. As important as functional digital and AI skills will be ‘Critical AI literacy’ - the ability independently to test, verify and sense-check AI outputs.

4              Open BBC products

In this section, we set out proposals to open up the BBC’s online products to host and support other public service media to help the BBC, public service broadcasters and UK media providers all compete effectively with global tech giants.

Context

BBC-led partnerships have played a crucial role in supporting the UK creative industries over many decades. These include digital switchover, the creation of Freeview, Freesat, YouView and Freely, and distribution partnerships such as hosting S4C Clic on BBC iPlayer. As a result, the UK has a healthier PSB sector than any other country and a world-beating creative economy[9].

However, the challenges to PSB driven by digital technology and globalisation threaten the foundations of this highly successful ecology. The pressure of competition for time and attention, and the dominance of US and China-based online gatekeepers holding control over access to content will put unprecedented audience and business pressures on public service broadcasters. Radical partnership thinking is needed to preserve what we value most as a country in our media.

Our partnership proposals for Charter Review include:

●        A new BBC partnership with YouTube to distribute content and invest in a new generation of creative talent, coupled with changes to prominence rules (see section 5)

●        Embedding the BBC as the anchor public service partner for digital transition to help UK public services pool user data, reach new audiences and accelerate their digital engagement with their users

●        Exploring partnerships with AI providers to provide revenue streams and support the development of ChatBBC, a new public service LLM demonstrating a trusted, verified, safe alternative model in the AI chat marketplace (see section 3).

However, the UK needs to be braver with consolidation in the PSB sector. In the commercial sector, particularly in the US, consolidation has played a crucial role in the battle for attention and revenues. It brings economies of scale: pooling resources, centralising operations, and reducing overheads in engineering, production and corporate services. It enhances bargaining power, particularly over retransmission fees, network access, programming terms and prominence. Consolidation creates more valuable data sets that enable more optimised production, advertising inventory and audience targeting. Companies can leverage cross-promotion and share content across multiple channels, enhancing their reach to different audiences. These trends have led to huge corporate mergers in the US, and have driven the creation of superindie producers and the recent Sky/ITV proposed merger in the UK.

The BBC is the natural partner for PSB and UK media consolidation. It has played this role over many decades with broadcasting and distribution partnerships. The BBC’s platforms are the best foundations for this strategy – they are the biggest British online platforms for all age groups, and the only products guaranteed to be British-owned in perpetuity.

Top ten organisations visited by UK online individuals on smartphones, tablets or computers,
by age group

Source: Ofcom Media Nations 2025.

BBC Charter Review proposals

In the face of these inexorable market forces, we propose to use the Charter Review process to enable a radical consolidation of UK audience-facing platforms. This would involve opening up the BBC’s major products – iPlayer, Sounds, News & Sport – to other public service and UK media providers. This would see iPlayer hosting ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and BFI content, for instance; Sounds could host content from commercial radio and UK music providers; BBC News and Sport online could host content from independently regulated UK news companies.

Consolidating online routes to audiences in this way will increase the reach and revenues associated with public service media and produce new revenue streams for the BBC. It will reduce the cost of investing in data, technology and product engineering at a time when those costs are escalating. It will create one digital service that will be strong enough to compete with global players, with mandated prominence to ensure its visibility. Prominence and visibility will be far easier to secure with one combined player across each content format (video, audio, news), than attempting to regulate prominence for 15-20 different players.

However, we acknowledge that this is a radical restructuring of the traditional PSB market, where organisations have traditionally competed separately and directly for audiences while generally pursuing different revenue models. Therefore, significant intervention will be needed to deliver this strategy.

1. The Government and Ofcom will need to accept that BBC products will have to show advertising from commercial providers, if their content is hosted on the BBC’s products, in order to support their business models. Safeguards for consumers will include:

○        the guarantee that no BBC publicly funded programming will have advertising in its first transmission window, protecting the audience experience of publicly funded content and the advertising revenues of commercial PSBs

○        the ability to turn off advertising completely and see only BBC publicly funded content if preferred. However, the default setting for these consolidated products should be the broader service.
 

2. Government and Ofcom should evaluate whether BBC News is a special case, where perceptions of BBC impartiality would be undermined by carriage of a broader range of news and opinion output, no matter how clearly labelled. If the risk was deemed too high, partners could be restricted to local news providers only, or providers regulated for impartiality (such as broadcasters with Ofcom licences, or newspapers groups with independent regulation). We would propose to use qualitative and quantitative audience research in the next phase of the Charter process to test consumer boundaries and preferences.
    
3. Ofcom will need to regulate the terms of carriage, access to data, branding and product roadmap guarantees between the BBC and its partners. Misaligned incentives in these areas have stymied partnership proposals before and some regulatory oversight may be needed to start the partnership process and ensure fair dealing between partners.
    
4. Regulators will need to relax market definitions and regulatory processes to approve these partnerships, to avoid repeating the ‘Project Kangaroo’ fiasco of 2009, now widely seen as a huge missed opportunity to strengthen UK public service broadcasting in the face of digital transformation.
    
5. The Government, Ofcom and the BBC should consider sequencing these partnerships over time to avoid regulatory, audience and product overload. It would make most sense to start with Channel 4, 5 and UKTV on iPlayer, before expanding to commercial radio on Sounds. This would leave potentially the most controversial partnerships in News until the model and process has been proven.
    
6. The Government and Ofcom will need to update prominence legislation to give Ofcom greater powers to support the visibility of these products in third-party interfaces and platforms (see section 5).

7. The Government will also need to consider the long-term future of Channel 4. This strategy releases immediate benefits by combining back office and product development to save costs and drive impact. But there may need to be a debate about a potential structural merger between Channel 4 and the BBC Group over time, particularly if Channel 4’s finances continue on the current trajectory and the Sky/ITV merger goes ahead and increases consolidation and overall competitive pressures in the UK market.

5              Third-party platforms and prominence

In this section, we set out our proposals for ambitious new partnerships with YouTube and third-party platforms to invest in a new generation of talent and syndicate BBC content. This would need to be supported by Government intervention on prominence.

Context

For decades, regulation has helped audiences easily find and discover PSB content on linear broadcast television – that is why BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and 5 main services are always numbered 1-5 on any broadcast TV. But by 2024, linear broadcast TV accounted for under half of audiences’ in-home viewing[10].

A growing disconnect between the UK public service broadcasters and audiences threatens the future sustainability of the sector. It puts at risk audience access to and usage of trusted and accurate news which supports democratic society, and a breadth of programming that reflects the whole of the UK. This is a particular challenge for children and younger people who risk losing access to British content that helps them to learn and grow, and that reflects their lives and shared societal values on screen.

Online platforms hold all the power today and they determine how content and news items are presented. Recent Ofcom analysis showed that the majority of YouTube videos watched from UK web browsers are viewed as a result of YouTube’s recommender system. When searching YouTube using a range of popular news-related terms, just 6% of the top ten results were from PSBs. Three-quarters of the videos did not originate in the UK, despite setting the search location to the UK[11]. Previous analysis found that news items at the top of a social media feed were viewed almost 15 times longer than those further down[12]. The increasing trend of algorithmic curation displacing content chosen by users with content pushed by the platforms is happening across the industry and across all major digital video services. The rapid proliferation of low-quality, highly emotive, AI-produced video is accelerating the phenomenon.

Currently, there are no requirements for the PSBs to put their content on online platforms like YouTube or on social media, or for these platforms to carry public service content or make it prominent. The Media Act 2024 introduced a limited new regime to make public service TV content easier to discover and watch on connected TVs. Audio regulation in the Act only covers voice assistants, not in-car interfaces or other audio platforms and devices. News on social media has had no support or intervention, despite evidence showing that users of PSB news output are more likely to correctly identify important factual information, have higher levels of trust in institutions, and be less polarised than non-users[13].

The increasing reach of Artificial Intelligence exacerbates these risks, as it can already produce passable news summaries and answer politically sensitive questions without an onward online journey to a trusted news source. This centralises the control of information in the hands of a few unaccountable non-UK technology giants and upends the traditional business models of news. Similarly, educational and entertainment content from PSBs that is appropriate for children is increasingly being displaced and can be functionally invisible. Furthermore, many of the largest digital media platforms have chosen to penalise posts with lower discoverability if they provide links that encourage users to click out to original sources, third-party websites or other platforms.

As a result, public service content will become invisible and undiscoverable without two crucial actions:

1. Creating and distributing more public service content on third-party platforms; and
2. Interventions to secure prominence[14], attribution and value on those platforms.

BBC Charter Review proposals

a. Syndication, distribution and content changes for the BBC:

1. The BBC should by default distribute all its news and audio content to third-party platforms, to maximise reach and provide a credible, trusted alternative to low-quality news and educational content. This should be done without requiring advertising, but without detriment to prominence because of this.
    
2. A more flexible approach is needed for premium televisual content, given its huge audience and financial value and the well-researched loss of attribution, credit and value from the producers of content to platform owners. Here we propose a more flexible approach, e.g. syndicating single episodes to encourage journeys back to BBC platforms. The goal of distributing content on YouTube and TikTok is partly to reach users where they are, recognising that many will never regularly come to PSB platforms. But it is also about encouraging user journeys to PSB platforms: putting some but not all content on third-party platforms is a proven way to tempt people to watch more of the high-value content they discover on YouTube over on iPlayer. On iPlayer, the BBC can also showcase a wide range and variety of public service content, recreating in the on-demand world the traditional role of ‘hammocking’ different kinds of public service content within a broadcast schedule.
    
3. The BBC should lead a shift to a different and more porous relationship with the growing UK creator economy. It should invest in the next generation of creators across the UK, helping to discover and nurture new talent, supporting and affiliating with creators on YouTube who meet key criteria of British creativity, trustworthiness and Ofcom standards[15]. These online creators can then be showcased on the BBC’s own platforms, so that creators gain access to BBC reach, visibility and branding in exchange for a revenue share. New prominence agreements will be needed to support the visibility of these UK online creators within the BBC’s own platforms. This proposal, combined with content from other PS providers, would be a powerful way to broaden the BBC’s range of content, serve more niche interests, and support the creative industry.

4. The BBC should create new public service content of its own in a tone, style and format tailored for platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. This content should receive the same level of prominence on those platforms as traditional content syndicated from the BBC.

5. The new Charter must reform the BBC’s funding model to an ‘audiovisual licence’ bringing in video-on-demand, streaming and video sharing to the scope of the licence, to reduce the BBC’s reliance on video consumption on its own products. This will enable these syndication and distribution changes without loss of revenue (see section 2 earlier).

b. Legislative and regulatory change to secure prominence:

1. Extend prominence rules to cover all kinds of public service media content, not just TV on connected TV platforms. To begin with, prominence rules should cover all content made by UK public service broadcasters – video, audio and written content. Prominence rules could be extended to cover high-quality British content that meets Ofcom or similar independent bodies’ regulatory standards, such as commercial radio and independently regulated UK news content.
    
2. Extend prominence rules to make that content prominent on all the devices and platforms used to consume it, including video-sharing platforms, streaming services, social media, search and audio devices. The activity of ‘watching TV’ in 2026 now includes a range of hardware including tablets, laptops, games consoles and mobile phones, and a range of interfaces, such as Android, Apple, Amazon, YouTube and Sky. UK audio also must be prominent when syndicated to audio platforms such as Spotify and in cars, such as through clearly branded presets in pre-installed car audio interfaces or in mobile interfaces like Apple Carplay or Android Auto.
    
3. Define a clear ‘minimum prominence guarantee’ for all such content on these platforms: for instance, ‘public service content must be no less discoverable or algorithmically weighted than the most favourably treated or optimised content on the platform’. Public service content may not be algorithmically downranked for providing links back to its own platforms or websites. A user may choose not to see public service content in their feed, but until this is actively selected the default should be prominent public service content, and this content should still be prominent in parts of the user interface not actively chosen by the user.
    
4. Set up a new operational framework to implement and enforce this new regime, by amending legislation to give a responsibility to Ofcom to support public service media prominence in all formats and on all platforms operating in the UK, with the requirement for codes that are flexible and adaptive to respond to technology and audience change.

6              Children’s content

In this section, we set out proposals to increase funding for entertaining, educational British programming for children, to support the UK’s commissioning and production sector, and to enhance the BBC’s formal education offer around media literacy and citizenship.

Context

Children lead the way in how audience viewing habits are changing, and they benefit from an unprecedented choice of content. Ofcom’s data shows that in 2024 children watched more than 3 hours of video content per day on average. However, the majority (62%) occurred via video sharing platforms like YouTube and streaming services like Netflix and Disney+. 4-6 year-olds spend 27% of their in-home viewing on YouTube; 7-12 year-olds spend 35% of their viewing time there. Among younger teenagers, TikTok makes up 22% of viewing time, making it the second-largest platform in this age group and meaning that half of all viewing time among teenagers is spent on video-sharing platforms[16].

By contrast UK broadcaster content, including live and recorded TV and Broadcaster Video on Demand (BVoD) made up 22% (41 minutes of the average child’s daily consumption). The shift to online viewing has come at the cost of linear TV: 87% of children aged 4-15 watched broadcast TV every week in 2016; now 53% of children do. Children are consuming less UK content which reflects them and their lives.

Only the BBC provides home-grown UK programmes for all children, across all genres and at scale. Since 2010 the annual production of children’s TV by the PSBs has more than halved from 843 hours to 380 hours, with the BBC providing 340 of these hours in 24/25 (88%).

The wider market is not making up for this decline: Ofcom data shows that SVOD providers made only 12 hours of UK children’s content in 2024[17]. YouTube does not commission content for UK children and Ofcom estimates that only around 20% of the content audiences consume on YouTube is UK-originated[18] – children’s data is not available.

The potential impact of this shift on the next generation of UK citizens includes a weakened sense of belonging to a cohesive society; a permanent loss of connection to public service content and its core British values; and a disengagement from the UK’s democratic processes, as young people struggle to navigate powerful and persuasive channels of disinformation. Moreover, the video sharing platforms that dominate the media consumption of young viewers are widely considered by experts to be addictive, notoriously flooded with age-inappropriate content, and monetised through surveillance and selling attention. The problems have become so severe that the UK is among numerous countries considering raising the minimum age for access from 13 to 16. The current and future requirement for trusted, age-appropriate content on platforms that parents can rely upon to protect children while providing educational and entertainment content is a core value proposition for public service media. It is not only a social responsibility; it is a market opportunity.

BBC Charter Review proposals

1. Support the BBC to remain the world’s biggest commissioner of children’s programming by reforming and stabilising its public funding (see section 2). Increased public funding would also support the continued commissioning of children’s content by S4C in the Welsh language, which remains significant.
    
2. Require the BBC to develop a comprehensive media literacy programme as part of its formal learning purpose to help young people critically evaluate online content and learn how to navigate the online world safely. Ofcom research shows that 19% of children as young as 3-5 are using social media independently[19].
    
3. As the BBC develops its own audience-facing AI services, ensure that they are safe for children to use and have a strong focus on AI literacy to respond to the increasing role AI will play in the way young people live, work and access information. The demand for AI services that are safe for children is a substantial opportunity for the BBC.
    
4. Support the expansion of the BBC’s formal education offer in BBC Bitesize, including a focus on citizenship for new, younger voters as a result of votes at 16.
    
5. In parallel, the Government should support the children’s production sector by implementing fair licensing arrangements and the authorised use of content by AI firms, ensuring the UK’s copyright regime remains gold standard.

6. Argue for a significant strengthening of the rules governing the prominence of UK children’s programming on third-party platforms, such as YouTube, given the crucial role PSBs play in providing children with UK content that reflects the diversity of the country. Public service children’s content must be no less discoverable or algorithmically weighted than the most favourably treated or optimised content on each platform. Prominence measures should be expanded to cover a wider set of public service media genres and providers, potentially through new legislation (see section 5 earlier).
    
7. Explore the idea of increasing the existing audio-visual tax relief for culturally relevant children’s content to support the production of children’s programming, to ensure a healthy and thriving commercial commissioning and production sector alongside the BBC.

* * *

These four sections - ChatBBC, Open BBC products, Third-party platforms and prominence, and Children’s content - are four key areas to reinvent the BBC for younger audiences in particular. Our submission now moves on to the key question of BBC independence and accountability.

7              An independent, accountable BBC

In this section, we summarise proposals to make the BBC more independent from Government and more accountable to the public who own it and pay for it. This would be through a perpetual Charter, an Independent Appointments Commission and an Independent Funding Commission, supported by a standing Citizen’s Panel. These proposals are expanded on in the recent publication by Demos, Our BBC - A Blueprint for a more independent and future-proofed BBC[20].

Context

We are at a moment of maximum peril for open, democratic societies. The BBC is one of very few institutions trusted across the political spectrum to provide reliable and trustworthy information. In a world where US-owned companies control the hardware, distribution and economic incentives through which UK citizens access information, the BBC offers something no commercial entity can: a publicly accountable organisation operating in the public interest.

Independence allows the BBC to be free from government or political influence in its content; to be impartial when reporting on elections, government policies, and political parties; to hold government to account; to be editorially independent and have the final say on what stories to cover and how to cover them; and to pursue its own agenda, without interference, so it can provide content that serves audiences across the UK and the world.

Perhaps most importantly, but not mentioned in the Government’s Green Paper consultation, is that it sets the standards for the whole sector. The BBC is unique in the UK. There is little difference between net scores for trust in the BBC from people on the left and right of politics. BBC News is consumed frequently by the majority of the public, unlike any other news source.

Source: FT analysis (26 May 2023) from YouGov data

This is a very different picture from the US, where levels of polarisation between each side

about each news provider are far more pronounced. No news source is used frequently by more than around a quarter of the public. The effects of this news landscape are visible in the political debate, high levels of polarisation and impacts on citizens in the US.

Source: FT analysis (26 May 2023) from YouGov data

However, the last fifteen years have eroded the BBC’s independence. Appointments of the Chair and Board members have been overtly politicised; more Government bodies have formally reviewed the BBC; and the BBC’s very future and funding have been explicitly linked by Ministers to its news coverage. In an AI-led world where trust, authenticity and independence will be highly prized, this Charter can reverse this trend and restore public confidence.

Critically, the UK public sees this as the biggest gap for the BBC today: out of 872,701 responses to the BBC’s recent survey, 91% said it was important for the BBC to be independent from the government, but only 43% thought the BBC was currently[21].

BBC Charter Review proposals

1. The time-limit and existential cliff-edge in the Charter should be removed so the BBC is not permanently under review. A perpetual, high-level Charter should be put in place to entrench the BBC’s mission, purposes, independence and universality.
    
2. A ‘public lock’ would prevent any future changes to the Charter so that no government could choose to end the Charter or defund the BBC. Any decisions that would fundamentally change the constitutional basis of the BBC would require parliamentary supermajorities in all four legislatures of the UK i.e. the UK, Scottish and Welsh Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly, and mandatory deliberation by a Citizens’ Assembly.

3. A new BBC Independence Bill would be introduced to set the terms of the Charter, establish a new BBC Independent Appointments Commission and set up a BBC Independent Funding Commission.
    
4. The Independent Appointments Commission would oversee the Chair and other non-executive appointments, replacing the current process of Ministerial appointment, and minimising Government involvement to a veto on specific and narrow grounds. Appointments should comply with clear criteria about skills and behaviours required for the Board.
    
5. The Independent BBC Funding Commission would be an arm’s-length body that would use a transparent and evidence-based process to assess and calculate the level of funding the BBC requires to deliver its remit and purposes. The findings of this body would be binding upon the government, which must then provide the correct amount of funding through appropriate mechanisms.
    
6. A new Operational Agreement would replace the Framework Agreement and Mid-Term Review, informed by a periodic Operational Review undertaken every 6-8 years. This process, together with the perpetual Charter, would help maintain the essential process of democratic scrutiny through periodic review of the operational plans and performance of the BBC and evolving public needs, while protecting the BBC’s independence.
   
   The Operational Review would be conducted by the newly created Independent Funding Commission rather than by the Government of the day. It would be the primary mechanism for independent evaluation of the BBC’s performance, including the extent to which it has delivered against its purposes, the effectiveness of its governance processes, its operations, and its technology and distribution strategy. The Review would set the funding envelope for the BBC’s next operational period. The Review’s terms of reference would explicitly exclude from scope any Charter-level foundational questions related to existence, core purposes, universality, funding adequacy or editorial and operational independence.
    
7. To enhance accountability, the UK public would be involved in BBC governance in a systematic way. The Board would be required to consult a Citizens’ Panel on key decisions. This is not to give the public a say in the day-to-day running of the organisation, which demands specialist journalistic, creative and management skills, but to give the BBC Board a representative group of citizens with whom they can sense-check decisions and more confidently navigate political scrutiny.
   
   A standing BBC Citizens’ Panel, made up of a representative and periodically refreshing group of the British public selected through sortition, would have defined and bounded powers and responsibilities and a two-way structured dialogue with the Board. The Board, and in some cases the Government, would have to comply or explain outcomes that respond to the Panel’s recommendations.

* * *

Our submission concludes with proposals in the area of news. The BBC remains a trusted source of news and the UK's most used news source. We propose changes in two key areas: international news and local news.

8              The BBC World Service

In this section, we set out proposals to secure the future of the BBC World Service, so that it has the opportunity to double its audience in a new strategic partnership funded by the Government.

Context

The BBC has a presence in 73 cities in 59 countries around the world[22]. That global footprint means it is on the ground in the most important parts of the world and provides first-hand journalism with unmatched credibility.

Overall, the BBC reaches 453 million people on average per week across all services in all countries across all platforms (television, radio, website and social media). The BBC is ranked No.1 for trust, reliability and independence amongst international news providers. It is the most trusted international news brand for audiences in the US, and the sixth-most consumed news source in the US[23].

The BBC is the UK’s most recognised cultural export, with 76% of influential audiences around the world having heard of it – higher than any other British cultural export including British sports, films and universities. This awareness correlates with a strong propensity to feel positively about the UK as a result[24].

However, the World Service is challenged by the much better funded state broadcasters from China and Russia – research has shown that CGTN and RT have a direct influence on their country’s respective favourability. 71% of CGTN consumers view China favourably while 58% of RT consumers view Russia favourably, and over the past three years China has shown a considerable increase in favourability.

Meanwhile, US global media channels that enjoyed large audiences and influence – such as Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe, the Middle East Broadcast Network and programming for Iran, Cuba and Venezuela – have all been closed or massively curtailed. Added to this are major reductions facing impartial media around the world previously in receipt of US funding which has now been eliminated. These unprecedented developments present major opportunities for expansion of the World Service in a way that aligns with UK national interests. The gap in the market is substantial, and the World Service is well positioned to fill it, for instance by using vacant frequencies and premises not already taken over by Russia and China. It is a generational opportunity for UK foreign policy.

However, the biggest challenge for the World Service is funding. Without a long-term funding plan, the World Service will be in permanent decline. Charter Review is an opportunity to solve both the principle of who funds the BBC’s overseas activities, and the overall funding level:

●        Who funds: until April 2014 the World Service was funded through grant-in-aid funding from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Since then, the World Service has been funded by a combination of the BBC’s licence fee and a grant from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). As the BBC’s overall budget has been reduced, it has made continued savings in the World Service, beginning with £28.5 million announced in 2022[25].

As the competitive intensity to deliver value to the licence fee payer in the UK increases, pressure will continue on budgets focused on domestic programming, precluding a substantial increase for the World Service. Any objective assessment of the importance of the World Service would recognise that its funding should not be in a zero-sum game with the licence fee and UK programming.
 

●        Funding level: the overall level of funding of the World Service is a strategic choice, where the UK must decide how much it values growing and extending its soft power and influence. The recent history of budget changes shows the clear effectiveness and return-on-investment of increasing spend in the World Service which produced significantly higher audience figures within two years of the increased funding. The cuts in 2020 and 2021 had a negative impact on audience figures, which have yet to recover.

BBC Charter Review proposals

1. Funding responsibility for the World Service should be shifted back to the Government as part of the Charter Review process. This would return to the position that held for the great majority of the BBC’s history. It would be part of a funding package that would diversify and expand the base of the BBC’s funding to reduce the cost per household (see section 2). It would reaffirm an investment in the World Service’s immense international value to the UK, separate and apart from the BBC’s domestic value. It would make visible and transparent the trade-off between international hard and soft power (where, for instance, the direct cost of three F-35 fighter jets is roughly equivalent to the annual cost of the World Service) and locate that trade-off where it should be, with the Government.
    
2. The Government should support the BBC’s plan to double the weekly reach of World Service through a doubling of the budget. Given its national strategic value, the Government could consider using further aid funding as part of the mix, as well as some of the defence budget (potentially including part of uplift in defence spending proposed to meet NATO targets).
    
3. The Government should review the regulatory arrangements for the World Service, preserving its editorial independence while ensuring sufficient independent scrutiny of its non-English language services. Operational flexibility should be increased, in order to spin up emergency services quickly in parts of the world affected by natural or manmade disasters, and to evolve language offers as demographics change.
    
4. New investment and partnerships should be explored to promote Internet Freedom technologies, such as VPNs and surveillance circumvention tools, that can effectively provide safe access to the World Service for populations constrained by state-backed restrictions. Around a fifth of the World Service language services currently have some kind of hostile interference, such as jamming satellites for television, blocking on websites, taking down social accounts or throttling internet speeds[26]. Investment in circumvention can ensure people have free access to trusted news in circumstances where they need it most.

9              Local news

In this section, we set out proposals to reinvigorate local news and local democracy through a new partnership between the BBC and the local news sector, developed together with colleagues at the Public Interest News Foundation.

Context

The BBC plays a critical role in providing local news for all parts of the UK and supporting the wider local media ecosystem through partnerships with local journalism. The BBC operates sites and journalistic teams that provide local radio, TV and online news across all four UK nations, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. BBC services support local democracy, scrutinise the democratic processes in the devolved nations and local government, and connect local communities with the issues that matter to them.

However, outside the BBC, the local media sector is facing serious challenges. As Ofcom has reported, despite audiences moving online, the decline in print and TV advertising revenues has not been offset by digital advertising revenues, a large proportion of which is captured by online intermediaries. Willingness to pay for online local news and information in the UK is very low compared to other countries[27].

Some local providers have gone out of business, while others have been acquired by a few big media groups which now control a large proportion of the sector. Consolidation has led to the closure of some local media outlets, while others have sought to cover a wider geographic area and/or reduce resources, including cutting jobs. New small or community providers, who are keen to fill gaps in the market, often struggle to thrive and are frequently reliant on part-time, voluntary and freelance staff.

However, audiences still value local news highly – Ofcom’s 2023 local media survey showed that 92% of UK adults use local news or information, with 89% of this group now accessing this online. 35% of adults claim to use the BBC website for local news in a month and the BBC’s 6.30pm regional news programme regularly delivers greater overnight audiences than any other TV news offer in the UK[28].

Ofcom did not find a significant impact from BBC activity on the local media sector. Since the BBC expanded its output online in 2023, its local page views have increased, while viewing of commercial online news (both local and non-local) have declined. However, Ofcom’s analysis did not find significant evidence that the two are causally linked and the decline in commercial page views is part of a longer-term trend predating the BBC’s changes. And, in addition, over the last ten years, the BBC has funded and supported the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) which has published more than 530,000 stories and supported the journalism of more than 230 commercial media organisations across the UK[29].

BBC Charter Review proposals

The BBC has long played a vital role in the local news ecosystem, both as a provider of local news and as a partner to local news providers. Together with our partners at the Public Interest News Foundation (PINF), we believe that the BBC can develop its role further as the partner of a thriving local news ecosystem. The current Review of the BBC’s Charter provides an ideal opportunity to cement this role in an expanded BBC local news partnership. This partnership would have five core areas.

1. A new Partnership Agreement between the BBC and the local news sector would set out the overarching aims of this relationship. The Agreement would be signed by the BBC and relevant bodies from the local news sector. It would include eligibility criteria for local news partners (modelled on the definition of relevant publisher in the Online Safety Act) and expectations for how the BBC should use and credit the work of local news partners in its output. A dedicated BBC Board Member would oversee and champion this partnership, supported by local news forums in each region/Nation. This person should command the confidence of both the BBC and the local news sector and ideally would have experience within the news industry. They would chair a current or new subcommittee of the Board that would monitor and evaluate the partnership, review output, solicit feedback from partners, and periodically review the Partnership Agreement itself.
    
2. A Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programme, administered by the BBC in partnership with the sector and journalism training bodies such as the NCTJ. This would include core modules on BBC editorial standards, to ensure that local news partners uphold relevant standards in work that is funded and/or hosted by the BBC. It would also include a wide range of modules on journalism law, ethics, technology and best practice, some of which would be delivered by local news partners, thus facilitating two-way learning between BBC professionals and their colleagues across the sector.
    
3. An expanded Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) with new, clear aims to enhance the democratic accountability of local councils and other public services (e.g. health, education and social care). It would support the employment of reporters in the local news sector to cover not only local government but also other parts of the public sector such as health, education and justice. As now, reporters would produce content to be shared between the BBC and local news partners, but the process for procuring local news partners should be reviewed to ensure it is open to a wider range of eligible local news providers. Suppliers would be monitored against the commitments made in their applications.
    
4. A new Local News Commissioning Fund (LNCF) would support the production of original journalism in the public interest, including long-form, investigative and co-creational forms of journalism. This would be distinct from the LDRS in that it would not be primarily supporting individual, named reporters but would be funding programming and content. The LNCF would have a similar sized budget as the LDRS and would be available to all eligible local news partners. It would be subject to a rigorous regional commissioning process, whereby either local news partners could approach the BBC with ideas, or the BBC could put out tenders on topics of interest. Projects would aim to meet regionally defined democratic aims, such as investigating local issues, enhancing civic participation, providing solutions to problems, facilitating community cohesion and engaging under-engaged groups. The Fund would be flexible in how its objectives are met, allowing for groups of publishers to work in partnership on complex or large-scale stories using whichever mediums or formats work best for their communities.
    
5. A new BBC platform for local news, sitting as appropriate within each of the BBC’s products but primarily visible in the BBC News product to provide a prominent, popular platform for BBC, LDRS and LNCF content. Content generated through this route would follow the same partnership approach as outlined in section 4 - Open BBC products - with editorial responsibility held by the publisher of the content.

* * *

Submitted by Reset Tech

April 2026

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