‘A completely unique opportunity’: the secretive process that will decide the BBC’s future | BBC
In a temperature-controlled room in a suburb of Reading, the basis of the BBC’s existence is kept in a flat, square, faded navy case, the size of a large pizza box. Inside is a stack of vellum – calfskin, pounded until it forms a milky and translucent paper that is supposed to last for thousands of years. The queen’s red wax seal is secured to its base with red and gold cord. The pages are strapped down with two strips of white elastic, more PE kit than Buckingham Palace.
The document is unique. Like hundreds of other British organisations, the BBC was founded via a Royal Charter, granted by the monarch of the day. But unlike Oxford colleges, the British Film Institute, or the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards, the BBC was given an expiry date. When the British Broadcasting Corporation was founded, in the 1920s, radio was seen as such an uncertain, risky technology that the government only gave it a 10-year guarantee, after which it would have to seek a new charter.
Ever since, the BBC has been forced to repeatedly regenerate, much like the lead character in its beloved series Doctor Who. Most governments have granted decade-long charters, with some variation. (The 2017 charter was set at 11 years to unhook it from the five-year British general election cycle.) Like the Doctor, in each iteration the BBC retains the same name, the same job, and does many of the same things. Yet at midnight on the night of its renewal, it disappears, and is replaced by a new version of itself. If the charter is not renewed, the BBC would cease to exist as a legal entity: it could no longer employ its staff, broadcast or publish, and its assets would automatically pass to the state.
The current charter will expire on 31 December 2027, and its replacement is now the subject of lobbying, scaremongering and dealmaking as its contents are debated, tugged apart and rewritten. The charter is produced via a two- or three-year negotiation between government and the BBC. It is a process that has a claim to being one of the largest acts of public participation in British politics, yet it is also a black box, its inner workings hidden from view. The last charter renewal process involved 16 focus groups, two independent reports, nine industry round tables and 300 meetings with organisations and experts. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) received 190,000 responses to a public consultation and had to hire a new building in order for staff to read them all.
Charter renewal is partly an exercise in predicting the future: in deciding what Britain and the media landscape will look like in a decade, and how the BBC must transform accordingly. This is why it is so difficult, and so fraught. The charter is the only way that the BBC’s purpose, funding model or governance can be drastically changed. It is through charter renewals that the BBC built Britain’s television infrastructure, launched its first website and built a streaming platform, the iPlayer, while Netflix was still sending out DVDs through the post.
The risk of failing to meet the moment bedevils every charter renewal. Debates about the BBC are so familiar that they have become a kind of white noise: whether it is secretly right or leftwing; whether it contributed to Brexit or sought to undermine it; whether its stars are paid too much, and so on. But to look at the history of charter renewal is to see that the real existential threats it faces are never the stuff of fleeting scandals or culture wars. In 2026, what is really threatening the BBC are the much larger tides of changing technology and changing habits. Year on year, fewer and fewer people are using the BBC, and fewer and fewer people are paying for it. Hundreds of millions of pounds in cuts are under way to balance the books. This charter renewal is its only chance to turn back those tides.
And yet in my interviews with 30 experts and BBC and government insiders over the past year, most struggled to tell me exactly what the charter is. One former director general told me simply: “The charter is … the charter.” Part of the difficulty of comprehending the charter lies in the difficulty of grasping the breadth and depth of the BBC itself. On a single day in 2026, the BBC staged a Stravinsky concert, brought its Strictly Come Dancing tour to Liverpool, broke a news story about cameras spying on people having sex in Chinese hotel rooms, broadcast a Gaelic news roundup, reported on speed limits in the Welsh town of Barry, interviewed Venezeula’s opposition leader, unveiled the lineup for the music festival it was putting on in Manchester, knocked on 10,000 doors of licence fee non-payers, and broadcast the opening ceremony of the Milan Winter Olympics. The BBC is so baked into British life that it is hard to unpick exactly what it represents, and what it would mean for it to change, shrink or even disappear.
In Reading, the navy blue box sits on its shelf in the BBC’s archive, rarely consulted, gathering dust. As long as the negotiation is completed in time, it will be replaced on 1 January 2028. The BBC’s survival depends on that new stack of calfskin, and whether its predictions hold true. “I don’t think we’ve had a charter renewal as consequential as this – and as potentially fantastically good – since the second world war,” Jean Seaton, the BBC’s official historian, told me. “It is a completely unique opportunity.”
On 16 December 2025, nearly a year later than promised, the charter renewal process officially began. In a 38,000 word green paper, Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, set out her vision for the BBC and invited feedback from the public. She described the BBC as a “light on the hill”, an institution as vital to Britain as the NHS. She suggested that the BBC could focus more on countering disinformation, and that it could move more of its work out of London. This was all well and good, but for the kind of readers who were impatiently awaiting this document – thinktanks, unions, politicians, media professionals inside and outside the BBC – most will have flicked first to the end: the bit about the funding.
Everyone agrees the funding model isn’t working. “A busted flush” is how the new BBC director general, former Google executive Matt Brittin, described it recently. About 65% of the BBC’s funding comes from the £180 licence fee, which is paid by any household that watches any live TV or uses iPlayer. The problem is that takings have dropped by a quarter – about £1.3bn in real terms – since 2017. Some of that is down to governments imposing below-inflation fee rises or no rises at all; some is down to the growing number of those refusing or unable to pay.
In the green paper, Nandy ruled out funding the BBC via taxation or a household levy, a model used in Germany and elsewhere. That leaves only three options: advertising, subscriptions or a reformed licence fee (or some combination of the above). The green paper also suggested growing BBC Studios, its commercial production company, and setting up partnerships with tech companies, but commercial revenues fund about 8% of the BBC’s public service output – they can’t replace the licence fee.
The green paper ended with 32 questions, to be answered by any member of the public or organisation who wished to give their view. Not everyone was happy with this. The questions were “leading, lacking and limited”, said Paul Fleming, general secretary of the performing arts union Equity, which announced it would be boycotting the survey. The Media Reform Coalition, which campaigns for more accountability, put out an “alternative green paper” as a “direct response to this hollow exercise in public consultation”. At the launch event in March, policy experts read out their own ideas; one performed a poem calling for BBC governance that is both “broad and shallow” and “deep and narrow”. That month, the BBC released its own response to the green paper, rejecting the idea of subscriptions or advertising, and asking the Foreign Office to fund the World Service in its entirety, as it did before 2014, when George Osborne shifted the costs on to the BBC.
By the time it finished in March, the public consultation had brought in about 120,000 responses. These must all be read and summarised for the culture minister, to meet a legal obligation that responses should be “conscientiously taken into account”. In the last charter process, Radio Times magazine threatened DCMS with legal action after it found that a memory stick containing 6,085 of its readers’ consultation responses had never been opened.
A varied cast of politicians and experts sought to influence the debate in the wood-panelled room of the culture, media and sport select committee. (The committee has no direct role in charter renewal, but invites guests to give evidence to inform the debate.) There was no shortage of ideas. Between May and August, plans were floated for “public service algorithms” to counter the narrowing effect of social media. Others proposed a kind of global iPlayer, bringing together public service broadcasters around the world, and called for a “citizens’ panel” to give the public a voice in the way the BBC is run. Jordan Schwarzenberger, the manager of YouTube stars the Sidemen, was brought in to suggest how the BBC could attract younger audiences. It needs to focus on “the slightly harsher, more raw and edgy content that young audiences are craving”, he argued. When asked if the Sidemen might appear on Celebrity Gladiators, he delicately explained that for the money on offer, it wouldn’t be worth their while.
What do all these thousands of words of debate, discussion, reports, responses and meetings actually add up to? It is not entirely clear. Because while experts, industry professionals and the public are asked to weigh in, they can only offer suggestions. When I asked people involved with previous charter renewals who actually decides what goes into the final text, the answer was unanimous: it’s the culture minister, with the prime minister and chancellor looming behind them. Tom Chivers, a media campaigner who wrote his PhD on the last charter renewal, found it to be an “erratic and decidedly undemocratic” process, marked in its later stages by a “withdrawal from its earlier public settings and into private, bureaucratic channels of elite decision-making”. This first flurry of activity and public debate is, he told me, “just gloss for what they already want to do”.
The latter stages of the charter process are under way now: a negotiation behind closed doors, between a small group of people, only a handful of whom hold any real power.
It is very easy to find people to speak to about the BBC. Almost every person in Britain has interacted with it, and has a view on it. And yet it is difficult to find many people with a view of the corporation in its entirety. As with the story of the blind men and the elephant, even BBC experts tend to have a clear perspective on only one limb: impartiality in news coverage, say, or the funding model, or an obscure sports programme axed back in the 80s. (And as with the story of the blind men and the elephant, the interested parties are overridingly men. A recent book of letters to the new director general did not feature a single woman; most of the books written about the BBC are by men, with a few notable exceptions; there has never been a female director general.)
From the huge array of opinions that swirl around the BBC, however, it is possible to discern three broad schools of thought. The first camp, the custodians, frames the corporation as a vital fortress, to be defended in its current form, at all costs. In this view, the BBC’s primacy in British life is assumed and its founding principles of independence from government and universality are sacrosanct.
The second camp, the shrinkers, views the BBC as one media company among many – one granted unfair advantages. In the past, it was this camp that argued successfully against the BBC’s monopoly first on radio, and then on television. These days, they rail against successful programmes such as The Traitors and Strictly Come Dancing, which, they say, could be made by commercial rivals. The shrinkers argue that the BBC should stick to its USP – the public service meat and potatoes of current affairs and children’s programming. This group also objects to the corporation’s vast scale: its 10 TV channels, 56 radio stations, five orchestras and a workforce that, at 21,000, is larger than that of either the Scottish or Welsh governments.
This second group is often framed as anti-BBC. This is fair if you believe, as the first camp does, that a more limited BBC is not really a BBC at all. But it is worth noting that many in this second camp would say they love the BBC and value public service media. Their objection lies in the idea that the BBC should be all things to all people, at the cost of competitors.
At the far edge of this camp, at least on paper, sits the Reform party, whose official policy is not to scrap the BBC, but to scrap the licence fee and force the BBC to act as a commercial entity, probably via a subscription service. Its chair, Lee Anderson, has boasted in parliament that he personally refuses to pay it (despite the fact he appears on GB News, which you need a TV licence to watch live).
The custodians and the shrinkers have been locked in battle since the BBC’s creation. To justify the licence fee to the first camp, the BBC must appeal to all ages, political persuasions and corners of the country. And yet if it succeeds in this feat, it is accused by the second camp of dominating the market and crowding out competitors. When in government, shrinkers then try to cut the BBC down to size, which in turn leads to questions about a reduced corporation’s ability to appeal to everyone. The cycle continues. In his 1986 book, somewhat prematurely titled The Last Days of the Beeb, the journalist Michael Leapman described the BBC’s bind: “It is like one of those computer adventure games where the player escapes from one mortal peril only to find he has landed himself in another tough spot, still more threatening.”
The latest version of this debate concerns online platforms. The BBC recently struck a deal to grow its number of YouTube channels to at least 50, and the government has suggested it may legislate to give the BBC and other public service news providers more prominence on the platform. YouTube creators have claimed that this will, to quote one, “kill YouTube”. Schwarzenberger, manager of the Sidemen, told the select committee: “Public service broadcasting does not really equate with the gen Z or gen Alpha experience … why [should] the BBC have a leg-up on a private platform like YouTube, when the whole premise of YouTube is that it is totally meritocratic?” On newer platforms, the shrinkers hold sway: the BBC is just one content creator among billions.
A third camp – let’s call them the engineers – believes the argument between the shrinkers and the custodians misses the point entirely. The BBC was founded to both produce radio programmes and to run the wireless network for the public good. That logic, the engineers say, should now be applied to digital media. “If the BBC thinks it’s just in the content business, then it’s already over. It’s lost,” Tony Ageh, one of the architects of the iPlayer, told me.
In an era of streamers, AI and social media platforms, the engineers believe the BBC should be building its own platforms or algorithms, so as to be less reliant on US billionaires, setting up safe social media sites for the under-16s, or offering free internet access for public service content. If it doesn’t, then those without broadband will lose access to BBC channels when terrestrial is switched off, which could be as soon as 2034. Pat Younge, a former BBC chief creative officer and now chair of the campaigning organisation British Broadcasting Challenge, told me: “The biggest threat when Donald Trump said he might sue the BBC wasn’t that he would sue – it was that he would get Jeff Bezos to withdraw Amazon Web Services from them, at which point iPlayer collapses.”
Throughout the summer, 15 formal meetings have taken place between DCMS and BBC officials, with more to come through the rest of the year and into 2027. These meetings are private. No public record is released. It’s here that the real work of drafting the charter is done.
BBC officials may be in the room for these conversations, but it is clear where the power lies. One senior DCMS figure in a previous negotiation recalled reminding the BBC that this was a review, not an automatic renewal: “It’s not an absolute certainty when we start that the charter will be renewed at all.”
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With no official levers to pull, the BBC must rely on diplomacy. In 2016-17, Tony Hall, the director general, met the then secretary of state for culture, John Whittingdale, or “Whitto”, as he called him when we spoke, for regular dinners one on one. (Whittingdale told me his officials “hated” that they met in private.) Other director generals have approached the dynamic rather differently: in 1947, the negotiator on the government side sent the director general, William Haley, a testy letter in response to changes he’d made to a draft of the charter. Haley passed it on to a colleague with a note scrawled in fountain pen: “This will amuse you. I do not intend to reply. I have stated the corporation’s view and the matter will be left till they raise it again.”
While ministers hold the power, they do not always have much expertise or interest. “Going quite a long way back, I can remember one secretary of state who fell asleep during a meeting with me,” said Stewart Purvis, who worked on broadcast policy for years at Ofcom. “No one dared say anything.” Purvis went on to advise DMCS on the 2017 charter and was asked by civil servants to help draft its text. This experience did not fill him with confidence. “DCMS has never been highly regarded in Whitehall, and you’re always wondering: ‘This is all very well. I’m a cog in this wheel, but at the end of the day, does Downing Street agree with any of this?’” Advisers to ministers would leak stories to further DCMS’s agenda, whether with the public or with Downing Street. “That seemed to be their principal role, to do the leaks,” Purvis said. “There was always pressure within DCMS to find a big story about charter renewal for the Sunday Times. That seemed to be the comms plan, if you like.”
Meanwhile, back at the BBC, since the 1940s a “war room” committee has been convened to feed into the negotiations. Former employees described a frantic scramble across departments, each quizzed on “what they were doing for charter renewal”, and rushing to launch projects to justify their existence. A recent internal call about charter renewal was joined by more than 6,000 staff.
The BBC has one other weapon at its disposal: public opinion. In their 2020 book The War Against the BBC, Patrick Barwise and Peter York blasted the Conservatives’ approach to the BBC in the run up to the last charter, which was widely seen as an attempt to shrink its power. And yet, in their view at least, this was mitigated by the “open, democratic and evidence-based charter renewal process”. A petition to “save the BBC” was signed by 305,000 people, and there were marches and protests against the closure of BBC Three. When the white paper – a kind of draft charter, which lays out the government’s proposals – was released, some of Whittingdale’s more outlandish ideas, such as government input on the scheduling of popular programmes, were absent. A DCMS civil servant involved in that negotiation confirmed that there was a strong sense that “at the point that the government takes on the BBC and the public chooses a side, the government loses, because the public values the BBC so highly”.
Over coffee in Portcullis House in February, Whittingdale looked back with pride on the marches and aerated parliamentary debate of that charter review, despite the fact they were largely directed against him. “There was a lot of parliamentary interest, there was commercial interest, and a lot of public interest. None of which, I have to say, seems to be the case now,” he said.
There is a general assumption that Labour governments are more pro-BBC, which may explain why the debate has been more muted this time round. (Jean Seaton told me this has been at times “both true and completely untrue: Harold Wilson hated the BBC”.) Multiple people familiar with the process told me that as prime minister, Keir Starmer wanted to avoid any great focus or debate on this charter renewal. The new PM, Andy Burnham, as a former culture minister, may be more invested and has increased the number of ministers at DCMS from four to seven, but he has yet to address charter renewal publicly in any depth.
Within the BBC, the hope is that recent crises may have actually endeared it to the public. In November 2025, President Trump announced that he would be suing the BBC for $10bn over an allegedly misleading Panorama documentary. For some liberal critics of the BBC, it was a reminder of where their loyalties lay. The timing of the lawsuit was “quite fortuitous, if it had to happen”, said Steve Barnett, a media academic advising the select committee on this charter process.
More surprisingly, senior figures at DCMS seem to believe that current rounds of job cuts – which will eventually amount to one in 10 of the BBC’s workforce – can be spun in the BBC’s favour. Lisa Nandy would not speak to me for this article, but Ian Murray, the DCMS junior minister working on charter renewal, told me he hoped the news of the cuts would show the public “the consequences of an inadequately funded BBC. It’s a really good way of the public realising that the BBC is something that they quite value.”
We are now waiting for the government’s white paper, due “in the autumn”, which in Westminster-speak could mean any time before the end of the year. After this, the final charter will be drafted, along with a framework agreement, which lays out what the charter might mean in practice. Parliament can debate the white paper and draft charter, but its approval isn’t required. The charter is signed off by the privy council, an unelected body of royal advisers also responsible for handing out honours and declaring war. The author Tom Mills notes in The BBC: Myth of a Public Service that “in this sense, [the BBC] is not even formally accountable to parliament, but to the crown”.
Where will Nandy land? Despite a somewhat lacklustre start to what Chivers called the “tiny, crappy” public consultation process, many of those I’ve spoken to have been increasingly impressed by her approach. Over email, the deputy director general, Rhodri Talfan Davies, told me he has found meetings with DCMS over the summer “very constructive … It’s clear to me they understand the importance of this moment for the BBC.” Tony Hall, the former director general, told me: “Nandy has been really interesting and thoughtful on the BBC. All her instincts are in the right direction.”
So far, Nandy has confirmed that she will seek to end political appointments to the BBC, and that she will try to establish a permanent charter. Both moves seem designed to defend the BBC from political opposition – from a future Reform government, say – but a permanent charter would still involve government reviews at set intervals, through a process that, bar the threat of extinction, sounds very similar to the current one. (Chivers, who wrote his PhD on the last charter, described the change to me as “a bit of window dressing”.)
The big unknown is the funding. Of the available options, a serious move towards advertising seems unlikely. Even Margaret Thatcher failed on this front. The committee she set up to explore this option found that advertising would slash the income of other channels, and “reduce consumer choice and welfare”. A 2024 plan to run adverts on BBC podcasts on third-party platforms was scrapped after a backlash from the audio industry. DCMS also seems to have backed away from the subscription-based approaches floated in the green paper, for fear that it would create a “two-tier” BBC.
That leaves a reformed licence fee model. Nandy and the BBC’s leadership have emphasised the gap between the 94% of adults using it every month, and the 80% of households who currently pay the licence fee. Closing that gap would seem an obvious way to improve the financial situation, perhaps by extending the licence fee to activities for which it’s not currently required, such as reading the BBC’s websites or listening to its radio and podcasts.
But there is another problem quietly eating away at the BBC, one that its defenders are less willing to highlight. Amid the rise of streamers and limitless online content, there has been an unprecedented decline in audience figures. In 2020, 91% of adults used the BBC every week; the weekly figure has now fallen to 84%. This suggests that almost all weekly users of the BBC are already paying the licence fee. It also means that the government needs to somehow convince the public that paying for the BBC isn’t an equation of money paid, media consumed. Once the BBC is no longer “universal”, the licence fee becomes harder and harder to defend.
In the past few months, ministers and BBC executives have begun emphasising the importance of the BBC to the UK’s “sovereignty”, and its potential uses in standing up to big tech. Brittin, the new director general, told the select committee: “The BBC is the biggest funder of original British content today; people around the world want that content and want those values, but we are being disrupted by a small number of very big and very powerful tech players.” Seaton, the BBC’s historian, believes that taking on the tech giants should be central to its future role: “The world’s five, six richest men own the only ways we can communicate. But then there is the BBC.”
It’s a savvy way to argue that the BBC benefits everyone, whether they use it or not – and to lay the groundwork for a licence fee paid by more people. The concept of sovereignty will probably appear in the charter in some form. But to work, it will need to be matched with specifics. In the 2017 charter, Whittingdale added the word “distinctive” to the description in the charter of the kinds of output the BBC was legally obliged to produce – to “send the message that it must look different to commercial broadcasters”. But by his own admission, it had little effect. It is possible to change the nuts and bolts of the BBC through the charter; attempts to transform it via buzzwords are doomed to fail.
In 1953, Lord Simon of Wythenshawe, who had been BBC chair for five years, summed up the strange paradox of the charter. He dismissed it as a long, “almost bewilderingly vague” document “containing masses of legalistic material which is of no use to any governor in normal times”. And yet, he continued, it has just about worked: “The intentions of successive governments have been well understood by the BBC”, while the BBC has maintained something close to “full freedom and responsibility for their work”.
At times, against the odds, the charter renewal process has set the BBC on the right path towards the future. In the 1940s, parts of the industry were adamant that TV would never take off as home entertainment, and would instead be shown in cinemas. And yet when it came to the BBC’s next charter in 1947, the government, having convened a committee to look into the question, took a swing on home television, introduced a new TV licence fee, and allowed the BBC to borrow money to set up new transmitters. It was right.
In the 1990s, the charter pulled off another reversal in the BBC’s fortunes. The corporation was facing problems it would recognise today. It had just emerged from a fight with a Tory government, only to face the issue of declining audiences. Technology journalist John Naughton wrote a gloomy piece for the London Review of Books in 1992, predicting that BBC TV audience share would drop to 20% by 2010, making a universal licence fee impossible to defend. The green paper for the 1997 charter had just been released, and looked, he said, “suspiciously like a plan for an organised retreat”.
But when the 1997 charter emerged from its secretive drafting process, it was far from a retreat: it paved the way for BBC Online, the corporation’s first network of websites, by allowing licence fee money to be spent on digital output for the first time. That charter prevented the BBC from being left behind by the digital age. By 2005, the fall in overall audience reach had halted. Even predictions of the decline in TV audiences proved pessimistic: in 2010, BBC’s share still stood at 33%.
This strange, flawed process seems to have survived for a century not because it is perfect, or even particularly good, but because no one has yet come up with something better. So again and again, hundreds of thousands of people try to conjure up the BBC they want; one which won’t make the same mistakes, which will reflect the version of Britain that they want to see. And every time the BBC reappears, as though its existence were never in doubt.
“This will be the most important charter negotiation in the history of the BBC,” John Shield, a former director of communications at the BBC, told me. “But then, they always are.”
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