[cma-l] The Guardian 14/02/14 - Ofcom boss: 'BBC licence fee should be shared with other broadcasters'

[Marilyn Hyndman]

Press statement from the sector?


On 14 Feb 2014, at 18:38, CMA-L wrote:

> The BBC licence fee should be shared with other broadcasters to promote "competition, dynamism and innovation", according to the outgoing chair of media regulator Ofcom.
> Colette Bowe said she thought some BBC licence fee funding should be "contestable", with other media companies allowed to bid to make public service broadcasting programming.
> 
> "I am an economist. There is a lot to be said for contestable funding on competition grounds ... The counter argument is that once you start stripping away great chunks of funding you weaken the stability [of the BBC]," Bowe said on Thursday night, at a Royal Television Society all party parliamentary group dinner marking her departure from Ofcom after five years as chair.
> 
> "I have got sympathy with the idea that some more of the funding currently available for public service broadcasting should be contestable. Because on the whole I am on the side of the people in the sector who believe that what we need is even more competition and  dynamism and innovation than we have got."
> 
> Bowe added that examples such as the Labour government's abandoned plan to use licence fee money to fund local news showed that it was "very, very difficult to see a way to make [contestable] work" in practice, but this "doesn't mean there is not a good reason to do it".
> 
> "I think the challenge for the BBC, leaving aside political will to continue with a hypothecated tax, the challenge is going to be enforcing the payment for the licence fee," she said, in the face of technological changes.
> 
> Bowe served as an Ofcom board member for several years before taking over as the media regulator's chair in 2009.
> 
> She is stepping down on 31 March, to be replaced by Dame Patricia Hodgson, the former BBC policy director and trustee who is Ofcom deputy chair.
> 
> Maggie Brown, Friday 14 February 2014 17.50 GMT
> 
> http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/feb/14/ofcom-bbc-licence-fee-shared-other-broadcasters
> 
> \\
> 
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Marilyn Hyndman
Northern Visions/NvTv
23 Donegall Street
Belfast
BT1 2FF

Tel: 028 9024 5495 ext 207
Fax: 028 9032 6608

NvTv 
Belfast Community Television

http://northernvisions.org/





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