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'Slash the corporation,' say Tories spokesman

Louise Jury Media Correspondent
Thursday 20 June 2002 00:00 BST
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A radical plan to abolish BBC2 and limit BBC1 to being a narrowly-defined public service broadcaster, stripped of entertainment and sport, was announced by Tim Yeo, the Conservative Party's culture spokesman, yesterday.

Mr Yeo proposed a much more limited licence fee, which he dubbed a "television tax", and said the BBC should be free to make up its income with subscription services.

"A taxpayer-funded PSB channel should not simply replicate programmes the market is already supplying or would supply if a tax-funded channel did not do so," he told a conference on public service broadcasting organised by the Social Market Foundation.

"It's doubtful if much sport can still be defined as PSB. Harder to judge is the extent to which drama, music and visual and performing arts are PSB."

Mr Yeo suggested that £1bn could be slashed from the BBC's £2.5bn annual licence fee income, adding that "perhaps PSB only needs one national television channel, not two."

But Gavyn Davies, the BBC's chairman, warned against "ghettoising" public service television. "We have always existed to make the good popular and to make the popular good. To try, artificially, to separate the two would be difficult and damaging."

He he asked whether people would really accept putting the World Cup – when up to four-fifths of viewers are watching on the BBC, not ITV – on a subscription channel.

Most TV executives immediately threw cold water on Tim Yeo's ideas yesterday. But even if these radical proposals are unlikely to become party policy, Mr Yeo's recent statements suggest that he is gearing up to propose a new way of funding the BBC.

He has criticised Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, for ruling out significant changes to the licence fee in the near future.

But Ms Jowell told yesterday's conference that no one had yet come up with an alternative formula that was likely to work.

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