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BBC Trust chair Rona Fairhead.
BBC Trust chair Rona Fairhead. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
BBC Trust chair Rona Fairhead. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Rona Fairhead's speech on external regulation is a landmark for the BBC

This article is more than 9 years old

The BBC Trust’s chair did not just signal the end of her job, but also the stepping-up of a debate about the future of the broadcaster’s governance and funding

If the governance of the BBC were a horse race the odds on the BBC Trust making it past the finish line at the end of 2016 would be very long indeed. Rather, the creature stitched together as a last-minute compromise is now like a sad pantomime horse coming apart at the seams.

With the exception perhaps of the people who created the trust 10 years ago, no one backs it any more. Not even the woman appointed as its first female chair.

That Rona Fairhead would rather write herself out of a job in 18 months’ time than fight against the flow of opinion among politicians and the media industry is the clearest sign yet that the trust isn’t long for this world.

Anyone looking for a reason for the relatively short-lived nature of the trust should look no further than the series of financial and operational failures that saw executive pay skyrocket out of control, £100m be spent on a failed Digital Media Initiative and a series of embarrassing editorial mishaps over the Savile affair and Lord McAlpine among others.

The “fault lines” referred to by Fairhead in her groundbreaking speech broke open for all to see during the excruciating bust-up between her predecessor, Lord Patten, and former director general Mark Thompson over multimillion pound payoffs to former executives.

But the speech by the former HSBC non-executive director, who has a lot more on her plate at the moment than her three days a week at the trust, is groundbreaking not because she is writing herself out of a job.

Consider too what she proposes as an alternative structure. Make no mistake, the recommendation that the BBC should be regulated in part by a fully external body is historic.

When the old BBC governors – a system of governance that essentially dated back to 1922 – was dismantled in 2006 the outcry that there might be something quickly nicknamed Ofbeeb was deafening. It was a capitalist plot to get their hands on Auntie, a bid for political influence, the end of the BBC as we knew it.

A decade on, the failures of the past few years appeared to have already united an influential cross-party committee of MPs, the trust and, privately, some senior BBC managers. It’s more remarkable because this was supposed to be the starting point for the charter renewal discussions that, let’s not forget, are not supposed to begin in earnest until after May’s election.

These are dangerous times for the BBC. A sense of consensus around change opens up a debate that many powerful players – from political parties to commercial rivals – will want to shape. The select committee report last week also suggested a public service broadcasting commission that will allow the universal funding mechanism – the licence fee – to be used for other things and not just the BBC output.

Tony Hall seems to have anticipated the debate by spending his first two years in the job quietly gathering a group of advisers around him, such as former Sony boss Sir Howard Stringer, a team that could easily turn into a proposed unitary board ultimately responsible for checking the sort of editorial and financial lapses that have occurred over the past few years. His team has also focused on the sort of programming – from Panorama reports on the News of the World to Wolf Hall – that garners plaudits not brickbats.

Fairhead opened her speech by referring to the “invisible gorilla”: the idea that people are so focused on looking at how the BBC is governed that they forget to notice something different in their vision.

The gorilla is the BBC’s ability to make great programmes free of political and commercial interference for the whole country. That’s the prize and whatever the forthcoming agonising over a new system of governance and funding, nobody should lose sight of it.

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