The coming crisis at the BBC

The BBC’s chief has quit ahead of what promises to be years of turmoil and conflict with a hostile government. Will the licence fee survive?

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Why is the BBC in the news?

This week Tony Hall (Lord Hall of Birkenhead) announced he’d be stepping down as director-general of the BBC in the summer, after seven years in charge. Hall is a former director of BBC News who was wooed back to the corporation in 2013 to steady the ship in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal and related unhappy conniptions. The ultimate BBC insider and safe pair of hands, Hall had been expected to stay on until 2022, the corporation’s centenary year. But this week he announced that he’s standing down to let a new leader get settled before what will also be a crucial year in terms of the BBC’s funding settlement. (And, it has been widely speculated, before the BBC’s current chairman, David Clementi, leaves next year and the government gets to install a new chairman and thereby influence the choice of the next DG.) Either way, Hall’s decision has inevitably set off a whole new round of debate about how the corporation is funded, and whether the licence-fee model – a fixed levy of £154.50 paid by 25,752,560 UK households – is sustainable.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.