Trust

Of course, there isn’t going to be any arrangement whereby commercial broadcasters receive a share of the television license fee for “public service programming”. I suppose that this is probably just as well: as with, say, State funding of political parties, who would decide what qualified and what didn’t, by what means would the decide this, and on what criteria?

And would such programming include the Party Conferences, now only held at all because the BBC still agrees to televise them, although even it now confines most of the coverage to BBC Parliament?

Instead, elect the Trustees. In Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and each of the nine English regions, licence-payers should each vote for up to one candidate, with the top two elected to serve a four-year term. There would also be a Chairman, appointed by the Secretary of State with the approval of the House of Commons.

The Trustees would meet in public under any circumstance when a local council would do so. And the candidates would be sufficiently independent to qualify in principle for the Remuneration Panels of their local authorities.

This pattern should also be applied, with everyone having a vote, to Ofcom, to the Press Complaints Commission, and to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, just for a start.