My first impression of the BBC White Paper is that it seems to give the impression of increasing Ofcom’s role without really doing so in a meaningful way.

It’s role on providing market impact assessments as part of the Public Value Test (PVT) for new services and significant changes to old services has been increased; although Ofcom’s work will now be overseen by a joint steering group from Ofcom and the Trust. The Government have deemed that there is no such threshold beyond which the market for a particular service might be deemed unacceptable under the PVT, and indeed as the PVT requires the Trust to weigh up the market impact assessment against the ‘public value’ , this means that even if a new service may be bad for competition, as long as the Trust feel its good ‘public value’ then they can go ahead with it anyway. It would still need to be signed off by the Secretary of State, but this would only be withheld if it was apparent ‘that the Trust had not followed the approval process properly’

The Government also heard those calls for more ex ante regulation of the BBC. The BBC Trust will have to ‘draw up and enforce codes’ of practice in relation to things like cross promotion. The Trust will have to take account of Ofcom’s views and ’should it ever fail to follow Ofcom’s advice, make its reasons clear’. So, once again, as long as it is clear why it doesn’t want to follow Ofcom’s advice, it is in the clear. The white paper suggests the Trust look at ex ante codes already applied to commercial broadcasters and see if ’suitably modified’ they could be applied to the BBC.