The Westminster Media Forum held a seminar this afternoon on the subject of the BBC White Paper. The opening keynote speaker was Tessa Jowell, Secretary of State at the Department of Culture, Media & Sport. She began her address by proclaiming: “The BBC is unique. There is nothing else quite like it in the world.” and she insisted that “The BBC is there as a deliberate act of public policy”. On the other hand, she recognised the concerns of the BBC’s competitors that it could crowd them out of the market and explained “The BBC must not prevent the rest of the market from flourishing”.

Naturally she expounded the virtues of the White Paper and especially the new system of governance for the BBC, arguing that this is “a radically differrent system of governance” with the creation of a new Trust to replace the Board of Governors and a new public value test (PVT) being conducted by the Trust whenever a new service is proposed by the BBC. A vital input into the PVT will be a market impact assessment (MIA) conducted by Ofcom with a joint steering group comprised of both the Trust and Ofcom.

The other keynote speech was given by Michael Grade, Chairman of the BBC Board of Governors for two years now and Chairman-designate of the new Trust. He went through what he called “Auntie’s four deadly sins” - “elephantisis”, “inefficiency”, “management capture”, and “lack of accountability” - and demonstrated how each would be resolved by the proposed governance structure which includes a Governance Unit and service licences as well as the PVT and the MIA. To doubters, he kept insisting “Just read the Charter and the Agreement” - pointing out that the draft Charter was much more detailed than the current one, constituting 175 clauses instead of 44.

Both the keynote speakers emphasized transparency. Tessa Jowell said that licence fee payers would be consulted over the new level for the licence fee and Michael Grade insisted that the public value test would be a very open exercise.

In between the keynote speakers, there was a panel. Two of the panel members - Lord McNally of the Liberal Democrats and Professsor Steven Barnett of the University of Westminster - gave clear support to both the BBC and the White Paper. Lord Fowler, the Conservative peer who chaired the all-party Lords Select Committee on the BBC Charter Review, wanted primary legislation on the new licence fee and Daniel Sandelson, a partner at Clifford Chance, tried to suggest that Trust members would have unclear responsibilites and that the PVT and the MIA could be in conflict, but the White Paper did not receive any fundamental criticism or challenge at this event.