Jowell won't rule out 'top slicing' licence fee

Although Tessa Jowell has declared that "top-slicing" the licence fee (ie. giving a portion of it to other broadcasters) is still an option that's under consideration, my opinion is that this is extremely unlikely to happen for at least another ten years if at all, since there are other requirements that are very likely to take precedence in the short term.

Firstly the Government wants everyone to switch over to digital TV, but to avoid upsetting lots of people (ie. potential Labour voters in the next general election) it needs all the remaining transmitters converted to carry digital terrestrial transmissions which someone needs to do (most likely to be the BBC) and it's going to cost some serious money to complete this task by the final switchoff date of 2012.

Secondly there's the planned move to Manchester - now postponed until after 2011 - for most of the BBC's sport and children's TV departments, which the BBC still says that it's unlikely not to happen but recent events have suggested otherwise. However ITV supports this move as long as more production work (hopefully) takes place at Granada's currently under-utilised Quay Street premises.

ITV may still publically support the concept of top-slicing the licence fee, but I suspect that it will rapidly change its tune on this issue given the basis that if the top-slicing proposal is implemented there's no guarantee that any such income will be redistributed in ITV's direction. And the large cost required for a move to Manchester means that the BBC needs all the money it can obtain for it to take place.

By contrast a deal with the BBC for joint production facilities in Manchester would secure a regular stream of income for ITV; it's possible that ITV may be trying to blackmail the BBC into a Manchester production deal by threatening to support top-slicing instead if no deal is reached, but the BBC has nothing to lose by exposing such an implication.

Combine all of this with a reluctance by politicians to either raise the licence fee or badly weaken the BBC (two ways of easily upsetting the electorate) and it's relatively safe to conclude that top-slicing the licence fee is unlikely to happen for at least ten years. And hopefully the BBC will have still proved its worth during the interim.