No licence fee funding for C4 - BBC

5:21am Wednesday 14th May 2008

BBC chairman Sir Michael Lyons has spoken out against calls to use part of the licence fee to help fund Channel 4 and said the Corporation must do more to embrace ethnic minority audiences.

Top-slicing the licence fee to fund unprofitable Channel 4 programmes such as Dispatches was one of the suggestions recently put forward by broadcasting watchdog Ofcom.

But Sir Michael said there was no "excess" licence fee and if such a thing did exist, it should be up to viewers to decide what to do with it.

Sir Michael said that "some might argue" that Channel 4's "contribution (to public service broadcasting) is not as radical or original as once it was but the thought of British television without Channel 4 is unthinkable".

But he said: "There is a question about whether Channel 4 really does face a financial crisis, and if it does, of its true scale."

Sir Michael told the Royal Society of Arts that giving Channel 4 public money could "weaken rather than cure the patient" and that it would lead to a change in the character of the broadcaster.

"Channel 4 is the way it is, in part because of the way it is funded and governed. Change the mechanisms of funding and governance and you change the channel", he said.

Sir Michael said the BBC "can improve on its record of reaching ethnic minority audiences".

The BBC also had "more to do" to respond to the fact that "audiences feel much less warmly about the BBC the farther away they live from London", he said.

The BBC had "the scale and scope" to be able to offer targeted channels such as the Asian Network, or BBC 1Xtra, the digital station for young black urban audiences. "But the need to reach everyone should not be an excuse to go on creating more services. The BBC must also find ways to bring those audiences into mainstream output," he said.

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