The BBC should be turned into a mutual organisation and its board elected by licence fee payers, a pair of MPs has suggested.

The broadcaster would benefit from more direct ownership by the people who pay for it, rather than the current system, which allows for too much government interference, Labour’s Gareth Thomas and Tory MP Steve Baker said.

“The BBC is a ‘public service’ broadcaster,” Thomas and Baker wrote in a letter to the Times. “It operates under a royal charter, agreed between it and the government, is governed by a trust of the great and good appointed by ministers, and is funded by the licence fee payers. But who, exactly, owns it? And to whom is it accountable, not least over the expenditure of more than £3bn of our money?

“The BBC Trust is accountable to no one, really. This creates a vacuum into which political interference from the government (of any colour) can leak.”

A mutual organisation is owned by those members who are directly involved in the business, such as employees or customers, rather than by outside investors.

There has been speculation about what system might replace the current BBC Trust model. The culture secretary John Whittingdale has been accused of seeking to bend the broadcaster to his political will over proposals to set up a new board dominated by government appointees.



His proposition was based on a report by the former chairman of Virgin Money and Prudential, David Clementi, which recommended that Ofcom be given regulatory oversight of the BBC. The report also backed a unitary board “charged with responsibility for meeting the obligations placed on it under the royal charter and agreement, and responsibility for the interests of licence fee payers”. But it said only half of the members should be appointed by the government.

The two MPs believe that the proposed systems will not address the two main problems, as they see them: “an ownership deficit and an accountability gap”.

They wrote: “More radical change is needed: the BBC should be mutualised. This would mean TV licence holders becoming members and owners of the BBC, thus solving the ownership deficit.

“These members would elect representatives to hold the executive management to account. Thorny issues such as executive remuneration and tough decisions about the prioritisation of constrained resources would be decided at an AGM open to all to attend in person or online. This would solve the accountability gap and would be a powerful bulwark against political interference.

“Mutualising the BBC would lend new legitimacy to the licence fee and bring the BBC and the audience together — an audience without which the BBC cannot flourish.”