BBC boss defends £15-a-month licence fee | UK | News
Outgoing director says BBC is in crisis (Image: Getty)
Director-General Tim Davie says the BBC is in “crisis”. The broadcaster has faced backlash over plans to increase the license fee, which will rise to £180 from April 1. The increase required by the 2022 License Fee Agreement will increase by £5.50 for the year, meaning a standard color TV license will now cost households £15 per month.
Speaking on The Rest Is Entertainment podcast, Mr Davie, who announced his resignation in November 2025, claimed the BBC and other institutions were absolutely in “crisis”.
READ MORE: Millions more UK households may have to pay £180 BBC TV license fee
READ MORE: Full list of Brits who could get free or discounted TV licenses as fee rises
He said: “Trust is built, and I’m semi-obsessed with this – trust is built by people who firmly believe that someone is acting in their best interests and listening to them. And if you think about an old-school broadcaster, they publish . . .
“I think there are plenty of examples where institutions – the BBC is certainly not immune to this – whatever you call it, the metropolis, look at life through a particular lens.”
There should be no problem with a license fee increase as long as the BBC delivers value to viewers, according to departing boss Mirror.
Mr Davies explained: “We’re in a consultation phase, but we’ve set out a very clear choice and I’m going to do that from where we are to starting over – I think there’s a model that says: look, if we can deliver value to every household and really work on that, then everyone contributes fairly and I think that’s a model worth fighting for.”
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He added: “I don’t see this as something that’s potentially stuck in the past. I actually think it could be an exciting thing for the future – quite enlightened. You don’t need to go exactly where the market is going now. You have to create markets and I think we can do that.”
But the BBC has recently faced a number of allegations, including that one of its Panorama documentaries misled viewers by editing out a speech by US President Donald Trump.
A leaked internal memo from the BBC claimed that employees of the Panorama program edited two parts of the speech together, thus revealing that Trump openly encouraged the Capitol Hill riot in 2021. Trump has since filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the broadcaster, which is scheduled to go to trial in February 2027.
Specific mistakes by the BBC were not mentioned during Trump’s tenure, but Trump said the world was in an age of “armamentism”, where the broadcaster was subject to strict scrutiny on one thing but all the good work they did was not mentioned.
“We’ve made mistakes, sometimes serious mistakes that we regret. But weaponization is selectively addressing a fact – it may be a fact, so you’re addressing a fact – but what you’re not addressing is an attempt to be proportionate,” he says.
“Look, thousands of stories are being published, we’re running and someone didn’t get it right, or that’s not where there’s a balance of data in general. It’s literally just picking a fact to make a case.”
