Rishi Sunak leads furious Cabinet revolt over Operation Red Meat plan to scrap BBC licence fee

Rishi Sunak and other senior ministers led a revolt over plans to scrap the BBC licence fee despite Boris Johnson throwing his weight behind the move. 

The Chancellor is said to have hit out at the speed of the announcement about the £159 annual levy, which was revealed in the Mail on Sunday.

He is also said to be unhappy at Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries over a lack of consultation with ministers beforehand on a matter with financial implications, according to the FT.

Ms Dorries tweeted at the weekend that the fee settlement running to 2027 would be ‘the last’. 

But in an announcement in the Commons on Monday she had watered down her language to simply say the current settlement would be reviewed then.

The Sun today said that Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey also voiced her unhappiness at Cabinet yesterday over the way the announcement –  which has pensions implications – was handled. 

It was part of a raft of right-wing populist measures announced under Operation Red Meat and rushed out to aid the PM as he faces widespread anger over Partygate.

Mr Johnson has enthusiastically thrown his weight behind axing the licence fee before the end of the decade.

The Sun reported he told Cabinet: ‘we can’t expect people to keep paying a licence fee just because they own a TV’. 

Ms Dorries on Monday confirmed that the licence fee would be frozen at £159 for two years, until 2024, after which it will rise in line with inflation for the following four years.

She told MPs that the corporation needed to ‘address issues around impartiality and group think’ and also added it was ‘time to begin asking those really serious questions about the long-term funding model of the BBC’.

She said the time had come to ‘discuss and debate new ways of funding’ the BBC but did not detail the Government’s preferred alternative.

The licence fee plans will take effect from April 1, 2022, and later this year the Government will ‘start to consider the overall governance and regulation of the BBC’, as part of the mid-term review of the BBC Charter.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport announced that it planned to cast its gaze to the future and given the changing broadcasting landscape due to streamers and video on demand, the Government will ‘separately consider whether the licence fee will remain a viable funding model for the BBC’.

Last night the BBC’s director-general refused to rule out scrapping BBC Four and warned ‘everything’s on the agenda’ after revealing the freeze will result in a £285million gap in funding for the corporation.

Tim Davie said the income from the fee by 2027 will be about £4.2billion based on the corporation’s assumptions around inflation and admitted that the settlement ‘will affect our frontline output, there’s no doubt about that’. 

Mr Davie was asked whether BBC Four would survive, and said: ‘I’m not going to make specific recommendations now, we are going to take stock, we’ve got the settlement – that gives us certainty now. We will make clean decisions, what we need to do is just go through this year. We’re being prudent in the way we plan our finances.’

While being interviewed on a prime-time 7.50am slot on BBC Radio 4’s Today by Nick Robinson, Mr Davie was pressed on the future of BBC Four, BBC Two and Radio Five Live, and said: ‘I think everything’s on the agenda.’

Asked whether ‘channels might go’, he said: ‘Absolutely’. Mr Davie added: ‘People, clearly and rightly, are worried about what the £285million cut in terms of two years flat brings, but also, as an organisation, we need to reshape ourselves for a digital age. The media market is moving extremely rapidly.’