The Future of the BBC
BBC CHARTER REVIEW 2028
Key Recommendations from the Children’s Media Foundation
Submitted in response to the Government Green Paper | March 2025
This briefing summarises the Children’s Media Foundation’s submission to the BBC Charter Review Green Paper. The CMF argues that the current Public Purposes are directionally sound but structurally incomplete – and that the 2028 Charter represents the last realistic opportunity to address a generational audience crisis before it becomes irreversible.
About the Children’s Media Foundation
The Children’s Media Foundation (CMF) is the UK’s leading independent audience advocacy organisation for children’s content and media policy. Our executive and board bring together decades of experience developing and delivering high quality media for young people across production, broadcasting, digital platforms, and in child development, technology policy, and regulatory affairs – including former senior leaders from the BBC, CITV, Paramount and Warner Media, and current independent production sector, academic and research representatives.
Our submission to the Charter Review reflects both this institutional expertise and an emerging policy consensus. The core proposals in this briefing have, for example, informed the Public Service Media Forum’s statements on public media renewal. Growing public concern about the consequences of unregulated social media platforms capturing and exploiting the attention of millions of young people strengthens the case for urgent action.
The Central Argument
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If it takes a village to raise a child, it will take a courageous, technology-led, child-prioritised Charter to shape the next generation of media spaces, services and citizens – for the long-term betterment of individual lives, British society, public service media and the BBC. |
The BBC’s five Public Purposes – to inform, educate, entertain, represent, and project – remain a sound foundation. But they need to be refocused because they fail to serve the nation’s needs as patterns of viewing have radically changed. Three structural gaps require urgent attention before the 2028 Charter is finalised:
- The language of provision in the Purposes has not kept pace with the reality of consumption
- The technology leadership mandate removed in 2017 must be reinstated
- Children and young people remain a footnote in the Charter rather than a foundation
Key Recommendations
1. Refocus from Outputs to Outcomes
The 2017 Charter’s operative verbs – ‘provide’, ‘offer’, ‘show’, ‘deliver’ – describe what the BBC puts into the world, not what happens when it does. This is no longer sufficient. Those under 25 now spend only 25% of their viewing time watching broadcast content. Audio and Internet consumption is equally fragmented. Excellent BBC ‘programming’ that fails to reach audiences cannot fulfil public purpose.
The 2028 Charter should pivot the BBC’s core purposes from “content provision” to “measurable impact.” By replacing supply-side verbs with outcome-driven language: e.g. shifting the focus from: creating news to: increasing engagement with trusted information, from: delivering content in key genres to: measurable effects on cultural, societal or democratic engagement or impacts on personal well-being. The BBC should align its KPIs with broader public service standards and Ofcom’s accountability frameworks should be modernised to regulate this.
2. Restore the Technology Leadership Mandate
The 2007 Charter included an explicit purpose to ‘deliver to the public the benefit of emerging communications technologies.’ It was removed in 2017. In the decade since, the BBC has fallen from pioneer to follower – despite the fact that iPlayer’s original prototype predated both Netflix streaming and YouTube.
The BBC’s annual R&D spend of approximately £20 million, and technology product development at around 2.8% of revenue, is less than a third of commercial comparators. The CMF proposes a new Technology Leadership Purpose: to pioneer free, universally accessible, safe and age-appropriate AI, 5G and IoT-enabled public media services for the UK – not merely adopting emerging technologies but shaping them.
3. Make Children and Young People a Binding Commitment
BBC loyalty is not won in adulthood. It is established in the 0-13 formative window – and the mechanism by which it is transmitted to the next generation has broken down. PSB hours of children’s TV content have declined by 81% since 2002; spend has fallen by more than half in real terms. Each successive generation enters adulthood with a lower BBC baseline than the one before.
Critically, the evidence shows that when a child churns away from BBC services, they do not return at the next life stage, and they also accelerate their parents’ migration to non-BBC services in the process. The CMF calls for a dedicated Children and Next Generation Purpose, with binding minimum investment benchmarked to 2002 levels (when CBeebies reached 48% weekly reach among its target audience), Ofcom-enforced mid-term review obligations, and ring-fenced protections that cannot be eroded mid-Charter.
4. Establish the BBC as Civic Steward
The BBC’s historic advantage is its credibility, not merely its catalogue. We therefore propose a new purpose to serve as the UK’s “connective tissue” in an AI-driven world. The BBC must become not only the national curator of digitally delivered cultural content from multiple sources, but boldly move beyond the limited role it currently assumes with its signed-in services to establish itself as the national “steward” and design authority for new services and content standards that will offer the public a decentralised digital engagement ecosystem rooted in public service values.
This begins with the BBC overseeing the roll-out of a portable digital identity for every child in Britain – a ‘solid pod’ system where data is stored in a vault the family owns rather than on platform servers. This leverages the BBC’s unique institutional independence to ensure that personal data remains a sovereign asset for families, rather than a commodity. The system would ensure safe, relevant and appropriate data exchanges between the user and public or commercial services, including birth registration and health records, a digital SureStart scheme, engagement with CBeebies content, primary and secondary educational services and public social media. The BBC will need to engage with technology infrastructure provision partners to develop the secure technical structure and design governance for the system, which will guarantee data sovereignty remains with the family until the child comes of age, and if chosen by the individual, through life. As young people age up, they can then use their secure ‘verified’ digital identities to navigate to more age-specific internet spaces without surrendering their privacy to commercial entities.
By modelling editorial and privacy standards the commercial internet lacks, the BBC becomes a safe on-ramp to the next generation of digital services. Our proposal outlines radical yet practical solutions, powered by the BBC and enriched by partnerships. These include AI-powered Bitesize tutors providing accountable, personalised learning; a trusted-source ‘narratives engine’ to curate individual and collective creativity and surface stories that address personal, community and national conversations; and a protected alternative to current social media platforms, replacing toxic algorithms with genuine community-curated, Fediverse-style social interaction online.
5. Reform Funding and Governance
The ten-year Charter cycle creates conditions under which long-term investment becomes structurally irrational. The BBC cannot credibly build an intergenerational audience pipeline if the question of its institutional form is in contention every decade. The CMF supports a move towards a longer, more secure mandate with periodic outcome-based reviews.
On funding, the CMF advocates replacing the licence fee with a household or broadband levy; progressive, universal, less costly to collect, and better suited to the BBC’s role as digital infrastructure for all citizens. Additional annual investment of £65–70m for young people’s content and services, and £25–40m to restore technology leadership, is required.
| Proposed Charter North Star
The BBC will exist to serve every person in the United Kingdom across every stage of their life – nurturing the curiosity, creativity and civic identity of the next generation; informing and connecting citizens in the present; and pioneering the free, safe, universally accessible media technologies that will define how future generations experience public life. It does so as an investment in the human potential of the nation, across every generation, in perpetuity. |
“As the first quarter of the 21st century draws to a close, the BBC’s most important investment is not in retaining today’s audience, already spoilt for media choice – but in tomorrow’s citizens. who will encounter a very different path to adulthood where new forms of AI-enabled emergent media will ultimately define their future identities and cultural citizenship”
The Full CMF Submission
This briefing summarises the CMF’s main submission document — BBC Charter Review 2028: Response to the Government Green Paper — which sets out in full the evidence base, structural analysis, and proposed Charter language changes underlying these recommendations.
That submission is accompanied by five detailed supporting papers:
BBC Technology Investment: A Chronology of Launch and Retrenchment — documenting the BBC’s track record across previous ventures in technical innovation and establishing the pattern of strategic launch followed by budget retrenchment that has repeatedly undermined long-term audience investment.
BBC Charter 2028: The Investment Gap — a detailed financial analysis, with inflation-adjusted figures, of the case for increased spending on children’s content and technology innovation, and the gap between current commitments and what is required to restore the BBC’s intergenerational transmission mechanism.
BBC Funding: The Efficiency Dividend — modelling the revenue implications of abandoning the licence fee in favour of a household or broadband levy, and demonstrating how revised collection mechanisms can generate the additional income required to finance the proposed new purposes while reducing per-household cost.
Partnership Initiatives for an AI-Enabled Public Service Steward — examining the structural and regulatory changes needed to free the BBC to ally with organisations that share a vision of civic digital access, including open-standard technology partners, federated social networking infrastructure, and civic data sovereignty initiatives.
Platform Partnerships: YouTube Interim Framework — setting out the contractual and regulatory framework required to maximise public service value on third-party delivery platforms, particularly YouTube, including proposed obligations around algorithmic prominence, data access, children’s safe harbour, and revenue transparency.
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