Dame Collette Bowe, the former chair of Ofcom, has said the media regulator is not the right organisation to replace the BBC Trust and hold the BBC to account.
Bowe told the Voice of the Listener and Viewer conference on Tuesday that the BBC needed more than a regulator to ensure it was meeting its public purposes.
Speaking from the audience during a Q&A session with the BBC Trust chair Rona Fairhead, Bowe said: “There’s a quite separate job to be done, which is holding the BBC to account for the delivery of its purposes. I would say that is not a regulatory job.
“This other body we are talking about is not actually a regulator. It’s a thing which has a very distinct process for [judging] against its purposes. And saying in public, to the public, the BBC has or has not delivered.” This was “not what Ofcom does”, she added.
The government’s review of the BBC is considering options to replace the BBC Trust, with Ofcom regularly cited as a potential option by the culture secretary John Whittingdale. As well as chairing Ofcom until April last year, Bowe is on the eight-person panel appointed to advise Whittingdale on the BBC’s future.
Fairhead reused to be drawn on what sort of body should replace the trust, although she agreed that any replacement would need to do much more than regulate the corporation.
She added that the trust was keen to see its successor have the power to make recommendations about the future level of the licence fee, and “it might be difficult for Ofcom to do that”.
Ofcom chief executive Sharon White, who took over after Bowe left, has said the organisation could take on broader regulatory duties for the BBC, but not the governance role of the trust.
“I would put a line in the sand between [regulation] and the core responsibilities of the governance function,” White told MPs on the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee in July.
