Culture secretary says BBC needs clear boundaries

The BBC should set clear boundaries on its commercial activities so that media companies can invest without fear that they will be driven out of business "by a wall of public money", the UK culture secretary said on Saturday.

Jeremy Hunt was speaking at the Edinburgh TV festival the day after Mark Thompson, the director-general of the BBC, launched an impassioned defence of the broadcaster and emphasised its role as a supporter of the UK's creative industries.

But Mr Hunt said: "The BBC needs to have competitors in the marketplace able to deliver high quality content," and those competitors "need some certainty about the reach of the BBC's commercial activities.

"They need to know they can take risks and to invest and they are not going to be pout out of business by a wall of public money."

He said he thought the BBC Trust, the corporation's sovereign body, would not on its own restrain the BBC from straying into commercial areas that would interdict rivals.

"The BBC should put redlines around its activities so that people know what they are going to do and what they aren't going to do."

In his speech on Friday, Mr Thompson identified British Sky Broadcasting as the dominant force in UK commercial broadcasting and said it must pay more towards the commissioning of original programmes. His MacTaggart speech was a response to the same address a year earlier by James Murdoch, the chairman of BSkyB and chief executive of News Corp in Europe and Asia.

Mr Hunt said he thought listening to Mr Thompson was like hearing "a bit of a family feud" and said his job as culture secretary was to step back from it because it was in viewers' interests for both broadcasters to be strong.

He reinforced the idea that the National Audit Office should be allowed full scrutiny of the BBC's accounts, something resisted by the Trust because its Royal Charter gives it responsibility for ensuring the BBC providers value for money.

"The BBC needs to be transparent. It is a no-brainer," Mr Hunt said.

But he added that he fully supported the BBC's editorial independence, even if "is likely to make life uncomfortable for me within my own party".

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