The BBC Royal Charter review – Who decides the future of PSM? By December 2027 the government is required to renew the BBC’s Royal Charter. During the last Charter review in 2015­2016, debates on the future of the BBC attracted strong public engagement, yet the then-Conservative govern­ment’s policymaking process was deeply undemocratic and highly politicised. Many expected the current Labour gov­ernment to be more cooperative with the BBC, but rela­tions between the new administration and the BBC have quickly cooled. Research of the BBC’s coverage of the war in Gaza has identified a systematic bias against Palestinian voices, yet Labour’s Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has focused her ire on disproven accusations of anti-Israeli cov­erage. 38 Nandy has also maintained a deliberately vague stance on future funding for the BBC, ruling out general taxation while flirting with‘two-tier’ models such as intro­ducing advertising or subscription alongside reduced public funding. 39 Alongside the urgent challenges facing PSBs in the new media landscape, the upcoming Charter review could become a focal point for many intractable crises in British society, such as the loss of trust in public institutions, and the fragmentation of social and political communication, driven in no small part by oligarch-dominated media and tech platforms. These are precisely the kinds of crises that a trusted, robust and democratic PSM ecology should help resolve, but UK PSBs – and the BBC in particular – lack the means or the motive to fulfil this essential purpose. Tackling these existential questions must involve democra­tising PSM itself, starting by reorganising the upcoming Charter review process as an exercise of direct public par­ticipation in PSM policy-making. The governance and oper­ations of the BBC should also be democratised, perma­nently ending the pervasive state and political interference that has undermined the BBC’s essential independence. Transforming the BBC into a mutual organisation – owned and controlled by the British public as‘members’ with active and direct involvement in how the BBC is run – would be a radical but effective reform to achieve this. 40 38  Centre for Media Monitoring(2025) BBC on Gaza-Israel: One story, double standards. June 2025; Media Reform Coalition(2024) BBC, bias and Gaza: a partial study of impartiality. September 2024. The Centre for Media Monitoring is a media research group, originally established as part of the Muslim Council of Britain, which monitors cover­age of Muslims and Islam in the UK media. 39  The Times(paywall),‘Lisa Nandy: Replace BBC licence fee with mix of funding’, 4 October 2025. 40  Hind, D, Mills, T. and Chivers, T.(2025) Our Mutual Friend: The BBC in the Digital Age. Media Reform Coalition and Common Wealth. At the Cliff-Edge: Public Service Broadcasting in the United Kingdom 9