Below is an article our Chair, Pat Younge, published today with the National Preparedness Commission:

The BBC’s Charter must be formally renewed by the end of December 2027 and the government has recently issued a consultative green paper asking for views on the BBC’s mission and public purposes and calling for responses by 10 March 2026. This comes at a time when the threats to national resilience and the UK’s information environment are more serious than at any point since the Cold War. Authoritarian states are waging sustained information warfare against open democracies. AI-generated content is making it harder to distinguish truth from fabrication. The digital infrastructure through which British citizens access information is almost entirely owned and controlled by a handful of US technology companies and individuals.

The BBC’s mission is broad.  It states that ‘the BBC exists to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain’. It is given specificity with five public purposes which define how the BBC can fulfil its mission:

1.   To provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them.

2.   To support learning for people of all ages.

3.   To show the most creative, highest quality and distinctive output and services.

4.   To reflect, represent and serve the diverse communities of all the United Kingdom’s nations and regions and, in doing so, to support the creative economy          across the United Kingdom.

5.   To reflect the United Kingdom, its culture and values to the world.

Its core mission is more important than ever, but there is a clear opportunity within the Charter review process to update the public purposes to bolster national resilience in the digital age. We propose that here should be two new public purposes:

6.   To counter disinformation and promote a healthy information environment.

7.   To develop new technologies for the public benefit.

Disinformation, social cohesion and democracy

Technological advances are enabling and accelerating the weaponisation of information as a central tactic of so-called ‘greyzone’ aggression.  Hostile actors are deliberately using disinformation to destabilise democracies, support autocracies, and divide communities.

In December 2025, Blaise Metreweli, the new chief of SIS warned that the UK is operating in a space between peace and war. It faces sustained hybrid information attacks at every level, from coordinated state-backed disinformation campaigns and fake BBC content, to the manipulation of local debates and the harassment of individuals working in the public interest.

AI-generated content is making it harder to distinguish truth from fabrication. Deepfakes, synthetic text and AI-enabled manipulation of genuine content are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from reality.

The hybrid information warfare being waged against open societies seeks to fracture social cohesion, exploiting the affordances of open democratic discourse to break democracies from within, and undermine confidence in democratic institutions.

The experience of the United States, where the absence of shared, trusted media has contributed directly to extreme polarisation, is a warning of where this trajectory leads. The owner of X (formerly Twitter) has given his support to political extremists in the UK, and has predicted civil war on our streets. Many tech platforms have reduced their capacity to moderate and remove extremist material.

In this environment, the BBC’s institutional commitment to verification, accuracy and editorial standards is not a legacy asset. It is essential infrastructure for maintaining a shared basis of fact, but a commitment may no longer be sufficient.  A formal mandate to support a healthy information environment, including countering disinformation and promoting evidence-based public debate, would ensure that the BBC remains a reliable and trusted voice. This is particularly important at times of national crisis, when official, verified information needs to be quickly identified and readily trusted by all citizens, wherever and whoever they may be.

Investment in public interest technology

Almost every layer of the digital infrastructure on which the UK depends is now imported, owned and controlled by a small number of US-based technology companies. The world’s six richest men between them own or control X (formerly Twitter), TikTok’s US operations, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Amazon Web Services, Google and YouTube. These platforms are where most content is now discovered and shared, and they operate with no public service obligations. Their algorithms prioritise engagement and profit over quality, accuracy or democratic outcomes.

In an era where control over information infrastructure is openly part of geopolitics and trade, a publicly accountable institution like the BBC, operating in the public interest with obligations to all citizens, is not merely desirable but essential.

Until it was removed in 2017, the BBC had a public purpose to develop new digital public-centred technologies, and delivering their benefits to the public. Now is, we believe, the right time to reinstate this task, which can be done by building on existing platforms like iPlayer and Sounds.  Opening these – at least in part – to other UK public service broadcaster content, creating a shared platform for trusted content with greater scale and leverage against commercial platforms, would rapidly created a trusted information space that the public already knows and uses. The logical direction of travel would be towards a Public Service Network: a digital space where the BBC, alongside other public service broadcasters and civic digital services (libraries, museums, cultural institutions), can offer a curated, ad-free experience on a common platform with shared technology standards.

Funding

Of course, additional duties come with additional costs, however these are necessary to secure the status and integrity of a public service broadcaster.  Since 2010, the BBC has experienced a sustained and substantial reduction in its real-terms income by more than 30%. The consequences of this prolonged underfunding are visible across its output. The BBC has made successive rounds of efficiency savings and service cuts, and these have increasingly affected audience-facing services. The loss of experienced managers and correspondents, the casualisation of the workforce, the inability to compete for talent with commercial rivals, and the reduction in specialist journalism and investigative capacity can all be traced to this funding trajectory.

Being asked to do more with substantially less funding can only serve to inject risk into the BBC’s ability to fulfil its mission.  Openly acknowledging that that mission underpins national security and resilience brings a different cost-benefit calculation into play.  The consequences of not investing in a robust digital information provider that can be relied upon to mitigate the effects of disinformation, and to act as essential infrastructure in times of crisis are enormous.

Conclusion

The BBC remains one of very few institutions in British life that is used by a broad cross-section of the population and trusted across the political spectrum. The BBC’s capacity to bring the nation together around shared stories, shared understanding, and a shared basis of fact is not a nostalgic aspiration. It is a functional requirement of a healthy democracy.

This is not a routine Charter renewal. The decisions made in the next twelve months will determine the BBC’s capacity to operate for the next decade and beyond, at a moment when the threats to the information environment are more serious than at any point since the cold war.

The BBC, with its unmatched verification capabilities and institutional commitment to accuracy, is uniquely positioned to serve as the UK’s frontline defence, but it needs the mandate and resources to do so.

The government green paper on BBC Charter Review and the consultation questions can be found here.