I served on the former Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee during the last charter negotiations in 2015-16, and I thought then that the charter period of 11 years was very long—it is a substantial extension. Although that allows the BBC to make longer-term decisions, a lot changes in the media landscape in that period of time. When the last charter was negotiated 11 years ago, the social media companies that dominate our media landscape today barely existed. They arrived on the scene in 2015-16 as major market players but were not yet what they are now: the principal way in which many people access their entertainment and news.

Looking at Ofcom’s “Media Nations” study, it is clear that younger viewers—people under the age of 40 —increasingly look first to social media or subscriber platforms for their content, rather than doing what people would have done in the past, which was to turn on the television and see what was on. That is a dramatic change in the way people consume news and information, and it is not just about a change in the type of content that they can access; it is also about broadcasting moving away from a true broadcast service, whereby a very large number of people choose to see the same things, and towards a personalised service, whereby the content that people consume is designed around them and their viewing habits. That applies to news just as much as it does to any other form of content.

That is the very big change that we have seen, and the prospect of artificial intelligence reducing the cost of production, particularly for news content, will only accelerate the process. The shift in people’s habits towards consuming media through online platforms and social media apps will accelerate the personalisation of the content they see. In fact, such tools have been designed precisely to achieve that end.