An estimated £200 million for the upgrade would come from an underspend in the BBC’s Digital Switchover Help Scheme after 2012, plus commercial contracts, private-partner contributions, regional public sector beneficiaries, upgrade consumers themselves and from mobile spectrum roll-out. See detail.

But Lyons, following that recommendation and with the BBC’s scale coming under increasing fire from James Murdoch and other commercial players, wrote an open letter to licence fee payers, saying research results from last week “reinforce our concern about any attempt to use the licence fee to subsidise commercial operators, as proposed by the government in its Digital Britain report”...

“This would weaken the BBC; threaten its independence; reduce accountability to licence fee payers and could in time lead to a bigger licence fee because it could merge with general taxation and be used for causes that have nothing to do with broadcasting.”

Digital Britain report author Stephen Carter had called the BBC cash “direct public funding”. His report had also proposed using some BBC money to finance bidders in a new structure of multi-media regional news consortia, with ITV’s regional news commitment evaporating.

Lyons is trying to safeguard the doctrine that the licence fee funds the BBC and no-one else. But, in dark economic times, when both main political parties are now committed to public sector spending cuts and the BBC is already under attack from free-market rivals, he will need to present his argument particularly clearly. In June, Lyons said: “The Trust will not sit quietly by and watch this happen.”

Next-generation broadband infrastructure, giving truly high data speeds, would be funded by a levy of £0.50 per customer per month on telcos’ copper wires, creating the Independent Next Generation Fund, a stash any telco can bid for to part-subsidise the roll-out of truly high-speed broadband to the final third of the market.