A Downing Street spokesman has confirmed that Prime Minister Boris Johnson does not want to scrap “all licence fees” at this stage.Director-General Lord Hall hit back at a suggestion that the BBC is redundant following the rise of streaming services like Netflix and Amazon as he spoke at a broadcasting conference.The licence fee model means that:

you’ve got to give something to everybody. I think that is a fantastic creative challenge. I hope we are developing and continuing to develop a much warmer relationship with the British public which is less the ‘Auntie’ of two or three decades ago and much more something which is interwoven in people’s lives.

People say things like ‘What’s the point of the BBC when you’ve got the streamers?’

The BBC is not Netflix, it really isn’t … Netflix don’t do sport, they don’t do news, they don’t do a whole raft of things.

It’s really important … to see what the BBC does in the round.

The licence fee, I think, beyond 2027 (when the BBC’s charter comes up for renewal) will still matter and will still be phenomenally important for the BBC.”

Constant reform is what the BBC is about.

The BBC is still the most trusted news source.

We should always listen to what people say to us about our impartiality and we should be open to people criticising what we do.

There is more of a need for the BBC today than at any point in our history … It’s the best antidote to fake news.

The broadcaster, which celebrates its centenary in 2022, is believed to have got its “Auntie” nickname because of an “Auntie knows best” image in previous decades.

Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden told the Media And Telecoms 2020 And Beyond conference that the BBC had “missed” or been slow to pick up on many of the key political changes and trends in recent years.

The Government is consulting on proposals to decriminalise non-payment of the licence fee and ministers have suggested it could be abolished altogether when the BBC’s charter comes up for renewal.