The military uses MIA for missing in action. The BBC uses it for market impact assessment. One is the result of battle, the other a way of avoiding it.

Here’s how it works. Before launching a new service, or making significant changes to an existing service, the BBC Trust “must be satisfied that any likely adverse impact on the market is justified by the likely public value of the change before deciding to proceed.”

How does it do that? The Trust asks Ofcom to commission some consultants to assess market impact, and send their report back to a group consisting of Ofcom and the Trust.

(Incidentally, commissioning ‘independent’ reports in a market as tiny as UK broadcasting is tough. Most consultancies will exist only to serve the BBC. There certainly won’t be a big market for ‘market impact assessment’ outside of it.)

Then it undertakes a public value test, which is an attempt to turn words into numbers. Spectrum did the initial work on an idea called Net Public Value. No betting that another team of consultants – or Spectrum themselves – will be required to plug in those formulae to determine the public value of the new service. Then the BBC Trust will put the two things together and decide if the BBC gets to go ahead.

A quango, and a couple of sets of consultants report to an unelected group of appointees to sign off on what the BBC does with our money. One day all politics will happen like this. Remember one of the public purposes of the BBC? It’s to help sustain civil society. Forget taking Question Time into schools. Sell tickets to these private meetings and let school children learn the machtpolitik of squaring committees and fixing decisions. Yes kids, this is how civil society is sustained. Now don’t get put off voting, or be tempted to disengage from politics.

My point: the public purpose and the private process ought to be in alignment, not opposition.

Postscript: In case you think I love acronyms and indicators and loathe the BBC, you’d be wrong. Its governance and rationale concerns me, and criticising it isn’t always an easy option. Especially since I know, respect and like a lot of people working there.

To give a personal example: I’m in education, but I sometimes write in a personal capacity for the media. When I penned a modestly critical line about one aspect of the BBC, an executive I’d never met wrote to me questioning the provision of work placements for students from my university. That threat has never been acted on, but did it make me more guarded in my approach to the corporation? You bet.