If Michael Grade was appointed as the BBC Chairman to “sell” the corporation to ministers, he has already succeeded in that task. The Green Paper published by Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, this year did not just meet the expectations of the BBC, it exceeded them. The licence fee will, in effect, remain in being until 2017 with only a modest midterm examination to trouble a well-fed Auntie. Having secured that bounty, Mr Grade and Mark Thompson, the BBC Director-General, have opted to push their not inconsiderable luck further by asking for an extortionate annual rise of 2.3 per cent more than the inflation rate for every year from 2007 to 2013.

In fairness to the BBC, this is the first time that it has made any sort of detailed public submission for a rise in the licence fee and the only occasion when it has allowed its estimates to be subject to external scrutiny. There is also an element of trade union politics at work here, with the BBC seeking an increase of 2.3 per cent beyond inflation, but being ready to settle for less.

Even allowing for the showbiz, this is an audacious bid and one which is impossible to justify. It is also a submission that barely acknowledges the transformation that has occurred in television since the last time that the BBC held out the begging bowl in the dim, distant years when Chris Smith was at the helm of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. In so far as the new environment is recognised, it is to only to provide justification for the lifting of taxpayer’s wallets and the pilfering of purses.

The much-heralded process of “going digital” is the perfect cover for a blank cheque from the public. It is also an exaggerated element of BBC accounting. It is responsible for £700 million of the £5.5 billion extra in direct spending that the corporation wishes to undertake and an extra £200 million of the supplementary £500 million that the BBC would like licence payers to set aside as a form of contingency reserve. The BBC should meet such costs through tighter budgetary controls elsewhere in the business.

The core of this plan, therefore, is that the BBC wants to spend more on the quality and quantity of its activities. The “quality” aspect consists of a populist pitch to “abolish repeats” (at least on BBC One and Two in peak viewing hours). The “quantity” ingredient includes a £1.2 billion drive to expand “digital services” and a £600 million strategy for “local relevance”.

The Culture Secretary should look at these plans with extreme suspicion. The quality component is basically a wish list. The quantity dimension is even more disturbing. Having moved into education publishing, magazine publishing and manifold merchandising, the BBC should not be encouraged to crash into the music downloading industry or marginalise local newspapers by providing, courtesy of the licence fee, “ultra-local” news services. What of the young journalists in Birmingham or Blackpool or Bath trying to start a local online news service? The BBC is treasured as a national institution. It should not be a taxpayer-funded marauding monopoly.