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Ross conceived the new discipline of Crime Science and inspired and founded the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College London, where he was chairman of the board. He is an Honorary Fellow of UCL and of the (American) Academy of Experimental Criminology, and author of ‘Crime, how to solve it and why so much of what we’re told is wrong‘.

After years presenting a TV show on crime Nick Ross was disappointed at the failure of criminology to stem crime and sought more practical and scientifically robust ways to cut victimisation. He was one of the first to point out that crime began to fall from the 1990s onwards – an issue now generally accepted but which was highly controversial until recently. He has campaigned for the Office of National Statistics to revise its crime reporting format which helps conceal the dramatic falls in almost all traditional forms of crime. He was also one of the first to explain why the tide of crime had turned. In 1995 he coined the term Crime Science to mark out a new multidisciplinary and evidence-based focus on crime reduction*.

The Jill Dando Institute at UCL has grown into a major Department of Security and Crime Science, with undergraduate teaching to five-star research status, housing one of the world’s largest secure data labs, helping to improve policing and with the world’s first dedicated crime forecasting centre. Crime Science is now established at several universities around the world.

Ross was also influential in the earliest national adoption of targets to reduce crime and in particular to cut car crime where he led an initiative involving the Department of Transport and the DVLA to reform vehicle registration procedures. In 2000 he gave the Police Foundation Lecture jointly with the then Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John (now Lord) Stevens, urging an evidence-based approach to crime policy instead of what he described as ‘political wheezes’. (A memorable Radio Times cover quoted him saying, “Governments are clueless about crime. They come at it like amateurs talking in the pub.”)

He worked with the EC and others to establish a new business-led campaign against crime and has been a member of several government inquiries on crime. He was an adviser to Victim Support and to reviews on crime statistics. He is a regular speaker and adviser on crime reduction, terrorism and security, including a keynote addresses to the annual conference of the Association of Chief Police Officers and to successive Cumberland Lodge National Policing Conferences. He authored the crime prevention section of the Government Chief Scientist’s 2015 annual report, summarised by Sir Mark Walport as, “a straightforward way of using inducements to civil behaviour”. He has advised the National Police Chiefs Council, chaired the Westminster Hate Crime Commission, was a member of the Barber Inquiry into the future of policing, and is currently a Trustee of Crimestoppers and President of the British Security Industries Association.

*Crime science is less concerned with political theory, criminal justice or redemption of people than with demonstrably effective and measurable ways of reducing victimisation. Most epidemics and cuts in crime are explained by changing circumstances in which individuals find themselves rather than by moves to re-engineer people or society, so while Crime Science embraces police training, detection methods and forensic science it finds most leverage in improving security by rethinking products, services or policies so as to design out unnecessary temptations and opportunities for crime.

For more, see Crime and Crime Science.

Nick Ross is a Trustee of Sense About Science, is a regular speaker at science meetings and was a founder-supporter of the Campbell Collaboration, the international partnership to improve scientific methodology in the social sciences.

He helped to change the climate of science reporting in the early 90s with an influential series of articles critical of media portrayal of science.

He has been a member of the Committee on Public Understanding of Science and of several advisory boards such as the Societal Issues Panel for the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council. He was Guest Director of the Cheltenham Science Festival, the largest public science meeting in the world and has twice been chairman of the Royal Society Science Book Prize.

He founded the new discipline of Crime Science at University College London where he is an honorary fellow and visiting professor.

In 2013 he inspired an initiative called Evidence Matters to promote evidence-based public policy which merged with Sense About Science. In its 2016 report, Missing Evidence by former Court of Appeal judge Sir Stephen Sedley, recommended that government should audit and publish all its research findings. From 2017 Evidence Matters has been core to Sense About Science policy, including annual Evidence Week held in parliament in collaboration with the House of Commons Library.

We Shall Overcome – Nick Ross’s award-winning and very personal account of the violence in Northern Ireland.Nick Ross was a student leader and civil rights campaigner in the late 1960s, reported from the Province through much of the 1970s and continues to have an interest in Northern Ireland affairs.His autobiographical account of the start of the troubles won a best documentary award and was hailed by the Irish Times as, “The true story told for the first time on television,” through the eyes of Nick Ross, “the well-informed English journalist (nearly an oxymoron when it comes to writing about Ireland).”In 2002 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University Belfast.

He is a Fellow of the World Wildlife Fund, served two terms (2004-2011) as a WWF Ambassador, and is an Honorary Member of Population Matters. In past years Ross worked on conjunction with the Foreign & Commonwealth Office on environmental issues in British Overseas Territories.

Twenty years before it became fashionable to challenge the TV licence fee Nick Ross was almost a lone voice in questioning the survival of the BBC. The RSA first published his proposals in 2002. He warned that by clinging to the licence fee the BBC had no incentive to compete on the world stage and would become a shrivelled version of its once mighty self. Weighed down by a fixed income it would slowly drown in a rising sea of digital choice and commercial output. As the whole sector grew exponentially new competitors would steal the mass-audience crown jewels like sports and drama; and as the BBC declined it would shed more of its public service role in order to retain its claim to mass popularity.

Ross subsequently chaired meetings between the Ofcom Content Board and broadcasters and for VLV (the Voice of the Listener & Viewer), and spoke at many other venues including BAFTA and the Edinburgh TV Festival, warning that, far from driving up quality, the licence fee would increasingly force the BBC to chase ratings much like its commercial rivals.

This was all robustly refuted by the BBC. His views were not regarded as helpful so much as subversive, and at a meeting in the Commons the then BBC panjandrum Michael Grade summed up the prevailing defensiveness by calling such ideas ‘naïve’. Yet Ross correctly forecast loss of specialist arts and science programmes, progressive loss of the BBC’s distinguishing public service remit including its flagship journalism, and its diminishing status around the world. In 2024 VLV research proved just how presecient he had been: in real terms the BBC’s income had declined by 40% over little more than a decade. It is now widely accepted that traditional TV is on the way out. Linear broadcast audiences have already shrunk by a third in a decade and are expected to fall further and faster in the face of streaming services . The BBC is also haemmorhaging audiences on radio in the face of competition from a host of digital stations and from podcasts.

Nick Ross now concedes that the battle for the BBC as a major force in broadcasting may now be lost. Back in 2002 he had proposed two paths to migrate to far less State dependence, and to rebuild a unique proposition. He argued that since the BBC’s reputation was built on trust it should never carry advertising, and in any case commercials could increasingly be spooled past or blocked. Instead it should pioneer subscription services – and do so quickly before commercial rivals stole a march on these new income streams. Not only hit shows and high-ratings TV networks could benefit hugely from subscriptions, but even more so channels that built loyalty like speech radio. Second, in order to justify a continued element of public levy, the BBC should have a more determined focus on areas of market failure. The State should retain its role in subsidies to arts, live music and to sciences. It should also increase funding to news services around the world thereby projecting British values and promoting informed democracy around the world. Where the BBC failed to deliver sufficient distinctiveness, such funding should be contestable by other broadcasters.

Ross’s warnings first proved prophetic when after complaints from nesspapers and other commercial rivals, the BBC, twice, agreed to downgrade its world-beating news website, which quickly became third-rate and a minor player on the global stage. By 2008 an IpsosMori poll showed that almost as many Britons opposed the licence fee as supported it (a proportion that grew to 75% by 2020). In 2009 the BBC’s Director General conceded that the licence fee could seem anachronistic and might need to be replaced, and in 2013 Roger Mosey, the BBC’s outgoing editorial director, agreed, suggesting that the licence fee might be shared among all broadcasters to promote greater quality and diversity.

The same year The Sunday Telegraph published Ross’s manifesto for the BBC and in 2014 his proposals were debated at Civitas and at an RTS seminar in the House of Commons. (This is where former BBC Chair Lord Grade called his ideas for less dependence on the licence fee irresponsibly ‘naïve’ – the same Michael Grade, incidentally, who eight years later was appointed to chair Ofcom where he declared the licence fee to be ‘regressive’ and said it should be ended in 2027.)

In a personal submission to the 2017 Charter Review, Ross proposed a last-ditch alternative to BBC decline, urging a one-time only step-up in the licence fee in return for a BBC commitment to migrate to more self-funding by the following Charter renewal in 2027. Speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival that year he lambasted BBC bosses for debasing the institution at the heart of British broadcasting. He conceded that the BBC would again win its conventional approach, but predicted that, as it had been in 2007, it would be a pyrrhic victory and would lead to further cuts.

Ross’s former colleague, Jeremy Paxman, now came to the same conclusion, pronouncing the licence fee “old-fashioned… Look how the likes of Netflix and Amazon now take extraordinary amounts of money from huge numbers of people electronically. Why can’t the BBC wake up to this?” By then the licence fee was proving to be an albatross, imposing severe cuts including scrapping of the science department, forcing the BBC downmarket and scrambling for younger audiences.

In 2019, perhaps twenty years late, the BBC finally announced preparations for its own streaming service, Britbox. But it was too little, and much too late.

By now, as the former BBC executive Roger Mosey conceded, the once world-beating broadcaster was facing irrelevance even on its home ground. “This is not scaremongering,” he said, the BBC is, “at risk of being eaten”. Its only option now, as Ross had argued many years before, was to focus on areas of market failure.

By 2019 even the BBC’s Chairman, Sir David Clementi, came round to accept that, far from Ross’s prescription being naive, there was, “no doubt that the BBC would do well under a subscription model”.

By then a BBC licence then cost £142 compared with £72 for Amazon Prime or £60 a year for Netflix.

By 2020 the BBC was earning a fifth of its own income but, as Ross had prophesied, it had frittered away much of its global leadership. In a world in which electronic media were growing at a rate averaging 5-6% pa, the BBC was actually declining, shedding jobs as Ross had forecast, most notably in public service areas like news and science. In 2019, when the BBC committed around £2.5bn to content – most of it on old-fashioned linear broadcasting – Netflix spent $17bn, Amazon and Apple $6bn apiece, and even AT&T invested some $15bn in streaming services. A gold rush was taking place in which not every player will survive, but where the BBC should have been the trailblazer.

In the autumn of 2024, in yet another £24 million cost-cutting retreat from its once dominant news role, the Corporation recalled some of its leading foreign correspondents and shed 130 more members of its news ­division.

The BBC once has global status. It was never inevitable that US corporations would drive it to the margins. It is doing that all by itself.

In 2020 the government almost abandoned criminal sanctions for non-payment of the licence fee, and in 2024 it proposed that criminal sanctions might be abandoned at the next charter renewal. If so, with evasion already estaimated at 11%, decriminalisation might cost the BBC almost 20% of its total income. Yet the existing sanctions are hard to justify. Each year more than 120,000 people clog up the courts charged with licence fee evasion and a handful go to prison. These tend to be the most vulnerable people in society and account for a third of all female criminal convictions. The BBC is externalising its own costs, obliging the criminal justice system to pick up the tab and, in England and Wales, consuming 10% of magistrates court capacity. Hardly a public service.

Some two decades after Ross warned the BBC needed to be bold or would go into decline, his ideas had become mainstream. A series of editorial scandals had demonstrated that BBC journalism was far from ‘gold standard’ as BBC supporters claimed, and in November 2025, with the threat of a multibillion dollar libel suit by Donald Trump hanging over the BBC, Ross again urged (in The Times) that ‘we no longer need the BBC in its current form. I say this with a heavy heart since I owe my career and four happy decades to it and still feel a fierce if misplaced loyalty. But like typewriters, coal-fired engines and fax machines the BBC is of another age.’

‘Most of the BBC’s output – Strictly, Traitors, Gladiators, the cooking, travel, property and quiz shows, the sitcoms, most of the popular dramas – the programmes used to justify its reach, and thus the licence fee, were so far from distinctive that, given half a chance, most would be snapped up by competitors… The only functions left for a BBC truly in the public interest are the World Service — soft power for Britain which successive governments have shortsightedly mistreated — and some music, science, arts and radio (including local radio), along with other material the market provides only fitfully and whose subsidies should be open to competition.’

BBC Soapbox, Daily Politics, 2 April 2014

More controversially, Ross posed the question in his Times article of whether it was any longer realistic to believe that a single institution could be universally accepted as a neutral voice.

Before the age of social media (perhaps antisocial media might be a more appropriate term) there was always a noisy democracy, but it was relatively easy to get agreement on fundamentals. Much less so now. The US provides an intense example of disharmony with extreme political partisanship and where half of all citizens say the legacy media ‘intentionally’ mislead. Equally worrying is how this extends beyond philosophical outlook. Questions of scientific fact compete with pre-Enlightenment ways of thinking. Some 37% of Americans tell routine Gallop polls that the earth was created in seven days, while 25% of US adults are ‘solidly sceptical’ of global warming and (according to different criteria and different survey) some 15–30% act out ‘meaningful vaccine-sceptical behaviour’. We are not yet quite so seriously fractured here in the UK and in Europe but even so, when impartiality depends on which perspective one starts from, the BBC will increasingly struggle not to alienate large sections of the population.

Which is the best defence of the Enlightenment. Should we seek to preserve a single institutuion, one voice that speaks for all above the tumult? Or is there a case for public subsidy to be shared with others like ITN, Channels 4 and 5 or wherever nuance and open dialogue can win a wider audience? Perhaps the question should not be how to save the BBC but how to enrich the ecology of honest journalism?