The future of Public Service Broadcasting is a debate that will never ignite widespread passion, even the name hangs heavy with obligation. Like all those good pieces of advice that are doled out to children – eat your greens, clean your teeth and tidy your room – public service television has always been associated with patrician attitudes and finger-waving rectitude.

This week, a new government advisory panel on public service broadcasting has been announced and a group of grandees have been brought together to deliberate on the future of radio and television. For many casual onlookers, including much of the print media it has already been reduced to a single issue, the politics of the licence fee. Will it be scrapped or won’t it? The problem with always returning to this riddle is that it sidelines so many other important issues.

I am both a supporter and a beneficiary of public service television, having worked for over 20 years as a senior executive at Channel 4 and presenting a noisy radio show on BBC Scotland. There is much to preserve, much to defend and much to be deeply concerned about, as market forces and new digital media floods our lives.

A million university dissertations have already been written about what constitutes public service broadcasting (PSB). One of the most familiar starting points is how the concept should be defined – is it by genres, such as documentary, the arts and news and current affairs; or by purpose with shows that enlighten, inform or change our attitudes to wider social issues, or is it by market forces, the types of television that a commercial company would not make if it doesn’t generate profit in the international rights market.

All of these ways of thinking about PSB are back in play and will test the experts as they set out to map the future. One of the big elephants clearly visible in the room will be how British broadcasting reacts to the power and popularity of streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime? Another issue is the potential privatisation of Channel 4 and what that might mean for Jon Snow and Channel 4 News. And another pressing issue is to how to protect EPG prominence, the requirements that give public broadcasters privileged buttons on our remote-control sets.

All of this is wrapped in the biggest enigma of all – what does the current Conservative Party and their policy mavericks think about television. For a variety of reasons to do with free-market ideology and settling old scores, some expressly hate the BBC.

You will not be surprised to hear that the chairman of the forthcoming PSB review is a former Downing Street director of communications, Sir Robbie Gibb, who in an earlier life was also in charge of BBC Westminster, the news and current affairs hub based in Millbank near Parliament. His brother The Right Honourable Nicholas Gibb, is England’s Minister of State for School Standards who has unusually survived since the premiership of David Cameron. It is these relationships that survive even in the digital era. Like sinews, they hold together the backbone of the British state, that define and periodically refines public broadcasting. It would be wrong to say that Scotland is entirely missing from the review although it will not be a prominent issue. We will have to take what we get. At least one member of the panel is a Scot, the redoubtable John Hardie, a former CEO and Editor-in-Chief at ITN, who still has the unmistakable glottal stops of a Glasgow accent. Hardie, joined ITN in 2009 from Disney, where he was executive vice-president and managing director of Walt Disney Television across Europe, Middle East, and Africa. His curriculum vitae makes impressive reading for a boy who was educated at Colston Secondary School in Springburn, but he has not lived in Scotland since he graduated from Glasgow University and joined Proctor and Gamble and is not immediately familiar with the politics of home.

John has a great track record in challenging established practices. He was a trailblazer for encouraging women in senior management and instituted a parent-friendly regime at ITN when he famously criticised television’s “macho” culture.

The advisory group has already provoked the easily aroused anger of the right-wing media service Media Guido, the newsfeed that partners the right-wing political blog Guido Fawkes. Guido has busily scoured the panel and believes it is biased in favour of the licence fee and that the BBC will escape with more reminders about impartiality.

This may be superficial thinking, what is significant about the composition of the panel, maybe even historic, is that includes at least four members from the independent production community. There’s Hardie who has made award-winning news programmes for ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5. Another panel member is Samir Shah the Chief Executive of factual producers Juniper; Sophie Turner Laing, the former CEO of super-indie the Endemol Shine Group, and Jane Turton the current Chief Executive of All3Media.

Make no mistake, this is a formidable grouping of indies individually and collectively capable of challenging a whole range of BBC shibboleths, not least the in-house production, studio ownership and long-term staff contracts that the BBC still protects as an essential part of doing business.

The privatisation of Channel 4 is back in play but so too is the way in which the BBC produces programmes. There will be many that say that the BBC news and current affair output is world class and needs to be protected at all costs, others, including many in Scotland will have a different perspective. Hardie for one has another story to tell, Channel 4 news is outsourced to his company ITN, and it is felt even within news and current affairs that there are real alternatives to the in-house battalions that currently provide news across the BBC services.

One of the most credible television journalists working in Scotland is Channel 4’s Ciaran Jenkins, who delivers stories to the UK network daily. He is not sitting in the modernist splendour of Pacific Quay but in a converted schoolhouse in Kinning Park where ITN have their small Scottish base. Jenkins brings another kind of freshness to the sector. He was raised in Merthyr Tydfil, the son of a prominent Welsh poet and anti-apartheid activist Mike Jenkins, in a family that also includes Bethan Jenkins the Plaid Cymru member of the Senedd for South West Wales. Jenkins is just one example of how independent production and outside journalistic influence can freshen and challenge a broadcaster’s output. Although, the Government’s advisory panel may include several members who will want to defend the licence fee, that does not mean they want a BBC preserved in aspic. There are many vociferous people out there who think the BBC has not done enough to change itself, and do not equate a secure funding settlement as a pre-cursor to business as usual.

What is a real missed opportunity in all of this is that Scotland will be a sideshow, barely given scrutiny and expected simply to fit in with what is decided for London. Precious little time will be devoted to broadcasting in either Scotland or Wales, and that means that much will be missed in the process. The Scottish Government should be encouraged to run a parallel Public Services Broadcasting Panel, even although it currently has no significant powers over broadcasting legislation.

Not having access to the levers of power is a quite different thing from not having ideas, not interrogating tough questions, and not having solutions to problems before they arise.

Its time for Scotland to start imagining its own future and that includes designing a broadcast landscape fit for an extremely competitive future.