The Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, posted this message on his blog, after the details of the BBC funding deal had been announced:


Sorting out DCMS's budget settlement was an extraordinarily gruelling process, all the more so because we ended up negotiating the BBC's next licence fee settlement as part of it. The latter incidentally must be the fastest negotiation in the Corporation's 83 year history - and if I looked tired yesterday it was because the talks went on right through Monday night.

Thank goodness I had been shadowing my brief in opposition for three years and given serious thought as to what any settlement needed to contain. In the end the deal we got was tough but fair. Tough because the BBC, like everyone, is going to have to make demanding efficiency savings. But fair because it allows them to continue to make the great programmes that we all love and licence fee payers won’t have to pay any extra for the privilege.

The assurances I have secured on magazines, local and online activities will also give some comfort to the BBC's commercial rivals that the licence fee will not be used to blast them out of the water.
 


With respect to the overall settlement for DCMS I have mixed emotions. No one comes into this job wanting to cut budgets and I feel incredibly angry about our economic inheritance. I have undoubtedly had the worst inheritance of any Culture Secretary in the short history of my job. Although I have tried hard to protect our cultural and sporting core, I am very disappointed that to do so we had to withdraw funding from both Creative Partnerships and CABE. I hope they both manage to continue with alternative funding - they deserve to.


 
I am relieved that relative to other departments DCMS did well. I have been able to limit the cuts to our core cultural and sporting organisations to 15% over 4 years, which after inflation will amount to a cash cut of 1-2% every year. When you add in the changes to the lottery we have made since May, combined exchequer and lottery funding to art is down even less at 12% - painful, but much less than many other budgets including for example the police.

Overall heritage funding is down by just 3% and sport funding actually goes up 2%. On top of which our financial commitment to a safe and successful 2012 Olympics remains on track.
 
In the course of our negotiations I said to the Treasury that any decisions we took needed to pass the "grandchildren" test. Would we be able to look our grandchildren in the eye in the years ahead and say that in nightmarish circumstances we made the right decisions? Today I feel a little more confident that we will.