BBC World Service faces 'significant reduction' in services and jobs

Mark Thompson says cuts will hit global broadcasting service, but budget will increase when BBC takes over funding in 2014

The BBC director general, Mark Thompson, last night conceded the World Service will be forced to cut services and jobs following a government decision last month to dramatically reduce its budget.

Thompson said the global broadcasting service, which is funded by a Foreign Office grant, faced "a significant reduction in services as well as job losses". "There is no getting away from this fact," he added.

However, he pledged to increase the World Service budget from April 2014, when the BBC assumes funding responsibility for the organisation.

The World Service faces a 16% budget cut between now and 2014 – the same level as the reduction in the BBC's licence fee income in real terms over six years under the deal negotiated with the government last month. This year's £272m World Service budget has already been reduced to £261m following earlier government cuts.

"It is our intention, subject to approval from the BBC Trust, to increase investment in the World Service again and hold it at a higher level until the end of the Charter period [in 2017]," Thompson said.

In a wide-ranging speech to a Voice of the Listener and Viewer conference in London, Thompson also defended the six-year licence fee settlement hastily hammered out with government ministers in October.

Under the terms of that deal, the corporation has agreed to take on the cost of running the World Service when the current funding agreement with the Foreign Office runs out in 2014.

In the meantime it will continue to be funded directly by the government. The chancellor, George Obsorne, said in his comprehensive spending review announcement on 20 October that its Foreign Office grant would be reduced.

The BBC's director of global news, Peter Horrocks, told MPs on the foreign affairs select committee last month that "hundreds of jobs" and some foreign-language services will need to be cut at the World Service to achieve the necessary cuts.

In his first speech since the agreement was hammered out with the government in just nine days, Thompson last night said the corporation's offer to freeze the licence fee at its current level of £145.50 for six years, together with the extra cost of paying for new commitments, would lead to cuts.

"Of course, it will be difficult to deliver," he added. "We believe that advances in productivity will not yield all of the saving and that the balance will have to come from what the technocrats call 'allocative efficiencies' and what most of the public rather reasonably think of as 'cuts'."

The BBC will have to push through savings of more than £500m, a 16% cut in its income, to meet the new commitments and the cost of the freeze.

In his speech and during the question and answer session that followed, Thompson mounted a passionate defence of the decision to reach a quick settlement rather than "walk away from the table".

He said he believed the BBC would have been landed with a worse settlement if it had attempted to negotiate a new licence fee deal in 2011, as originally planned.

He claimed the BBC had effectively outmanoeuvred its critics, including commercial rivals that wanted to use the next 12 months to turn a debate over the future level of the licence fee into an argument about the size and scope of the BBC.

"For some, of course, the licence fee settlement was a nasty surprise, because they had hoped that a 2011 licence fee negotiation could have been parlayed into a root-and-branch debate about what the BBC should and shouldn't do and about whether the licence fee should exist at all," Thompson said.

He added: "I'm told that one media company has had to shelve – no doubt only temporarily – a carefully worked out 12-month anti-BBC campaign."

However, Thompson also criticised the present and previous governments for using the £145.50 annual licence fee, which generates £3.6bn a year, for other purposes and placing more responsibilities on the corporation.

"This licence fee settlement should mark a high watermark of this whole approach," Thompson said, adding that he was confident the BBC would not be asked to take on extra costs.

"This is acknowledged in the agreement that sets out clearly that there will be no further calls on the licence fee, no new commitments."


By:- James Robinson
Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/nov/25/mark-thompson-bbc-world-service