The BBC’s creative director Alan Yentob has admitted the corporation’s controversial funding deal with the government presented it with hard choices but said it was the best option available.
Yentob said nobody in the BBC would have chosen the process which led to the shotgun deal, announced by the government on Monday, which saw the BBC take on the £750m cost of free licence fees for the over-75s.
He was responding to critics such as the former acting chair and deputy chair of the BBC Trust, Diane Coyle, who described it as a “shocking deal” that would require service closures.
“Nobody would have chosen this process, this procedure,” Yentob told Radio 4’s The Media Show on Wednesday.
“It’s all very well saying we shouldn’t have accepted, then we would have had to wait a very long time and had no clarity about our future.
“I have spoken to people you talk about, [former BBC chairman] Christopher Bland and others, yes they do take umbrage at the way this was done but I believe if they sat there and had that conversation [BBC director general] Tony Hall had with the chancellor they would have seen the outcome he delivered as actually the best in the circumstances.”
Yentob disputed the suggestion that the deal would mean a 12% cut in real terms in BBC funding. Hall has suggested it would be flat or slightly up.
Asked what services would have to go as a result, Yentob said there was still much to discuss. “We need to talk about what we are going to do, we need to look forward to what services the BBC are going to offer.
“If you are saying is this the orthodoxy, no it isn’t. On the other hand it’s the job of the BBC to get the best deal it can for licence fee payers. What I’m saying is, by taking this deal now, we will be able to plan for the future. It is a better deal than we would otherwise have got.
“There are going to be hard choices … eveyone is going to have to think hard about how they create a simpler model.”
He added: “It could have been a lot worse, the uncertainty would have been a lot worse.”
Coyle described it as a “shocking” deal and said she was “horrified” by the process and the way the government “obviously imposed this on the BBC”.
“I think this is likely to mean real term cuts on a scale that will mean service closures,” she said.
“There has been a real term cut of 20% over the last five years [at the BBC]. Even a 10% real term cut over the next five years would stretch existing services so thin that quality would start to go.
“It would be better [to cut services] than spreading existing services so thinly that quality starts to go down.”
Yentob said: “The BBC and the BBC executive and the director general and the trust for that matter made a decision based on what they believed was in the best interest of licence fee payers.”
Asked again about cuts, he said: “We shall see about that. The debate is not over.”
