In the battle over the future of the BBC, which can at times feel like a civil war, the economists are often seen as the Roundheads arguing for change against the Cavaliers confessing undying loyalty to the institution itself, whatever the cost. Last week, those at the top of the BBC presented themselves as a new(ish) model of Cromwellian efficiency.
With Driving Efficiency at the BBC, director general Tony Hall was claiming to be a direct descendant of that other hard-headed leader, John Birt, who used the same language of competition to cut costs and salvage the licence fee. And like Birt, he appears to be happy to leave the battle for hearts and minds to others. Or at least to do so at this stage of the war.
A 50-page report presented by the BBC’s managing director of finance and operations, Anne Bulford, outlined cost cuts which, when added together since the start of the current BBC charter in 2007, have achieved annual savings of £1.1bn. The bulk of them have come from shrewd property decisions (hello £200m from the sale of Television Centre at White City) rather than job cuts – although staff numbers have apparently fallen 12% to 18,500 in the past seven years.
With £400m more to find to meet obligations under the last licence fee settlement, the £1.5bn annual savings projected for 2016/17 represent an impressive percentage of the £3.2bn a year the BBC has to play with. Or, looked at through the lens of some parliamentary rightwingers who see the BBC as the most inefficient of bureaucracies, simply proof that there was a lot of fat to cut.
With BBC critics typically alighting on the numbers of dreaded “managers”, the report trumpets the fact that just 9% of its spending is on “the professional support needed to run the BBC” with more than 90% spent on content. But the obvious question is whether such cuts will change the content and lead to a different kind of BBC, one that doesn’t produce the kind of shows on the kind of platforms that licence fee payers want. After announcing the decision to close BBC3 as a linear channel to make it online-only – thereby saving £50m – what else is on the block? On this question, BBC executives are largely mute.
As is often the way with the BBC, it was left to one of its most loyal and best-known footsoldiers to ask these difficult questions. But when John Humphrys opened his interview with James Purnell with “Are you going to close BBC4?” the BBC director of strategy and digital had no answer.
Which is roughly where we are with Hall’s core strategy of “compete or compare”. Under this idea, a chunk of BBC’s inhouse production arm – the bits that provide the most popular content (likely to include drama and natural history) and cost the most – will be free to go out and compete in the open market for business. But over the past few weeks we have learnt that parts of the BBC’s output that were considered not only core to its public service remit but sacrosanct – current affairs and children’s television – are being considered for the separate production company to operate outside the corporation, the “compete” bit. Commercial broadcasters are hardly falling over themselves trying to make more current affairs strands such as Panorama or children’s TV programmes.
What’s going on? When pushed Purnell said that making part of in-house production more competitive would make them “thrive” while the BBC itself could continue on its “journey to be more and more efficient”. At the point where he said it would be a “tragedy” if the BBC stopped in-house production, Humphrys offered a sort of snort-laugh.
But a three-minute slot on the Today programme is not really enough to discuss a report and a strategy which could have huge ramifications – the BBC as simply a publisher of others’ content with a production arm semi-privatised. One of the most comprehensive reports by the BBC on how it manages its money was not made the subject of a press conference or an official launch.
There are of course much bigger questions to put to senior BBC management – among them, will the licence fee survive in an age in which more and more of us watch catchup television on any screen other than the one in the living room?
Reports on savings and threats of closure are minor skirmishes in a battle that cannot start in earnest until after the election reveals which opponents the BBC will face. Until then, it can continue to play a game described by one wag as “Radio 6 Music roulette”, where senior executives offer to close a popular platform or show in the hope someone will stop them in the end.
Let’s hope someone does.
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