As the BBC’s manager for weather forecasts on TV 40 years ago, I introduced the weather symbols still in use on BBC screens and negotiated the first financial contract with the Met Office. No doubt the contractual relationship of the BBC and the Met Office has raised its head again because the licence fee settlement comes round every five years. Last time, in 2010, the Guardian published my comments on how commercialism has damaged weather-forecasting on the BBC, referring to an earlier time when no money changed hands and both parties respected the other’s sense of public service responsibility.
Previously, the Met Office was a trading fund within the Ministry of Defence; today it sits within the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. The solution is straightforward. It requires a meeting of minds between the secretary of state, Sajid Javid, and the director-general of the BBC, Tony Hall. Both need to appreciate the balance of interest between the Met Office, which relies for its national standing on the publicity it gets from the BBC, while BBC audiences benefit from the best weather-forecasting in the world. To monetise such a balance is nigh on impossible, although economists will try. The fact is that each party needs the other. Each has a huge interest in providing the best public service it can and each should accept that it pays its own costs.
Of course, there will be occasions when new investment will warrant a review of this balance, but a guiding principle of mutuality is surely in the national interest. For the BBC not to have shortlisted the Met Office among its preferred future providers indicates a broken relationship. The public is entitled to have a proper explanation derived, in the last resort, from competing tenders. Javid and Hall should bang heads together.
Hugh Sheppard
Hook, Hampshire
