Welcome to this joint meeting on the future of the BBC World Service. Today, we are bringing together work from the end of the last Parliament, which was done by the International Development Committee, and the evidence sessions from the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which I chair, and the Foreign Affairs Committee, which Emily chairs, all of which has taken place over the last month or so. We have all been looking at the role of the BBC World Service and its future funding. We are joined by a buffet of different Committee members. We have four members from each Committee, or thereabouts. I know that all our members would love to have taken part if we had had a room big enough in this building to fit us all in and the time to do it. We are going to try to cover as much as we can in a limited time today. For our first panel, we are joined by Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, and Jonathan Munro, the global director and deputy CEO at BBC News. You are both very welcome. Before we begin, can I remind members to declare any relevant interests before they ask their questions? I am going to kick off the questions and I want to start with you, please, Mr Davie. Does the £32.5 million uplift awarded from the FCDO for 2025-26 mean that the World Service is now protected from having to make any savings in the next financial year?

The short answer is no. It protects the World Service from the cutting of any language service in the round. It will still mean that we have to make some savings within our overall budgets to cope with huge inflationary pressures and the other choices we have to make. We are very grateful for the money. It was very important to get. It has safeguarded the fact that every language service is preserved, which is great news. It does not mean that, in every nook and cranny, we are going to preserve every element of everything, as it were. We have to constantly look for savings.

What would the amount have been if you were to have been able to protect all your nooks and crannies?

We did not get all we asked for. We asked for over £150 million and we are now at £137 million all in. We would have wanted about £20 million more.

What are you thinking about in terms of the period for the next spending review up to 2028?

What am I thinking about? I suppose that that acts at a number of levels. One is that there are the minimum rations that we need to keep the service reach and viability at this point. My colleague, Mr Munro, might want to come in on this at some point. The minimum is to ensure that we continue with this investment. One issue that I am sure we will touch in this Committee is that one thing that is very difficult is living on a year-by-year variable budget. It is one of the good things about—dare I say—the licence fee, which is that we have a five-year timeframe. It means that we can deliver big changes and efficiencies. With the World Service, the minimum we need is that we continue the investment we have to hang on in there. We can then open up—I am sure that we will get to it—a bigger discussion, which is the money we really need to grow and invest in the service. That is a different question. My view is that that could not happen soon enough. When you say next year, there is a minimum viable investment but there is also a choice for us all, which is whether we want to grow this service and ensure its competitiveness in what is a ferociously competitive landscape, in which I fear that the jeopardy for the UK and its reputation is quite significant.

What are we talking about financially for your minimum and your optimum requests there?

Currently, we put in £260 million. The Government put in £137 million for this year. If we continue with that investment, we know what we get. We cling on. We try to keep our reach flat, and that is worth having, because it is over 400 million people and we are the most trusted service, et cetera. We are doing the work at the moment. It is a bit of a what I might call pay and play, which is that, however much you invest, you can in this market begin to think about what your ambitions are in terms of growing. I would love to see an ambitious growth plan for the World Service in which we are trying to really significantly grow the reach and impact of the service. Versus others, our efficiency rate is good. We have an investment of around £400 million and deliver a reach of 450 million. That conversion is quite straightforward. We have talked in the past about whether we could double that. I would love to see one in 10 of the world’s population getting the most trusted news service. The accretive effects for the UK would be very significant, but you are talking about a very significant increase in the budget. In my view, it would be very wise money to spend as the UK, but that is something that we are going to have to discuss and is in your hands more than mine.

To cut to the chase, are we saying that the £137 million that you got this year would be enough annually moving forward to keep everything ticking over?

It depends what you call ticking over. By the way, we have a lot of markets globally that are inflating at 30% or 40%, so I cannot make guarantees. If we continue to get a sensible inflation rate, with that kind of investment you are at what I would call the minimum viable spending. You may want to opine on this.

By all means, yes. Thank you. The short answer to your question is that stability of budgets at the current level will lead to decline in the World Service. That is for a number of reasons. The first is that other state actors are spending at an extraordinary rate and are eating our lunch, as it were. We pulled out of Lebanon relatively recently, a couple of years ago, with our Arabic radio service and the Russians moved in pretty much straightaway. The rate of spend of those state actors is eyewatering. We think that Russia and China combined are spending about £8 billion a year. As we have just discussed, we are spending about £400 million. We need to invest in order to grow. Frankly, we need to invest in order to stay still. As Tim says, we were really grateful for the FCDO’s flexibility and we had a very good engagement with it about the funding round. It is a one-year settlement. It is not enough to maintain growth in the World Service in the longer run.

Finally, when it comes to negotiation with the Government over the spending review on this, how does that then interact with your request that the responsibility for the World Service passes back to the central Government.

Members of the Committees will be aware that, until the 2010s, the Government funded the World Service in its entirety and had done for 80 years. There is absolutely a precedent for working with full Government funding but total editorial independence. I think that we would all agree that there is a red line here. Editorial independence needs to be guaranteed and baked in to the BBC, without political interference. The benefits of the World Service are benefits to the UK, not just to the BBC, though of course there are big benefits to BBC audiences. Our view is that full return to Government spending will allow the World Service to have a stable budget over time. It will allow us to invest and grow, adapt our strategic priorities and deliver real value for the taxpayer, as well as the licence fee payer.

I expect that my colleague, John Whittingdale, will want to ask you a few questions about this later. Q7                Laura Kyrke-Smith: Mr Munro, given the resource pressures that we are discussing, can you explain how the World Service decides on the allocation of the funding across your different services, regions and programmes?

Yes, by all means. It is a fluid allocation. It is not set in stone. We move money around from time to time. We have just, for example, started in the last few days an emergency radio service for Syria. Assad fell on Sunday morning UK time. By Friday morning, we had a radio service for eight hours a day on medium wave. Tomorrow it also goes on to FM. That requires the movement of money and therefore there is a flexibility around the way we allocate our expenditure. Broadly speaking, we are looking at a matrix of factors. Reach is key. How many millions of people are we reaching per service? The value for reach is tagged. We know how much each pound returns in terms of reach per service. The platforms are more or less expensive depending on which platform you are talking about. Television is an expensive medium to operate in. It requires a lot of technical infrastructure, transmission infrastructure, studios, et cetera. Digital is, relatively speaking, much cheaper. Some parts of the world have a real maturity about their digital penetration. People can get digital media pretty easily in some parts of the world. In other parts of world, it is in its infancy and not moving very fast. Into that mix, you add tricky situations where digital maturity appears to be relatively well established, but conflict or instability breaks out and it is no longer the case. Gaza is a really good case in point. Nobody is sitting in the rubble of Gaza on a smartphone waiting for a data package. That is just not the way that they are ingesting news right now. We move money around according to all those priorities. There are some parts of the World Service portfolio that will always be big beasts of expenditure because they are big beasts of reach. That would apply, for example, to World Service English, the thing that probably is the most high-profile, best-known product that we make.

There is another factor we would look at within that. It is multi‑variable. It is not like profit and loss. Reach is one of the biggest variables. There is also this idea of democratic deficit. Where is a service going to add most value? That often aligns with the UK’s security interests. We are not a vehicle of Government in that way, but it is appropriate that we are looking at where there is a shortage of trusted information and market failures of that nature. That shapes our thinking in terms of how we deploy and what the most valuable reach is for the World Service. The conversation I am having is not just about chasing reach at all costs but the right reach. Q8                Laura Kyrke-Smith: Reach is significant but there is also incredible diversity within those audiences that you are serving. Do you think that your resources are currently distributed effectively in a way that meets those very diverse needs of the audience?

That is a very fair question. They are distributed as effectively as they can be on the resource base, subject to the flexibility we just discussed. That is important. To take a recent example, we redistributed the way we spend money on audiences in Afghanistan because we could not stay in Kabul any longer. It is just not possible. One of our priorities now is reaching girls and young women who do not have an education in Afghanistan. We make specific output for them in the Afghan languages. That is based in London for safety and resilience reasons. That is a cost we did not have three or four years ago. It is important for all of us not to get too locked into patterns of expenditure but to remain fleet of foot. None of us knows what the world will look like in a few years from now. As I just mentioned in response to a previous question, we have a variable rate of competition from, for example, the Russians, Chinese and Iranians. We need to react to that, because audiences of need are absolutely on the radar screens of those capital cities to try to get their version of news, which, frankly, we would recognise more as propaganda, into those markets. Our job is to be there for those audiences. Q9                Laura Kyrke-Smith: Perhaps with that competition point in mind, what could the World Service do better in terms of its allocations to be competitive?

Do you mean allocating existing money? Laura Kyrke-Smith: Yes, with what you have.

We look all the time at whether we are allocating funds correctly. You may remember that we had an injection of cash in 2016-17 for an expansion programme, which was funded by the Foreign Office. At that time, we increased the number of languages that we were providing. We sprung up new languages, for example several new languages in west Africa, covering populations in Nigeria. All that money that comes into the World Service is calibrated carefully against what the need of the moment is. It is very important that that is seen in the context of the moment we are dealing with, as opposed to necessarily a long-term commitment, though, as we have mentioned, we are not planning on closing any languages at all in the foreseeable future. I think that that is right, given the portfolio of languages we have.

There is a particular tension here. We have done a hell of a lot of work on what I would call core efficiency. I would welcome anyone from the Committees to go and visit any World Service output or station and say, “Can we cut fat?” We have done a lot of work on that in the BBC, so I do not think that you are looking there. We have these debates in the round. There are some peculiarly tough things going on here. That is not me special pleading. It is just the market. You are transitioning to digital. Therefore, you have this complexity of linear services. Welcome to my life in the wider job. You have a traditional media organisation and significant audiences in linear. Meanwhile, if you are not building new digital services you have a problem. The second thing is rampant inflation plus competitive forces driving up pricing of distribution slots. There is quite a nexus of things going on. The final thing is that, as we and many people round this table know, on closing services, we do not do a lot of bad work. We may have things we can improve but, if you close off a service, that is going to hurt. Moving money around is probably quite hard for us in that regard. That is the tension. We are looking at it quite objectively against our criteria to do that.

Can I ask a follow-up question? Diving into the detail of you moving money to Syria, as you said, where did that money come from? Also, as you are seeing more and more conflicts—there are 120 armed conflicts in the world at the moment—are you finding that you are putting more money into that space?

We retain a relatively small flex fund for emergency response. Broadly speaking, it is funding about three or four things at the moment. It is funding a daily bulletin for Gaza, another one for Sudan and now the Syria operation. It funded the Afghan education programme I mentioned a few moments ago. We will move money around within the portfolio. That happens quite regularly, where we will decide that we are going to prioritise a service, subject matter or location around the world in order to deliver against a certain need and take some savings in other areas. For example, we have had a strategy in the last few years of offshoring a lot of our production. That is because you are closer to the market, but it is actually also a cheaper way of operating. For example, all our Asian language services are now based out of Bangkok, whereas some of them were previously based in London. That is a better business model. It helps us to release some of our expenditure. That is good housekeeping as well. That is absolutely not anything more than we should be doing to make sure that public money, whether it is licence fee or Government money, goes further. That gives us a little bit of a reservoir to react as quickly as we can to the crises that emerge.

Moving on to longer-term funding, which you have touched on, the budget was additional funding for 2025-26. Can you expand on long-term plans in progress to secure the World Service’s financial future?

Members of the Committees will be aware that we have the royal charter coming up in just over a couple of years’ time. Between now and then, the debate we are very keen to engage in is the level and extent of central Government funding for all of the World Service operations. As we have just mentioned, in round figures that is about a £400 million turnover business, or thereabouts. As you have just heard, we increased our share from Foreign Office funding in the negotiations with the new Government just before the Chancellor’s Budget in October. We would like to see two things being true. First, we would like to see the share of the existing funding envelope being increasingly weighted towards central Government and decreasingly a licence fee issue. Secondly, we would like to move ultimately to a full funding of the World Service by the Government. That clearly needs some protection written into the constitutional governance of that around editorial independence, which we discussed earlier, and about the way that that settlement would behave in the years ahead relevant to cost prices inflation, global inflation, et cetera. We are open to a constructive discussion with Government about whether that is a charter moment or a pre‑charter moment, but we have signalled to Government that we think that that is the right way forward. We would like to accelerate that as quickly as we reasonably can. We all recognise, however, that the Government have significant demands on their spending. That is the story we report on our news bulletins all the time. Therefore, we go into that with a very strong case, but, equally, we believe that we are going in with a powerful incentive for the UK to be a major player in global media at a time when most other major players—not all, but most—are pushing misinformation and disinformation to the audiences we are trying to reach. That is a really critical point, not just for the BBC but for the UK as a whole.

I think that we will come back to that subject later. You have touched on this a little bit. In terms of the additional funding that you have, is the current focus really on sustaining the World Service’s current activities, or are there plans for future development programming? Are you able to look at what extra money would mean?

With any business, you need to find a little bit of margin at the top end of a budget to invest in things that are new, because stagnation is obviously the route to decline. The big issue that we are grappling with as a corporation, and it is certainly true within the World Service, is the role that AI might play in future provision of services. It is perfectly possible, for example, to envisage language services being launched in languages we do not currently cover. We currently have 42 language services. It is perfectly possible to envisage that growing quite significantly over time and with technology allowing us to spread our journalism more prolifically around parts of the world where that is not readily available, other than in English. We are certainly looking at that proactively now. I do not think that that is a big leap moment. We want to tread relatively carefully. The reputation of the BBC is sacrosanct and we need to make sure that, when we move into that field, we are learning lessons as we go along, adapting our model and taking adapted and learnt lessons into the next market and then the next one. That might take some considerable time, but I suspect that, if we are sitting here in, let us say, five years from now, we will have a rather different portfolio. That will be largely generated on the investment we need to make now.

What we currently have as a funding settlement, directly to your question, gives us some flexibility in the margins to begin digital transition, do some work and bring that, but you cannot close off the linear services, because they are the things that often, in many markets, are underpinning our reach. I talked about digital transition and it relates to the Chair’s opening remarks. The first thing is that we have a number of challenges. We have a skinny funding settlement. We are very grateful for the money, but we have a skinny funding settlement based on the competitive environment. This is all tiny versus what we are seeing from the other actors in this space. The US is a multiple. China is multiple. We see Turkey coming in. Going to the Chair’s initial questions, that enables us to hang on in there with language services, but it is essentially a managed decline or, at very best, a cling-on strategy. That is something and we can do it. There are two issues in the long term. One is the principle of funding and the second is the quantum. On the principle of funding, even at the current level, I do not believe that it is correct. For most of our history, it was not the case that the UK licence fee payer, through the licence fee, should be paying for language services and the English World Service internationally. That is wrong. The second thing is the quantum. That is a strategic discussion, which we cannot resolve in a month. It is really important for us to decide, as the UK, what our strategic plan is. Is it one of growth, extended influence and competitiveness? To do that, again, to the top of the discussion, will be a major increment in terms of what we are talking about. It is exciting. If we got to 800 million people, that might mean doubling the World Service budget. Could we get even further than that? We know that it is one of the most important things for the UK. It is one of the shining beacons of what we are, but it also does good. That growth plan is what I really would like to see happen, which is beyond the short term, “Can we make sure we have a couple of years at this level of funding to survive?”

I think that we have sympathy with your frustration at the difficulty of planning in the long term with the uncertainty around your funding, but why do you think that transferring funding responsibility from the licence fee payer to the Government is going to give you any more certainty? Surely at the moment it is likely that Government and the competing pressures from other Departments are going to give you even less certainty.

That is a very fair challenge. The key rationale for asking for that transfer is not about the certainty of time period. That is not what it is trying to address. It is trying to address a fairness issue and what the licence fee can deliver. Also, in the other side of the budget of the licence fee, we are under enormous pressure. As you know, we have had 30% cut out since the last decade. We are working extremely hard against multi-billion/trillion-dollar entities to preserve public service broadcasting and deliver that value in the UK. I take the point on whatever the charter length is. We will not jump the gun on that, but that gives some certainty. It also puts it into a budget that is equally problematic in terms of its ability to drive revenue and preserve public service broadcasting. This is a UK strategic question. To your point, the Government, and others, then can decide on what length of settlement and what level of certainty. The Government are perfectly able to develop long-term projects, infrastructure and other things. We have to make a strategic call about the world service and that can be done within general taxation.

You have said that it is a matter of principle, not just quantum, and it is a principle I have some sympathy with. Given the pressures on Government expenditure, you are asking for the Foreign Office budget to take on a huge additional cost. Have you had any reason to think that the Government might be sympathetic to this request?

Sympathetic, yes. You made an assumption there. This is a discussion with the Foreign Office, but we have three Committees assembled here. This is a strategic question for the UK. Just like we are properly interrogated around the efficiency of our spend, we are loaded witnesses but we would say that a proper investment in the World Service makes the cut. I have got the point and it is incredibly tough in terms of the framework in which public spending is working. We are deeply understanding of that. If you are in my position and you look at the evidence set we have, I would challenge everyone to say, “Are we spending money that efficiently across all our investments internationally?” That is an appropriate challenge for the World Service. The other thing is that I believe we have data in terms of our return on investment and efficiency that is pretty compelling. Judge us on our numbers.

Thank you, Tim, for that email I got via someone about the Wallace women and what to do with them. Thank you for that. I wanted to come back. You talked about being a shining beacon to these ideas of independence and trust. I know that the initials BBC throughout a lot of the globe are associated with the truth. I know my cousins from the 1980s in Bangladesh used to say, “We listen to the BBC when we want the truth”. For them, that is the World Service. You have this reputation as the most accurate independent news provider on the planet. What do you think the biggest threats are to your ability to maintain that? You have mentioned AI and funding. There is a whole load of things.

There are huge threats.

Let me start by expanding a little bit on the point I made earlier about Russia and China. These are state actors and there is a massive story going on right now about how the UK should handle China. These are state actors that are aggressive in their desire to dominate the global media landscape. By being present in a country, they automatically increase their trust. We manage surveys that look at trust scores. If you look at the trust scores, for example, in Egypt, where there is a lot of money being spent from Beijing and Moscow, the trust scores for those state organisations have gone up simply because they are more present than they used to be. That is an existential threat to those of us who believe trust should be based on impartial news and value-based journalism, not on propaganda. The marketplace is getting extremely congested and it is getting congested with people who do not share our values. This is an opportunity, we believe, in the discussion coming up around the charter and the funding, for the UK to make a statement about this. The BBC is the most trusted brand in the world, as you have mentioned in your question. We are also the most recognised UK export, way ahead of others that you might think would be very well recognised, and indeed they are, such as the Premier League and the royal family. Actually, the BBC is more recognised than anything else this country exports. To build out on that, there is an opportunity here for the UK to be the world leader, even more than we are already, in truth, impartial reporting and enriching the knowledge of communities around the world. That takes you to international security, stability, democracy and all those values that we are lucky enough to have in this country. If the UK strategically believes that that is a lever it wants to pull, there is only one way of pulling that lever and that is to invest in the World Service. There is no other game in town for the UK to play with. Given that we are in a leading position, for now, in this space, we think that this is a critical time to have this discussion, as we run up to the next couple of years of funding.

I have mixed news. If you want cheering up before Christmas, our trust ratings actually improved this year, slightly, in terms of a Reuters study. We are the most trusted. As a nation, we have a public service broadcaster with the most trusted news service in the world. That is something. The trouble is, around us, as my colleague was saying, you are seeing trust ratings for RT and Chinese services grow as they take over more slots. The other thing is that we are facing a tsunami of bad actors, disinformation and fakery. The threats are overwhelming. It is cognitive warfare, as it has been called, as people try to win the hearts and minds of populations and people around the world. Our current resources are impressive on their investment, but they need to be up-weighted, as per the earlier discussions. We are also doing work on things that we may want to touch on, such as AI for good—dare I say—disinformation, and all those issues. This going to be absolutely ferocious over the next few years. The final thing is, editorially, we also have to hold firm and make sure we talk about impartiality and deliver it. That is in a more weaponised world, where everyone is trying to ascribe intent to the BBC: that it is a vehicle of Government or a cabal of this. We have to make sure that the people we recruit and take on have the strength and resilience—and I thank them all—to hold their nerve. Currently, 300 people working for the World Service—you may have heard this—are living in exile. They have made a choice to report without fear or favour and that is the consequence. They cannot visit their families in their home nation. That is pretty sobering. The trend lines are not good, so they need support.

I was going to ask about that. With Ukraine and Gaza and the year of elections, it is the thing people turn to. I think that 40% of the globe have been to the polls this year. People such as Sarah Rainsford, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes and John Sudworth, I think, have reported eastern Europe, Asia and North America, respectively. There was a thing in the Times that they have all been ordered to concentrate on domestic work. Is that a worry? Is that a financial thing that is driving that? They have all been people that have been banned or they have had big restrictions put on in those countries they report from. They have been ejected from those countries before or they have upset those countries. You were just saying that you are seen as independent of Government, even though you are funded by them, so is that not a worry? I think that they have 70 years of experience between them.

Yes. They are wonderful journalists. They are supported by us and they are extraordinary. There is zero link between us deploying what resources we need in what location to any of their histories around being expelled. I have never heard that and that would not be something that we would even countenance. We have made some changes. We set up a Warsaw office at one point and we are saying that we want to run out of Rome. Our international provision from our UK-based news operation is utterly critical. We will have hundreds of people doing our work. We have made some choices, as we face some difficult budget situations in terms of what resources where, and we can go into each of the situations. No, there is no drawing back from international reporting in any way, shape or form. I will not go into all the individual cases, because they are brilliant journalists and we need to support them.

Lastly, when countries can switch off the internet—it happened in Bangladesh this summer—how do you get round that? That is another threat. China can stop people looking at the BBC. I think that Burundi has just banned your corporation.

Circumvention is really important. Getting around these blockages is something our technical teams work on all the time, but there are some really good news stories from around the world. We are not allowed to broadcast, transmit or upload in Iran, but we think about 13.5 million Iranians consume us on a weekly basis. That is a phenomenal audience for BBC Persian.

Is that through a VPN or something?

Yes, and through a range of different methods, many of which are illegal and we do not want to discuss in this forum, for fairly obvious reasons.

Yes, my cousins were at it this this summer.

You are right that Niger has banned us, because it did not like some reporting that we did, which was factually completely true and absolutely robust journalism. We would always rather do the story and take the consequences than not do the story. We have many times run across the wrath of regimes around the world when we have exposed wrongdoing, corruption, persecution of minorities or whatever it might be. Our job is to keep doing that. As managers, our job internally is to manage the fallout from that and look after our staff, but we are not going to pull back from any of that journalism.

I am supposed to be going to Bangladesh next year. It would be good to see the office.

You would be very welcome. Please let us know when you are in town and you would be very welcome.

Impartiality is as important for the World Service as it is for the BBC. I do not underestimate the difficulty you face in reporting on very complex and controversial situations such as the situation with Israel-Gaza. You will be aware that there have been a huge number of complaints about the coverage by BBC Arabic, with individual reporters being identified as having tweeted in support of Hamas and something like two-thirds of complaints upheld. Are you satisfied with the impartiality of BBC Arabic? Will you do more to make sure that it is maintained?

I might get Jonathan to talk in terms of governance of the services. In my career, this has been the toughest to negotiate as a conflict. We have thousands of strong voices on either side. With regard to social media activity, I will just take that. Jonathan, you may want to talk more broadly about the service. There is no situation in which we do not follow up, put it through process and make decisions. I am not going to go through all the outcomes of the disciplinary process, but we act every time we see social media in this circumstance. I think that we are managing a very difficult circumstance pretty well. There have been circumstances where we have had to take tough disciplinary action

You are quite right about the polarising nature of this conflict. It has now gone on for well over a year, as we all know and we have been reporting. I do not recognise the picture that has been painted by some of our critics about BBC Arabic. In fact, we have had a significant number of complaints on both sides of this conflict, as I am sure you will appreciate. Numerically, in fact, it is not far off even. I do not think that that is necessarily a gauge in its own right, but it is not an unhelpful thing to bring into the room. In terms of complaints against Arabic, members of the Committees might be familiar with the complaints process, which is overseen at the top level by an independent group called the ECU, the executive complaints unit. It has dealt with seven, or I think it might be eight now, complaints, all of which have come from one source, against BBC Arabic. None of those complaints has been upheld. While it is important for us always to be open to critique—and we genuinely are; we have had several meetings with internal and external stakeholders on both sides of the divide on this story, and we will continue to engage with them when helpful—any shorthand summary that says that there have been lots of complaints upheld is not actually fair on Arabic. I want to say that our journalists, both on location and in London, are doing a very difficult job extremely skilfully. We would use this opportunity to ask again for the authorities in the region to allow us into Gaza so that we can report firsthand on what is happening, which is not currently possible.

To illustrate the point first, let me briefly touch on an example that some of you may have heard before but I think is worthwhile bringing to the room. That is Arabic FM in Lebanon, which I mentioned earlier in the session. We monitored its output on the day of the walkie-talkie explosions and it was essentially Moscow propaganda. It was essentially telling audiences that the route to a more stable Middle East was stronger ties between Moscow and a range of capital cities around the Middle East. It is for the Foreign Office and others to assess the dangers of that, but I think that we would all be concerned about that. Let us put it that way. Is the Government a player? Yes, but the BBC is the subject matter expert in how to deliver impartial and free journalism around the world to our audiences, with the network and the experience to do that. For reasons that we discussed in response to colleagues’ questions in the room in the last half an hour or so, we believe that that is becoming an imperative battle. “The battle for truth is on” is a nice marketing slogan, but actually it is meaningful. It means that there is a moment in our modern history now when establishing what is and is not true is the preeminent role of media organisations, so that consumers have a chance of getting to the truth. We always say that pursuing truth and enriching knowledge is our mission. “Enriching knowledge” implies to me that the knowledge that you are imparting needs to be based on facts and verifiably true. That is something we hold dear to our services. The Government, of course, have a role. All Governments in free democracies have a role. In terms of the practical application of the discipline of journalism, the Government are not the experts and I do not think would claim to be the experts. That is what the BBC has done for 100 years and we think we are in a very strong position to play a massive leading role in that.

The BBC is a unique asset to deliver exactly what you are talking about. It is all about trust. The BBC is not perfect. We do not get everything right, but look at the trust scores. If I want cheering up, I almost go anywhere in the world and talk to people on the ground about what the BBC is. We are currently investing £137 million of Government funding in this. We have to make a decision. Much as I would absolutely support the Government’s efforts in terms of fact-based sharing of facts and all the things the Government do, at the end of the day, a trusted, impartial, editorially independent organisation is how to go about this, and we have it. We are unique worldwide. We are the most trusted news brand in the world. That is huge.

There are always things we can learn. In fact, one of my meetings after we have finished in this session is with the outgoing editor-in-chief of Deutsche Welle, which is the nearest thing the German state has to the BBC. It is not quite the same model, but all models are different around the world. It has language services in many territories and we work co-operatively with them and others. For example, there are a couple of parts of the world where it has been banned operationally from working where we share some material, in the public interest, with Deutsche Welle. We meet with others, such as Voice of America and the French, as you mentioned, from time to time to update ourselves on techniques and political threats and dangers. It is a co-operative environment. There is something about the footprint of most of these organisations that is quite historic. It is where those countries have, in some cases, colonial history, for example. We are much stronger, for example, in south Asia and west Africa than some other organisations and the same is true the other way around. We do not feel that we are in direct competition with those organisations whose journalism we respect and we regard as being values-based. The competition is those organisations that are not imparting journalism of any particular quality. It is, however, important for us to say that we think that it is a big selling point for the UK and the BBC that the BBC is the biggest operator in the world right now. That might not last very long at the current rate of spend from other places, but that is an important point.

I think that it is fair to say that we are probably in the lead on this at the moment. The conversations that I have with colleagues from other organisations tend to start with, “What is the BBC currently doing or thinking of doing?” Of course, that does not mean to say that we do not have things to learn. I had a fascinating meeting relatively recently with colleagues from Voice of America. They are political appointees and the cast list of senior leaders at Voice of America may well change now that there has been a change of power in Washington, but I would expect that that conversation will continue to be cordial and constructive. I do not believe that there is anyone else in the world that is technically more advanced or more dedicated to this than we are, but of course that is a constructive conversation.

There are two things I would say. Your question is extremely well put and the answer is that we could probably dig even deeper into it, but it is quite a small cast list. It is Voice of America and some other public service broadcasters. The collaboration between us is very significant. We are talking about how we do fact-checking provenance using AI. Without sounding too much like the BBC waving the flag here, I think most of them look to the BBC for advice. We are seen as world leaders in this, particularly on things such as editorial guidelines. I was in Kenya. I went to a community station and they had the BBC editorial guidelines on the wall and said, “We will go as close to this…” The BBC is beyond individuals. It is actually robust process and editorial guidelines. That holds up and is copied around the world a lot. The state actors are more subtle than this. They are not trying to do hard news coverage. They are often just doing so-called softer programming with a message. It is a long-term game. The threats are not just who is running the news story. They are who they feel culturally connected to. It is slightly deeper than just a head-on confrontation on who is running the news service. This is profound and it lasts over decades, in terms of what is being built against us here.

That was an interesting final point you mentioned there in terms of culturally competent and culturally aware. You mentioned countries that perhaps might be a challenge. There are conflicts there. How does the World Service work on the humanitarian project or humanitarian issues in areas where there are conflicts? You mentioned Afghanistan earlier. Also, taking into account your last comments on cultural understanding in those particular areas, how would that come across?

That is a massive point. On the cultural understanding point, as I mentioned earlier, we have spent a lot of energy in the last few years moving our services and production, and therefore our recruitment, into the markets that they serve. I was in Nigeria relatively recently and we have five language services across Nigeria based jointly in Lagos and Abuja. We have done that split very deliberately, because the cultures of those two cities are very different from each other and the language services that emanate from those two cities cannot be brought into one place without losing the cultural connection that you rightly identify as being a priority. On the humanitarian point, we do a lot of news that is not bombs, bullets and conflict. We do a lot of news, for example, in health and education. While I was in Nigeria, I was looking at a team’s work in education. They had found a volunteer who was educating school children around Maiduguri where there has been, as you know, a very unhappy history of school kidnapping. The story that we told there was of a volunteer teacher who never went to a classroom, because they feel vulnerable in a classroom, but she would just put the message out that she was going to be in a village hall on Tuesday morning and do a pop‑up class for children. It was a wonderful story of human endeavour. Health is very important. Again in the same part of the world, we did a significant amount of coverage about the recent outbreak of Mpox and the vaccination programme that was then rolled out by the United Nations and other organisations. I would also point to our colleagues in BBC Media Action, which is part of the BBC. It is not structurally part of the World Service, but we work very closely with them. I was meeting with them only yesterday about philanthropic entrepreneurs in Zambia, for example, who are engaged in an education programme for underprivileged children in that part of the world and who use local radio outreach. We work closely with them on sharing content from around the continent, which is valuable education for those children. There are loads of such examples. We are very happy to do a brief about Media Action at any time, but those are the sorts of things that we are very conscious are in our editorial agenda.

Directly to your question and to build on what Jonathan is saying, 23% of adults in Afghanistan come to our services. That is pretty extraordinary. We are also providing, through Dars, the TV and radio series. It is educative. It is absolutely giving a chance for girls often barred from formal education to learn. We are playing an incredible role there. I am very proud of the teams.

How do you monitor the impact of that against the value of the funding that you received? How do you monitor whether it is actually reaching the people that it needs to reach?

It may be slightly counterintuitive, but it is possible to do audience surveys even in places like Afghanistan. The costs of Dars are not particularly significant in the grand scheme of the budget. The public value of it is one of the things I am proudest of: that the BBC can educate girls in a country that is so difficult. We talk about impartiality a lot. Impartiality is not balance. We do not need to be balanced about whether it is a good or bad thing for girls to have education in Afghanistan. It is plainly one of the biggest outrages in the world that half the population is banned not just from education but from civilised, open society in that country. We have a role to play in that. We do not use those education programs to deliver political messages. We use them to deliver what they should, which is education, learning maths and learning about the world around them, climate or whatever. We are about to open up a similar programme for BBC Arabic with lessons for children, particularly girls, who find getting education in places such as Yemen very challenging and difficult. That comes out of the funding envelope of BBC Arabic. It is not a significant marginal cost and I believe that it is incredible value for money.

How do you monitor that against censorship in some countries? The work in Afghanistan is incredibly important. The current regime might restrict women and girls from access to these particular programmes? What actual work is taking place to try to challenge that?

Censorship is something we come across in lots of parts of the world, usually through blocking of our signals or downloads. That is increasingly sophisticated, depending on where you are in the world. I mentioned earlier about getting around that through technical means. In terms of Dars, we deliver it through a number of different methods, including partners that distribute for us in Afghanistan. Partner broadcasters are critical to us in all markets. We have lots of partner broadcasters. We make a product that lasts X number of minutes. It forms part of the schedule of a broadcaster that has a mixed offer for their audiences. That is absolutely crucial. We are very conscious that, in some parts of the world—I mentioned Iran earlier—it is a very serious offence to access some parts of the media. The families of our Persian colleagues are regularly interrogated and that is something that is very troubling. In North Korea, if you are caught consuming western media, that is a deeply serious moment. Ultimately, that gives us a choice about whether to continue with those services, but we believe that the provision of the free media is a right that people have. It is a human right. That is why we are not balanced about it. We are not impartial about whether people have the right to know. What they do with that knowledge is a matter for them, but the right to know is something that is deeply grounded in what the BBC stands for.

There are a couple of things here. One is that, when we are in extreme situations, we are, frankly, trying to find ways of getting into a country, often through different ways, even the dark web, which I never thought I would approve as director general, going into Russia. We try to preserve access in those extreme scenarios. There are other scenarios where democracy is under threat but there is the depth of brand connection to the BBC and we find that a lot of regimes do not want to be seen to be throwing out the BBC, if I can be blunt. They want to engage with us. At that point, that gets interesting as well, in terms of making sure we hold our editorial ground while delivering that. I cannot speak highly enough of the people on the ground in some of these pressured environments trying to navigate that course. You have seen that we are broadly holding our reach through all of this, but the threats of censorship are growing weekly.

My final question is in relation to the Dars programme. Does this rely on the Malala foundation funding continuing, or would you be able to cost this?

In terms of philanthropic funding, no, all those contributions are extremely valuable and very helpful to us, but we are committed to Dars. It is such an important part of what we do.

Mr Davie, you have talked about the unfairness of having to choose between cutting domestic services for viewers in the UK and cutting the World Service. Can you explain the context in which you are having to make these decisions?

The context is that my primary job is to make sure public service broadcasting in the UK is sustained. To do that, the underpinnings of the BBC are relatively simple, which is, “Do most households think they get good value from the £169 a year?” As we do our research—obviously we have incredibly important roles informing, educating and entertaining—it comes down to whether most households get that value. I do not need to tell you that the market has changed so fundamentally in terms of the last five years. The obvious front, for starters, is that we no longer have fixed distribution; we have infinite distribution. Therefore, you can choose anything of an evening. In that context, I have to ensure, with rapid inflation within pockets of what I am delivering, such as some of our programming, that we can sustain delivering 30-plus dramas a year. We are not trying to be the biggest, but we are trying to make sure we can secure “Wolf Hall”; we can secure “Gavin and Stacey” for Christmas day. That is important, as well as providing the incredible news services we do, but the whole thing works together as a package for your licence fee. The pressures on that budget, as others around this table know, are very significant, based on market inflation and all the other factors around us. We act as a group and move money around. Often, it can be very unpopular if we move money around within that frame. We have had a situation where we have had, as I said earlier, 30% of our money taken in a decade. At least we are now at inflation. That enables us to make some choices within that framework. My job is simply to make choices against that to make sure that the public get not only what is unique about the BBC, but they get enough of it and it is relevant to them. There is no point in doing it in an echo chamber or a small section of society. If you are in my job, you are totally passionate about universality. That is the game, not just making high-end stuff. It is also about making sure the whole of society is in the game. It is simple. Steam is coming off our budget. We have taken nearly 2,000 people out of the BBC. We have cut the budgets. We cannot be in a position where anyone has protected status. There is a particular problem here, and do not misread me. It is not because I do not care desperately about the World Service. If you are someone in Perth or Plymouth and you have paid your licence fee, you get less direct value from those language services, particularly. Also, the vast majority of World Service English is coming from international consumption. That is the problem.

How close have you come to telling the Government that you might have to close one or more of the World Service language services?

We get to that point in the conversation in most funding rounds.

How likely is it that there will be further cuts to domestic BBC services and domestic programming to protect the licence fee contribution to the World Service?

It depends what you mean by cuts. I am not being clever‑clever. We now have an inflation settlement. In order to provide the things that I talked about, whether it is drama or news, we have to build digital services. I am having to invest to make sure iPlayer or BBC Sounds is competitive. You will hear things get cut as we move money around the BBC. The cuts are not solely about the Government funding. They are also us as a leadership team saying. “If the BBC is going to maintain relevance, you cannot just keep all the money sitting in every single pot. You have to move it around”. It is the same as any enterprise, so we will continue to move money around the BBC. Currently, we have moved about £700 million, I think, and we are going to move about £1 billion of our spending to be more effective. That is often not popular, by the way, but we are actually delivering good numbers at the BBC in the UK. What I cannot do—I would love to do it—is put hundreds of millions into the World Service. I think that is a smart investment; I just struggle to see that as a fair investment as part of the licence fee.

What would you do with the money that you would keep if the Government took back funding the World Service?

That is a good question. First, the BBC is woefully underfunded per se. If you look at the long-term future of the BBC, you are going to need serious investment in terms of programming, digital infrastructure and all those things to ensure the BBC’s health for the next period. We are going to need that and some to ensure there is investment, because so much has been taken off the BBC. That is the first thing I would say. That is a matter for Government in the round, in terms of how you spend that money and what you do with that saving

Mr Munro, you told Broadcast magazine that the reason that you were closing “HARDtalk” at the end of this financial year was because nobody listened to it. Where did you get that idea from?

First of all, I did not say that.

You have been misquoted by Broadcast magazine.

Let me tell you what I said and the reason we are closing “HARDtalk”. “HARDtalk” is a production of the News channel. It is made as a television programme. It is made as three episodes a week that are 30 minutes or thereabouts each. The audio version of that runs on World Service English, but the costs of that reside in the News channel. For reasons that we have been discussing during this session, with pressures on budgets, the News channel had some tough decisions to take. One feature of news channels globally—this is not a BBC issue; it is an international issue with rolling news channels—particularly when you have a very busy news period, as we have been living through this year, is that audiences switch away from news channels when news channels run pre-recorded programmes and move away from live news.

Although, of course, it goes out on the News channel at 12.30 in the morning and 4.30 in the morning, so there may not be a large number of people watching it at that stage in any event.

That is simulcast around the world, so it is peak time elsewhere.

Across the world, it is on the BBC World News channel four times a week and three times a day, where it gets a 70 million audience. On the English language World Service radio, it is on three times a day, three days a week, and gets 100 million people listening.

These are big numbers.

They are big numbers.

You are right: they are big numbers. We will ensure that the long-form interview, if you like, if 25 to 30 minutes counts as a long-form interview compared to most news interviews that you hear on other output, is alive and well at the BBC. We do lots of long-form interviews, not all of them under the “HARDtalk” brand. We interviewed Angela Merkel pretty recently. It was on BBC Two. We just did the incoming Secretary General of NATO in long form, which was on the News channel and on “Newsnight”. The long‑form interview is something we feel very strongly about, but the commitment to doing such a heavy schedule of them was a financial commitment the News channel could no longer sustain.

It is right, is it not, that the long-form interview that the BBC undertakes under “HARDtalk” means that people such as Sudanese warlords, Serbian Presidents or all kinds of people who would not normally be expected to be asked a lot of difficult questions over a long period get asked those questions by the BBC on a regular basis? Do you not think that, when your boss says that the BBC should be a shining beacon of the UK that does good, “HARDtalk” does exactly that?

Long-form interviews do that and will do that. Whether it is under that brand or not is a matter of how we identify the programme, brand the programme, which budget it comes out of and so on. As far as the World Service is concerned, we will continue to ensure that long-form interviews are very much part of our schedule.

How regularly are we going to hear long-form interviews being done on the World Service if you get rid of “HARDtalk” at the end of this financial year?

Let me make two points on that.

There will not be a regular programme that will be doing it, will there?

Yes. We have not done a full schedule rebuild for the post‑“HARDtalk” period. We are in a consultation with our staff right now, which members of the Committees will be aware is an important obligation that we have with our staff. We have not come forward with a specific schedule proposal.

You might replace “HARDtalk” with another programme that will come out regularly, as often as this, three times a week and three times a day. You will have a programme going out as regularly as that doing long-form interviews, following consultation with your staff.

There is not a huge amount to gain by putting a programme in that costs the same as the one we have just closed down, so we are going to make some changes.

Holding world leaders to account is not going to be done as often by the BBC because of cuts.

No, I do not think that that is fair. Look at the range of interviews on “HARDtalk”. By the way, I should just say that “HARDtalk” is an excellent product. This is not about the quality of the product or the quality of the editorial line in the interview.

No, it is because you said that no one listened to it.

As I have just explained, I did not actually say that. Nobody is suggesting that world leaders, who are rightly held to account by the BBC and others, will not have that experience on the BBC. They will. As I have just explained, in the example of Merkel and Mark Rutte, we do that all the time.

They were one-offs. They were not from a programme that will be going out regularly.

No, but we cleared schedule time on BBC Two to run them in peak time, so that bigger audiences could see them. Of course, they also ran across our global output. There are also a lot of interviews that we do, for example, for Radio 4, which do not find airtime on the World Service, because the schedule is built differently, and we are going to change that. Relatively recently, former Member of the House, Sir Nick Clegg, who is a very important player in social media, as you will all be aware, did “Political Thinking with Nick Robinson”. That is an interview of international significance, in my view, because Facebook is clearly an international platform, but it is not getting on the World Service at the moment.

I understand what you are saying, but these are domestic-facing programmes that you are going to put out on the World Service. What I am asking—I will not ask it again, but I will ask it one more time—is whether there will be, in the future, a programme on the World Service that will be international, facing outwards and holding world leaders to account in the way that “HARDtalk” does.

There will be a programme, or maybe programmes, in the plural—who knows?—that hold opinion-formers, politicians, decision-makers, industry leaders and entrepreneurs to account.

I wonder if I could ask your boss this. Do you not think that it is a sad day for the BBC today for you to be losing perhaps the best news presenter and interviewer that the BBC has ever had, and that Mishal Husain is leaving the BBC in order to go to Bloomberg to do a regular programme, internationally, that will be doing long-form interviews?

I do not want to comment on the specific. I am very sorry to see Mishal go.

I declare my interest as a member of the National Union of Journalists and as a former presenter of BBC Radio 4’s “Week in Westminster”. It is radio that I would like to ask you about, and particularly the closure of BBC Arabic and BBC Persian radio services. Mr Munro, you talked about people living in the rubble of Gaza right now and not worrying about access to a data package, but they do have access to radio services. When we had Fiona Crack of the World Service before our Committee, we asked her about the closure of the Arabic radio service, and she said that, with hindsight, “It does not feel like a good decision”. How can you make sure that you make good decisions in the future on this kind of subject?

Thank you for raising that, because, first of all, I agree with Fiona, you will not be surprised to hear. I do not think that that decision has stood the test of time. That is not to say that the decision was taken with anything other than good motives at the time against extreme financial pressures. That savings round amounted to about £28.5 million of annual savings taken out of the World Service in 2022, so some difficult decisions had to be taken. As I have just explained in previous answers, we have sprung up radio services for Syria and some radio output for Gaza and Sudan, because we were lacking the continuing platform that Arabic radio gave us. To answer your question about avoiding future decisions of that sort, I would make two points. The first is that we have clearly learnt a lesson about the withdrawal from linear services where digital maturity is not as established as we would like it to be. It is important that we are honest about that and not to try to rewrite history. We would be in a different position if digital maturity was as established as we hoped it would be, but we are not, and that is clear. The second point is that part of the funding ask, to be blunt, is that we are not in this dilemma again. £28.5 million out of the budget, as it then was nearly three years ago, was a significant percentage that we had to pull out, because it was the beginning of the licence freeze period. The whole of the BBC—not just the World Service, but everybody—was asked to reduce their operating expenditure. Across the BBC, a lot of very difficult decisions were made, and it is the nature of any change programme that, if you bring in dozens of changes, some of them are going to be things that you, with hindsight, do not think stood the test of time, and that is firmly where I am on Arabic radio.

One of the consequences of really squeezing this budget so hard is this area that we talked about earlier, which is simply linear transition. If you are left behind in digital, the future looks bleak if you cannot sustain your linear. Sometimes, frankly, all media organisations are struggling with just the pace of change and getting that balance right. With the hindsight of events, we reflect on that. As my colleagues say, with hindsight, keeping that linear service going for longer would have been ideal.

Director General, was the FCDO made aware beforehand of that decision to withdraw radio services from BBC Arabic?

I was not in the management team at the time. It is our normal practice to inform, but it is not an FCDO decision. It does not require a FCDO sign-off, because it is not the closure of a language service as such. It is the movement from one platform to another. My general approach to Government is not to take them by surprise with these decisions, because that is not fair. They are a major funder of the World Service. We would like them to be a bigger funder of the World Service, as we just discussed. I was not in the room for that particular discussion.

I would just have to look back. My instinct is that we tend to be appropriately sharing the implications of financial settlements, so we usually try to do that.

Notwithstanding your editorial independence, it would be interesting if you could write to us to let us know whether there was any feedback from the Government about anticipation about that decision and the impact of it, and whether there was any decision within Government to say, “You have consulted us. We think it is a bad idea” or, “Go ahead. We think it is a borderline one”.

We will clarify that for you.

First of all, just to be clear, I was not in those discussions, so I do not speak from personal knowledge, and we are happy to clarify that for the Committee when we have looked into that in more detail. We would tend to inform the Government about the projected reach loss of closing a platform in terms of how many hundreds of thousands or millions of people would come off the reach targets. It is not, strictly speaking, a consultation, because we were not closing a whole language down. I do not know what the reaction was from the Government at that time, but we can certainly come back to you with a summary of that.

We should just clarify to you exactly where we are on that. Normally, it would be exactly as has been outlined. It would mainly be about reach. It would be very difficult to forecast who takes frequencies. That risk has got even more real since that time.

Thank you. If you could clarify that with us, that would be helpful. Before we conclude, is there anything that you briefly wanted to add or say?

No. We have put our points across.

In which case, Mr Davie, we will be seeing you again via just the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, alongside Samir Shah, the chair, in February, so we look forward to seeing you again then. Thank you both for your time today. We are going to pause very briefly to allow the Government witnesses to come forward and Emily to take the chair.   Witnesses: Baroness Chapman of Darlington, Patricia Seex, Stephanie Peacock and Helen Martin. [Emily Thornberry took the Chair]

Welcome back to the joint session of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee and the International Development Committee on the future of the BBC World Service. Stating the obvious, the fact that there are three Select Committees wanting to talk about the future of the World Service shows just how much of a priority elected Members of Parliament put on this particular issue. For our second panel today, we have Ministers and officials from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Thank you very much for coming. Can you introduce yourselves?

I am Helen Martin. I am the deputy director in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport with responsibility for the BBC.

I am Stephanie Peacock I am the media Minister and the Member of Parliament for Barnsley South.

I am Jenny Chapman, Minister at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office with responsibility for soft power and the World Service.

I am Patricia Seex, the deputy director at the FCDO with responsibility for the World Service.

If I just begin with perhaps a more general question, how does the World Service feed into the Government’s idea about soft power? Is it a priority area?

It absolutely is a huge part of our soft power across the world, and I am sure that Baroness Chapman can speak to some of the specifics on that. Certainly, from my Department’s perspective, the World Service has a huge part to play in broadcasting, across the world to 58 countries and in 42 languages[1], the voice of Great Britain and our values, and has done for many years previously.

That is quite an important starting point, to ask ourselves, “Why are we doing this?” We are investing significant amounts of money in this, and the Government are about to launch a soft power council, which we can talk more about if that is of interest. How I think about soft power is that it is what enables you to achieve your objectives without using force and without just paying people to do what you want them to do. You are using the assets that we have, which can be Kew Gardens, the Premier League or the royal family. I am from the north-east and would add snooker, brass bands and darts—whatever we have. The World Service is such a critical part of how we convey our values around the world, which are about truth, access to information and democracy. It is about using soft power, but not the World Service specifically, to enable us to get what we want. What do we want? We want improvements on climate change. We want economic growth for our country. We want security. I would argue that the World Service has a great deal to contribute to those things in tackling misinformation and disinformation and providing reliable sources of information. 75% of people who listen to the World Service live in places where you do not have good access to free media. The World Service has a great deal to offer in terms of our ability to use soft power. Where the UK probably has not been doing all that it can in recent years is that we have not been particularly strategic about how we think about and deploy soft power. I was very pleased to see that the Committees are so interested in this. It is probably long overdue, and parliamentarians really ought to have had their say and a proper chew over, if you like, of what we are doing in soft power, so I am looking forward to your report.

I wondered if you could briefly tell us what the FCDO’s role on the soft power council is.

We are just bringing it together. We have 25 to 30 people who have agreed to take part. It is quite broad-ranging. It looks at culture. We have film and TV, and there is sport. Rule of law is very important and sometimes overlooked, so we have people who are going to be quite influential in their fields, but also who are really super connectors and can bring other people along with them. The idea of it is that it advises Government. It is a joint initiative between DCMS and FCDO.

I am so sorry to interrupt you, but what is the FCDO’s role in the soft power council?

David Lammy and Lisa Nandy will be jointly chairing the soft power council. We want to make sure that we harness the insights that those organisations and individuals have in advising us in our strategic decision-making. If you are heading up an organisation, whether you want it or not, one of your key drivers is around soft power. Hopefully, if you are a Premier League club, you are not thinking about soft power; you are thinking about keeping your business going and winning your next match. Whether you like it or not, you are part of team UK and you are promoting the United Kingdom around the world, so it matters that the head of the Premier League understands the global context, I would say. At the FCDO, it is about making sure that that happens in the right way and that, as a country, we are as strategic and co-ordinated as appropriate when we are thinking about where we want to be active in soft power in the future.

Steph Peacock, given what Baroness Chapman has said, is there anything extra that you would like to say about DCMS’s role on the soft power council?

It will be jointly chaired between the two Departments. The Foreign Secretary said in front of your Committee that it is about getting greater bang for our buck. We have a huge amount of soft power, and a lot of that does fall into our Department with the creative sectors, the sports sectors and so on. It is about greater co-ordination and bringing those different organisations and those huge assets together to really sell team GB and Great Britain as a whole.

What is going to be the role of the BBC World Service on the soft power council?

BBC Studios is going to be on the soft power council itself. You could argue that there is a good argument for the World Service being on the soft power council, but, then again, we need to make sure that the World Service is protected in terms of its independence. At this stage, we feel that we will not have the World Service on the council itself, because, in a sense, the World Service is plugged in very well. I think that they should be there, because they would be quite good at informing others about the global context, given that they are as aware as anybody. The BBC is certainly going to be there, which is appropriate at the moment.

It is difficult to get it exactly right. I understand that.

We mentioned the World Service there. In advancing the UK’s foreign policy interests in relation to the World Service, how might the BBC deploy influence and advance foreign policy using the World Service?

We have to be quite careful about this, because I probably would not use the term “deploy” when it comes to the World Service in this way. The World Service is so trusted internationally, as I am sure Tim Davie and Jonathan Munro have explained, and one of the reasons for that is that they can say truthfully that they are independent of Government. It is important that we do not do things, either deliberately or inadvertently, that could imply that they are an arm of the state or that they are doing things as directed by Government. The way I think about this is that I feel like it is my right to go to the BBC and say, “I want you to do XYZ in these places”, and they have every right to say, “No”, and to disagree and to fight back. That is healthy and the right way to go about it. We do not think of this, in terms of the World Service, as being about deployment of an asset into a particular country.

Might it help in any area of UK foreign policy in relation to trade or international investment, or is the idea to keep those at arm’s length?

It is really quite important that we keep them distinct. Does it help in terms of investment, or people’s desire to travel or desire to study here, that they get a good impression of the UK and that our values that are expressed through the World Service are positive? It does. Those things happen, but they happen because the World Service is a trusted brand, and it is that trust that reflects well on the UK, rather than us trying to say to the World Service, “We would really like you to do some more activity that would help develop business opportunities in South Africa”, or something like that. That would be a mistake. We get the benefit, because the World Service is such a trusted brand and is associated with the UK.

Beyond the soft power, are there any other benefits of the World Service?

There are huge humanitarian benefits, without a doubt. The work that they have done in Ukraine and identifying Russian war dead, and them being the most reliable and accurate source of the number of Russian casualties, is hugely important. In a sense, that helps our security in the long run. The reason that other countries are investing so heavily in media and information is because it matters now, more than it ever has in history, what a population thinks, how they are inclined to vote and whether they protest.

How will our funding levels affect our ability to play a stronger role in that field?

I think we get incredible value for money, if I am honest. The investment that we make in our World Service, compared to what other nations are spending, and the status and trust that the World Service has compared to the investment that we make, is very good value for money.

While I understand that tension, do you not think that not having the BBC at the table in these soft power summits means that they lose their voice in a way in which they can promote UK soft power? Given what you have rightly said—that investment into that by other countries means that they have influence—do we not underestimate, therefore, the BBC’s influence? On that last point, we have just been told by Tim Davie that, if funding stays at the current levels, the BBC World Service will go into managed decline, which would not be a good thing for the UK. What do you think about that?

It would be a very bad thing for the UK. The work that the FCDO is doing and, later, the charter review, will be about making sure that the funding position is stabilised for the long term, so that we do not have this annual round of panic and having to make quick decisions. That is not good for Government, it is not fair on the taxpayer, and it is certainly not good for the BBC or the World Service. On whether they should be at the table, let us see. There are good arguments either way. At the moment, we have come down on having BBC Studios there, and having the BBC at the table in that guise. I do not have a particularly firm view about it. If the Committee has an opinion about that, I would be really interested to hear what that is. The reason that they are not is that it has been made in order to not compromise, or allow others to say that they have been compromised. That is the right place for now, but these things are never fixed, and we will continue to be open to suggestions on it.

I was very concerned at the time that that decision was made. Everyone knows that we were not in Government at that point. Most people, looking at that and bearing in mind what has happened since, do wonder now whether that was, in fact, the right choice to make. One of the good things about the World Service is its agility. It is constantly changing. If it was not like that, it would still be broadcasting in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean in English, calling itself the Empire Service. In the 1940s, it had a Danish service. It changes all the time. It is allowed to make mistakes. We need to tread incredibly carefully. The experience of what has happened with the Arabic service means that, in future, we need to be thinking, “Yes, but what if the situation changes on the ground? What if there is more instability? What if the projections of digital growth do not turn out to be as we expect for whatever reason?” It has forced us to ask many more questions and perhaps to challenge the World Service when they want to have those conversations next time.

I do not think that there is one. What they do is so special, and the quality is so good. Yes, there are other news providers. CNN scores quite highly on trust as well, but that is because they have been doing it for so long and the standards are so high, and they have that independence from Government. That gives them a special role. Whatever else we do around funding and all that stuff, that is what needs to be protected, because you can easily lose your leading position. The BBC World Service has no God-given right to have that position and, if that should be lost, that damages them, but it damages us as a country as well.

I have not come across situations where we have had an issue where the World Service has withdrawn entirely. It is important to remember that the Arabic service was just radio, and digital and TV have continued. They have managed, with their crisis operation, to reach 700,000 people in Gaza every week. It is pretty impressive. It is an important diplomatic tool in that sense. I guess what you are asking is, “Does withdrawing from a country cause a diplomatic issue?” Since I have been in role, I am not aware that we have had that as a problem. Our concern is more about making sure that people who are subject to misinformation or who lack the ability to get accurate broadcast news are able to get it. We spend our ODA money on this. It is important. It is an SDG goal that people have access to accurate information and freedom of information. It really is important. Those are the things that worry me when we are discussing perhaps standing down a platform.

In 2015, the Government partially reversed the decision taken in 2010, when the Foreign Office gave an additional top-up to the licence fee funding, with the specific suggestion that it should be used to broadcast language services in particular areas of the world where it was felt that we needed to do more. You have now given an additional sum of money, and you have also just said that it is fine for you to suggest to the BBC World Service things that they might do, although it is their right to come back and oppose that. As part of the new funding, have you said to the BBC World Service, “We are going to give you more money, and this is where we think you should devote it?” Has the BBC agreed to that?

What we have said on the additional £32 million was that it must maintain the 42 languages and—this is important—that it must maintain the crisis response[2]. In Syria, it has already been proved to have been essential. That is what we have said at this stage.

Had the BBC said to you that, unless they had that top-up, they would not?

It is not the case that they make a threat and we respond that. We need to get to a point where there is maturity of engagement and we are quite open. We could see for ourselves that the funding predicament was such that, had that additional resource not been available, they would have to make some pretty unpalatable decisions. We provided that additional funding because we wanted to make sure that that was going to be avoided.

Your request to them that they maintain 42 language services and the crisis provision is a fairly basic one. Do you see it as appropriate and possible that the Foreign Office may come back in due course and say, “We would like you to devote a bit more to this part of the world because we see that that is where the need is greater”?

The Foreign Office ought to do that, if that is what we think is needed. That is entirely fair, but we need to have a relationship where we can explain why that is, the BBC can explain its constraints and we can have a conversation about it. My strong sense from the BBC, especially given the predicament that it faced in recent years, if I can put it that way, is that it has remained so committed to providing this service in the way that it has and to the standard that it has. It should not be a fractious relationship. It should be one where, yes, there are tensions and I might want them to do things that they do not want to. I am not a broadcaster. I do not necessarily know how accurate the projections are for digital take-up in a particular country. They will know better than me. There needs to be an exchange of opinion in that way, and that is the kind of relationship that we are seeking to build with the BBC on this.

How often do you have conversations with the World Service?

We have to have our annual review of their objectives, priorities and targets, which we did a few weeks ago, but if that is all you do, that is pretty poor. Jonathan Munro has been to the Foreign Office to see me recently. I went to Broadcasting House to meet some of the production staff and to see the studios. It should not be an informal situation. It must be formalised, but we can do a bit better than just having a session once a year in front of a spreadsheet.

Thank you both. Baroness Chapman, there was a lot of love for you at our Committee—just the CMS people—when we met on 19 November for the cash injection that you got. I wanted to ask, in a time of black holes, straitened circumstances and an iron Chancellor, what arguments you made to get this extra boost of £32.6 million.

The argument makes itself. I do know our Chancellor, and she is not a soft touch by any means. You can see that by some of the tough decisions that she has had to make. The World Service contributes to our objectives as a country. For me, one is the security priority, but also informing people around climate and climate change. We have seen some really good examples of what they have been able to do. There was something in Indonesia, where they have been able to promote recycling and retrieving plastics from the sea, because of information that they were able to share. It was not a campaign. It was journalism, where they were highlighting some work that had been going on there. It supports our objectives as a country, and the Treasury could see that. It could see the good value for money that it provides. It could see the crisis response in Gaza. It could see what is going on in Sudan, and in Afghanistan in terms of educating women and girls. Those are whole‑Government objectives. Those are not just things that the Foreign Office cares about. These are things that the whole Government have a stake in.

Stephanie Peacock, what CMS arguments were advanced to get this extra cash?

The shorter-term settlement, as Baroness Chapman has outlined, was a negotiation between the Foreign Office and the Treasury. We work closely with the Treasury and the Foreign Office, and we meet regularly with the BBC as a whole. In terms of the short to medium term, we will have the second spending review. The longer-term funding of the World Service is obviously something that we will want to explore as part of the charter review. Although that does not come until 2027, it is a long process, and we will begin that in the coming weeks and months. As part of the charter review, we really want to have that national conversation about the BBC in its entirety—what it is for and who it serves—and the World Service is a huge part of that discussion.

I would like to ask you about the long term. Baroness Chapman, you told the Lords last month that “it was a mistake to put that burden”, for the World Service, “entirely on the licence fee payer”, and you said you were open to future funding models. Do you accept that the current hybrid funding model is unsustainable?

I love it when people take notice of what you say in the Lords. I am quite aware that this would be massively putting my tanks on Steph’s lawn, so Minister Peacock needs to talk about the long-term model. Most people—even those who were involved in the decision to put the burden entirely on the licence fee payer—probably quite quickly came to recognise that that really was not the wisest thing that could have happened, looking at John. It quickly became obvious that there was going to be some additional funding needed. We are in a situation now where around a third of the funding comes from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and a large chunk of that is ODA.

Given that the money does come from the FCDO rather than from CMS, do you accept that the current hybrid model is unsustainable?

I am trying not to get hung up on funding and where the money comes from. It is all taxpayers’ money. What matters to me is that we get a high-quality product and good value for money, and that we do it as efficiently as we can. Is the way that we do it at the moment, where you have some things ring-fenced from grants and from the licence fee payer, and all the inefficiencies that you can create inadvertently, the best way of doing it? I am interested in what the Committee has to say about that. In terms of the charter review and how the World Service fits in the bigger questions about the licence fee and all of those things, it is definitely not my question to answer.

I can see that the brilliantly advised Minister Peacock wants to step in right now.

I am happy to step in. I do not want to misquote the Secretary of State, but I believe she was in front of the Committee last week and used words around “increasingly unsustainable”. We all recognise that, over the last 10 to 15 years, the BBC has had a very challenging funding situation. Depending on what estimate you look at, it is a 30% to 40% cut, as was quoted in the previous session. The position that we all want to get to for the World Service, as well as for the BBC as a whole, is a sustainable funding model. That is a really important question, and it is not an easy question in the rapidly developing media landscape, of course. In terms of the charter review, as she said, no option is off the table in terms of funding, and we will have an opportunity to debate that further in the House, both later today and, indeed, tomorrow in Westminster Hall. The charter review is a long process. It involves stakeholders. This Committee will play a big role, as will Parliament and the public. We want that to be a genuine national conversation. Lisa Nandy, the Secretary of State, has talked about a settlement not just for the next 10 years but for the next 50 years, and that is a really important viewpoint.

I totally get the point about the charter review, but this is specifically an inquiry into World Service funding. That is why I was directing it at Baroness Chapman. My own Chair may now have a question on longer-term funding as well.

Minister Peacock, are you working on the assumption that the funding of the BBC World Service will come in under the charter review?

In terms of how we look at the funding of the World Service, we are assuming that its longer-term funding will be considered as part of the charter review. However, I do appreciate—and this point has been put to me by the World Service and others—that that is, ultimately, two and a half years away. In terms of the short-to-medium-term funding, that will be addressed by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with the Treasury, as part of the second spending review. We are not delaying everything until the charter review, but in terms of the point of principle of whether it should be Government‑funded, that has to be considered as part of the charter review.

What is the plan in the meantime to stop the BBC World Service getting to a point where it has to turn around to you and say that they are going to have to cut one of their language services?

That would be a conversation that we would have between the Foreign Office and the Treasury. Of course, we do have the second spending review coming up.

That is the situation that we are trying to get away from, is it not? We want to get to one where we do not have to have these annual rounds, so that the World Service can plan more effectively. I like what the World Service is doing in terms of moving its production capacity in country, because it is better value for money. You are going to get a more country-specific product by doing it that way. That is a really good thing. That takes planning. It is moving people and buildings. It is something that needs to be done with a long‑term focus. At the moment, in some places, it is difficult for the World Service to do that as well as it could. The situation that you are describing is one that we want to get away from. We are probably stuck there for a little while longer, but what we have achieved with the spending review that we have just gone through should give us all confidence that the Government are committed to making sure that the World Service is sustainable. Cutting language services can be the right decision. What we do not want to see is language services that we really treasure and we want to see continue having to be lost because of funding decisions. We would like to avoid that if at all possible, but that does not mean that the World Service cannot change. It ought to be able to be flexible. It ought to be able to deprioritise and prioritise new parts of the world. That has been how it has operated for 90-odd years. Am I saying that we will not see any language cuts? I am not saying that, but what we need to do is make sure that, when those decisions are made, they are made for the right reasons.

Licence fee payers are also taxpayers. Do licence fee payers know that they are funding the World Service? Do you think that they mind? When we had Tim Davie before us a moment ago, he was talking about, “Any money that you spend on World Service is money that you are not spending on domestic telly, radio or digital”. Do licence fee payers in the UK care? Are they interested in that? Do they mind?

This is an evidence-free answer. I lived in Darlington and represented it for 10 years, and I can tell honestly tell you that no one ever mentioned the World Service to me once. Do they care and do they mind? I honestly do not know if they mind. Awareness is probably not all that great, if I am honest. They are probably not that pleased about paying the licence fee at all. I do not know, but to put the entire burden of this on to the licence fee payer has been proven to have not been the wisest and most secure decision to have made. How licence fee payers feel about that is probably a question for people who do lots of research into this, and that is not the Foreign Office.

Is it a question that will be taken into consideration at the point of the charter review?

Yes. It is hard to tell. If I was to ask my constituents in Barnsley if they listen to the World Service, I would suspect that they would say not. However, if I was to talk to them about some of the motivators and reasons behind the World Service that this Committee has been exploring, and the huge contribution that it makes to the security of the UK, they absolutely would be supportive of that. That is really important. This is an issue that needs to be explored at the charter review. We cannot escape the fact that this is the model that we have currently have and have inherited from the previous Government, and the charter review gives us an opportunity to explore these challenges.

Baroness Chapman, on the contribution of the World Service to humanitarian impact, does the World Service’s reporting on conflict zones affect the local population’s access to lifesaving information and aid, such as in Gaza and Sudan?

It does, without a doubt. There are so many examples of this. One that has really stuck with me was when the BBC was able to detect changes in the colour of the sea around Gaza, and was one of the first people to say, “We think that there is a major contamination issue here”, and to pre-empt the polio situation. There are some very real, very hard examples of where access to information and where the use of the tools that the BBC has have led to real-world consequences.

Does the World Service collaborate with other international organisations and NGOs to support humanitarian efforts?

I do not know. That is more of an operational question, unless Patricia knows. I am afraid that I do not know. I would expect that they would work with NGOs in country as appropriate, but I do not know any examples of it.

Have the cuts to the World Service language services impacted its ability to reach those in crisis in countries such as those that we have talked of?

When we look at the Arabic radio decision, if we had known then what we know now, would that decision have been made? No, it would not, because people’s access to radio became more and more important. The answer to your question, straightforwardly, is yes.

Collaboratively, then, the value of the World Service to humanitarian aid in the world is valued by the FCDO.

It very much is.

I had better start by declaring my interest as one of the founders of Radio for a Better World. Baroness Chapman, in what ways does the World Service help amplify the voices of marginalised or vulnerable communities during humanitarian crises?

There are examples where it will report on killings and on incidents that have not been covered by the state media where they are. Sometimes, that has a very real consequence for those journalists, and the World Service has been able to make sure that crimes get investigated because they have highlighted them. In the future, we may well find that, if it has not happened already, some of the investigative work that is done by journalists in country is later used to assist with investigations of a more criminal nature. Sometimes, they are the only people present doing that kind of work, so it is vital.

How does the World Service engage with local communities to ensure that coverage is relevant and beneficial to them—for example, through its educational content?

Again, I would be overstepping the limits of my knowledge on this. It is more of an operational question. When you are talking about the work that it does on education, that is done necessarily with knowledge and insight from the local population. Otherwise, it would not be relevant, effective or impactful. The fact that you have 23% of people in Afghanistan accessing the service tells you that the World Service is getting that right and managing to get appropriate content delivered in a way that seems to be relevant to the community that they seek to target.

If I can probe with one more question, what mechanisms are in place for local audiences to provide feedback on programming? How is this feedback used to shape future content?

There is a complaints procedure, if that is what you mean. I do not know the detail of that.

I can come in on that. It speaks to feedback, but, in terms of complaints, there is of course the BBC First service. If you complain to the BBC, you can then escalate it to the executive complaints unit. The detail was run through in your previous session with the BBC, so audiences who are not happy can certainly feed back in that way.

How about if they are happy?

That is a very good question and one that I will ask the BBC and write to the Committee about.

Thank you, It would be nice to know.

Before we move on, some of the questions were difficult for the Baroness to be able to answer, and I just wondered if Patricia Seex is able to help with answers to any of the questions.

We could write with some good examples in response to your questions.

That would be really helpful. Thank you so much

We heard earlier from the BBC that, when a crisis happens, it has to move money around within its budgets to be able to cover some of that. We have just announced a £15 million package for Syria, and I recognise that that is for urgent humanitarian need. We have heard about the value of information in terms of accessing that and tackling disinformation. Is there ever a discussion within these aid packages about potentially extra emergency funding for the World Service when it has having to move its money around to deal with different conflicts?

I can imagine a situation where there would need to be. We have not faced that yet, because the World Service keeps this crisis fund there specifically. Unfortunately, it has always needed it. It is not a conversation that we have had to have as yet. Given just how important access to information is, now more than ever, I can anticipate a situation where we would need to have that conversation, but we are not in that position at the moment.

The funding agreement for 2025-26 shifts the responsibility for that crisis pop-up fund from the licence fee to us, substantially.

We raised a question earlier, and I appreciate that Baroness Chapman was not there at the time, and neither was Mr Davie. Just going back to the decisions around the withdrawal of services that we referred to earlier—Patricia, you may be able to answer these, since you might have been there at the time—is there a protocol around how the FCDO is engaged in any of the discussions around withdrawal of services? I know that the BBC is going to write to us in terms of that, but can you remember, Patricia, in that example in the past, what happened in terms of FCDO engagement? That would be helpful.

I was not there at the time.

The agreement is that, if they are to withdraw a whole language service, we would be able to direct or have purchase on that. In terms of platform, that is seen as an operational decision for the BBC. With regard to Arabic, it was the radio that they withdrew, not a whole language service. As far as this formal agreement goes, the Government, as I understand, would not have been able to direct the BBC to not make that choice. Would a different Government or a different set of circumstances have been able to use stronger arguments or show more engagement and got to a different outcome? I do not know, but were the BBC to make that decision again today, the Government do not have the power to simply direct the BBC to keep that service alive, because it has not withdrawn the entire language provision.

I appreciate that some of this would be for the World Service, but, in terms of performing any long-term impact assessments of the withdrawal, is that fully a decision for the World Service or would the FCDO be pushing for that, particularly when it is taxpayers’ ODA money that is in question?

As part of our annual discussion, of which I have done only one, we look at their targets. There is a question about whether too much of it is about reach. If reach has been affected by the withdrawal of a platform, we would be able to challenge them on that and say, “What are you going to do about this?” As it happens, it would appear that reach in that area has not really fallen, because they have done the pop-up service and there has been a stronger move to digital for other people accessing the Arabic service. It is slightly more complicated than we sometimes reflect in our conversations.

We are going to move on to countering disinformation, which is something that, as the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, we have been hitting our head against a lot recently. Uma is going to lead, but there may be other questions, particularly from the Foreign Affairs team.

Hopefully, I cleared some of that with my answer to the last question. There is clarity. In terms of whether the clarity is right and whether we want the clarity to stay the same in the future, I am interested in your view. We have the power to direct the BBC to close a language or not close a language, and that kind of thing. We do not have the power to determine whether it withdraws from digital, television or radio but keeps the language there.

What I would expect, if it was happening now, is that we would be informed, absolutely. We would not have the power to direct the BBC to change its choice, but it would be absolutely legitimate and my duty to point out to the BBC any concerns that we might have or to say, “You do that, but the global context, as we see it, means that the effect will be XYZ”. That is a grey area. Do I think that that is right? I do not know yet. Ask me in another year whether the lines are in the right place.

Is one of the problems not that so much disinformation comes from hostile states? We, our allies or other countries may be being attacked through disinformation. What is the state response? What is the state defence? That is one of the questions that we are wrestling with.

Do we keep a service going, on radio in particular, in a place where we know that broadcast space is contested or competitive? We know that we are not getting much reach out of it, but we also know that, if we withdraw, there will be a Russian channel there in its place. What is the right answer to that? At the moment, we are saying to the BBC, “We judge you on reach”, so can we be surprised when the BBC makes decisions that enhance reach above other issues, or should we be saying to the BBC, “We would like you to consider these other issues as well”? That is a live question and one that, at the moment, we resolve through dialogue with the BBC. In the future, we may wish to re-appraise the set of metrics that we assess the BBC on.

What we have just seen as part of the recent spending review, where we have secured the uplift, reflected just that concern. This is something that, in fairness, the previous Government probably did not have to be as worried about in 2015, but we sure as hell ought to be worried about it now.

I just want to get to the last question, which is about perception and protecting the reputation of the World Service. I wondered if you would commit to safeguarding the World Service and, if necessary, enhancing it for the purposes of upholding democratic values and ensuring that we have resilience overseas. How important is it?

I would be very proud to say yes to that, because you can tell from the answers that I have given that I feel quite strongly about it.

I completely echo that. As we have said right from the beginning of this session, it is a huge asset to the country, not just in terms of power but the huge contribution that it makes. We have talked about all of that this afternoon—humanitarian, education, the accuracy of information, and the huge contribution that it makes to the security of this country. We all want to see it thrive and on a sustainable footing for the future.

There have been political attacks on the BBC that have been going on, and perhaps it is evidence of its power. We were looking earlier at news reports from Niger about attacks on the BBC there. One of the attacks is alleged Government interference. People will be surprised at how it is that we wrestle with this issue in the way that we have. It has damaged the reputation of the BBC overseas and audience trust. Can the Government take any steps to strengthen the standing of the World Service abroad?

I am aware of what has happened in Niger, and it is deeply regrettable. The BBC takes these issues and, of course, the safety of their journalists incredibly seriously, and they will be making sure that their team are okay. In terms of what the Government can do to protect the reputation, the biggest threat is any perception that the World Service is somehow a propaganda arm of the Government. If we start playing that game, there is no doubt that we will weaken the World Service. We need to just be mindful at all times, in every decision that we make, whether that is about funding or commentary that we might choose to offer, that we are respectful and that we value the editorial and operational independence of the World Service at all times.

Steph Peacock, do you want to add to that?

Baroness Chapman has articulated it very well and is absolutely right. We need to be respectful. We need to respect the independence and we want to see it thrive into the future.

Thank you very much. That concludes our joint session on the future of the BBC World Service. Thank you to all our witnesses for their time this afternoon. If there are any additional points and you are able to write to us, we would be very grateful if we could have those as well. [1] The witness subsequently clarified that they intended to say “the World Service has a huge part to play in broadcasting, across the world to over 100 countries and in 42 languages. [2] The witness subsequently clarified that they intended to say “£32.6 million”.