Welcome to the first public meeting of the new Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. This morning we are going to hear about the work of the BBC World Service, which is funded mainly by the BBC licence fee, with some additional funds from the FCDO. We want to find out whether there is a more sustainable way to fund the World Service in future. We are carrying out this work in parallel with our friends in the Foreign Affairs Committee, and we should of course acknowledge the fact that this work builds on an inquiry started by the International Development Committee in the last Parliament. For our first panel we are joined by Fiona Crack, who is the joint controller of the World Service languages and deputy global director for BBC News, and by Jon Zilkha, who is the controller of World Service English at the BBC World Service. You are both very welcome; thank you so much for joining us. Before we begin, I should note that the BBC hosted the Committee at New Broadcasting House last week, and I have to ask whether any Members have any interests to declare.

I am chair of the BBC APPG.

I am a former presenter of BBC Radio 4’s “Week in Westminster” and a graduate of the Cardiff Centre for Journalism Studies.

I was a lowly employee at the BBC in the 1990s.

I am a member of the BBC APPG.

This question is for both witnesses, but I am looking at you, Jon, so I will start with you. Many people who pay the BBC licence fee will associate the World Service with radio broadcasts, but in real life what does the World Service actually look like in 2024?

The World Service is a major contributor to BBC News’s overall reach globally. BBC News reaches 414 million people a week around the world, and the World Service delivers 320 million of those. The network that I am responsible for, World Service English, delivers 84 million listeners weekly around the world. The World Service makes a major contribution to the fact that BBC News is the most trusted international news provider. Our own research shows us that, where people globally consume the BBC, 62% of them think more positively about the United Kingdom. There are, then, a variety of ways you can look at our role. One is in terms of the influence that we bring to bear and the values that we seek to share around the world in terms of impartial information, independent journalism, freedom of speech and democratic participation, and we also reach a very large number of people.

Is the most popular way for your audiences to access the World Service via TV, via radio or by clicking on a website?

For different services there is a different answer. For the English service, there are a variety of ways. Around half the audience comes to us through direct relays, which is FM, DAB and that sort of thing. When you take in things like syndicated audio online—through partner stations, third-party distribution arrangements and licensing—the majority of the audience comes through third parties. It is a very complex ecosystem. We are reliant on partner stations and partner broadcasters and platforms around the world, but direct reach through relays and that sort of thing is another part of it. For Fiona, there will be different answers.

In that case, Fiona, the same question to you, please.

For the language services, it depends on the market and on how we are able to reach people. For example, we have two TV channels—Arabic and Persian. We have radio services where radio remains dominant—Hausa and French in Africa; the Burmese service has a radio station; and radio remains really important for Afghanistan. So we retain radio where we need to, but 124 million people access the World Service through digital. Every service has a site, but social media is also a very important part of the offer, both to bring people directly to our sites and because that is how people are accessing the news.

Does the World Service in 2024 look different from the way people might imagine it?

I think so. I think sometimes people imagine that it is primarily radio, but some of the examples I have just given show the diversification. We need to serve audiences where they are. We need to do that with the right timing; different markets have the digital tilt at different times depending on data costs, for example. Who has access to that technology? While we change and adapt, we are trying to get the speed right for different markets. That is particularly important for audiences of extreme need; I have mentioned Afghanistan, but in other parts of the Arab world where people really need us to remain on linear, we are there in force.

In the UK, I guess the World Service might be associated with news but also things like Test Match Special. What is the focus in the foreign language service? Is it news and current affairs, or other things as well?

It is news, but health is also a very important offer for us, as is information more generally. You mentioned sport; our African services in particular are very interested in that. But what we are looking to do is the core BBC mission: to help people understand the world around them in order to discuss things and take inspiration from other parts of the world in coming up with solutions for climate change, for example. I suppose it is really to join the dots, to help people see the world around them.

Is there anything that people might learn about the BBC World Service that would surprise them?

Hopefully, the sheer diversity of what we do. I can give you an example from Afghanistan, where in the last two years we have launched Dars, an education programme for the girls of Afghanistan, in particular, who are banned from school. We were able to use Bitesize, which is a brilliant educational resource for British children, and adapt that for Afghan children. I hope that the exciting and inspirational parts of the World Service would be of real interest to people.

I think the breadth of the overall offer would surprise them. It is not just about news. As Fiona mentioned, there is the health and other useful information, but there is also some quite active stuff around arts and understanding what is going on in different parts of the world, in terms of their creative and cultural communities. It is not just about geopolitics.

It is really good to see you this morning; thank you so much for being here. I understand that the audience of the World Service is about 320 million per week. Is that correct?

Yes.

Is that for both the English service and the foreign language service combined?

That is right. English is 84 million and the rest is other languages.

I also understand that you have specific targets for reaching women and young people. Obviously, those are two groups for whom it is particularly important that we ensure access to quality news and information. You mentioned that the World Service is enabling young women to access education. How are you working to achieve those targets? Can you give us an overview of the bigger picture?

We have targets for both young people and women. At the moment, across the World Service everywhere, we are reaching 25% and our target is 29%. There are lots of ways in which we are approaching that, from the tone and approach of what we do—every bit of journalism and every story that we do, and how that can be accessible to the most people—to the platforms that we are on. Obviously, young people use different platforms, and the mix of platforms will depend on the market. For women, we reach 34% overall—our target is 37%—but we have increased that; we are 1% up on last year. Reaching women and girls is a key strategic objective for us. That figure of 37% shows that there are other structural obstacles to women accessing the BBC and accessing news, including technology and access to devices—there are lots of other things to take into account. Again, we approach that by having a mixture in terms of our platform strategy—asking, “Where are we? Where are women? Where are young people? What does this look like for time-poor people, who might not have time to read in-depth pieces but might be able to access a really good explanatory bit of video?” We also have some female-centric content, which is very important; 100 Women was part of a scheme to ensure that, and it remains very popular. We hope that all drives people to us and that they then see our overall news and current affairs offer. Those are some of the ways we tackle the situation.

We share the same targets and we have similar challenges. A specific factor for us, as I said, is that when a lot of your audience is coming through third parties, you inherit the audience profile of the third party. You therefore have to try to find ways of making your content appeal beyond the audiences you already reach. In practice, that means that we have seen enormous growth on new platforms in the last six months—for example, among women listeners on Instagram and on YouTube. We made an investment in YouTube because we have seen an opportunity to reach audiences that we are not currently reaching otherwise. Similarly, in different markets the numbers are different. For example, the World Service English network reaches 47% of women audiences in the UK. In that sense, it is just a question of which market you are looking at.

Do you have a sense that there are particular countries in the overseas market where women in particular are accessing the service? Are there any countries where there is a real gap—places where you are not managing to connect with women and perhaps need to improve?

We have individual language service targets for women, and they range. We have an excellent audiences department that looks at a range of landscape factors, including how many women other broadcasters and other media players are reaching in that market. We always have a stretch target; we always want to go beyond that. The proportion of women that we reach in some of our Indian languages markets is quite low, so we put in place particular interventions—for example, a different platform mix and particular products. We are trying to be specific for each market. Afghanistan is another key example where we have to look behind the figures to see why the proportions are lower than we would hope.

I have one quick final question. Do you have a sense of how many of those accessing the World Service are UK-based and therefore are likely to be licence fee payers?

World Service English reaches 2 million people a week in the UK. That is probably about 2% of the overall audience. I think our public purpose clearly states that our primary purpose is to reach audiences globally. It is a benefit to us that we reach audiences in the UK. A lot of content is shared between us and other parts of the BBC that also then goes out in that way—so there is a growing audience in the UK as well.

Do you want me to tell you a little bit about the vernacular services, just so you have the full picture? About 850,000 people access the vernacular—the language—services directly, but you would hear some of the best journalism of the language services on the Today programme and on the 10 o’clock news—for example, with our Sudan coverage; it was an Arabic correspondent, Feras Kilani, who was the first to get to the frontline of Khartoum to see the devastation happening there. Without that, we might not have been able to see it. We see a wider range of World Service journalism on domestic channels.

Thank you for coming in today. I am thinking a bit more about something you mentioned earlier, Jon—about trust and the BBC leading the way globally on that. How is the BBC building that trust with such different audiences? You are bringing forward quite a diverse range of voices, so how do you build trust among such varied audiences to maintain that world leader status?

Trust is the most important thing we have. As I said, we are the most trusted international broadcaster. The Reuters report, which is an annual report, showed that our levels of trust had gone up both last year to this year and two years ago to last year to this year—that is a is a very good trend. How do we do it? There are a variety of things. We have global scale, so to the point that Fiona made earlier around joining the dots, I think the figure is that we are actually in 73 cities in 59 countries around the world; the World Service figure is that we are in 58 cities in 44 countries, because other parts of the BBC and BBC News have a bureau as well. That global scale allows us to really be on the ground, and presence on the ground is the critical factor in determining whether you have authenticity and credibility. Beyond that, within our Trust is Earned campaign that we are doing to emphasise the point about trust, there is a point about transparency. If we can show our audiences how we know what we know, and how we know what we don’t know and why we don’t know it, that helps to build trust. It is something that we have made a real push on—I am sure you are all familiar with BBC Verify as the brand and, indeed, the unit that now leads the work on all that. That has really brought together a variety of different teams that were doing similar work, and they have been brought together into one team with a very clearly defined brand presence online and a brand presence on television. You hear it on the output that I am responsible for all the time. Fiona’s teams have worked closely with them as well. Our BBC Monitoring colleagues, who obviously monitor media around the world, are part of that same team. In that sense, we have tried to pull together all those different parts of BBC News responsible for verification and finding out what is going on, and then showing people how we do it as best we can. That is the clearest way to maintaining and hopefully building trust.

The editorial principles that we all share are crucial. Obviously, the World Service has a large body of staff across the world and the fundamental principles are accuracy, bringing all perspectives into our coverage, the analysis, and that transparency point, which I think audiences increasingly expect us to do—perhaps it was different a few years ago. We have really had a push on that, and we see some of the trust metrics shown by doing so.

It is going to become more of a crowded and competitive landscape as time goes on. What are you hoping will set the BBC apart from your competitors as we go forward?

A lot of our competitors in these markets are increasingly polarised, because they are not able to be independent in the way that the BBC can be, because it is funded and because of our heritage. It is our adherence to our principles of accuracy, impartiality and transparency, and that we hold steady on that. In the amount of disinformation and misinformation that swirls, people look to us. We see that a lot in languages where we may not be the place that people come first for their news, but they will come to the BBC to check that the story is correct. We can see that in the analytics that we have. That gives us a good indication of the point of the BBC being in those markets.

Some of the things that you have talked about—it has been really interesting to hear about soft power and the polyglot thing, with all those different languages—seem to apply more to the World Service than to BBC News, but the two merged in 2022. What is the relationship between the BBC News that we see on TV and the BBC World Service?

The BBC World Service is an integral part of BBC News. It drives an awful lot of the journalism with exactly the same values and principles as the rest of BBC News. Where they work together is particularly on global journalism, where the output facing the United Kingdom is able to draw heavily on the journalism that Fiona’s teams do. Perhaps the most notable recent example was the work of BBC Russian—it is really for Fiona to speak about it—which was a fantastic piece of work on counting Russia’s war dead from our BBC Russian service. That piece of journalism was then relayed back into Russia to show audiences in Russia what the cost of the war in Ukraine was to their citizens. That piece of work was done by BBC Russian. It ran everywhere on our UK output. It ran prominently on the output I am responsible for, because we see that that journalism, which has the same hallmark and the same value, needs to be shared for our audiences wherever they are.

I would add that often, when there is breaking news, it is a World Service correspondent who is there. In both the recent examples of Lebanon, with the walkie-talkie attacks and Nasrallah’s death, it was BBC Arabic and BBC Persian correspondents who were there. They are bilingual, so you would have heard them on all our output. It is very important for our language service audiences to have the brilliant analysis of Anthony Zurcher, the online correspondent for Washington. There is huge interest in the US presidential elections around the world. Bringing the analysis of our specialists to the global audience through the language services is really important. It should work in both directions.

On Gaza and Ukraine, there has been good crossover, but sometimes I feel that some of your stuff is maybe a bit wasted and it is not making it to the mainstream bulletins. We saw Liam Payne as the main story for days and days—okay, it happened overseas, so maybe that is tangentially a world thing—but Bangladesh had really big, major things happen this summer. There is BBC Bangla, but it seems to be mostly a website. Like the majority of my fellow Bangladeshi people, I do not read the language. I would like to have seen more of that content on mainstream TV. There is a huge diaspora, and it often feels as though these things are in a bit of a parallel universe and siloed, so my plea is to have more crossover.

I understand your plea and I will take it forward. Bangla is a good example. Bangla is a website and a digital offer, but we have a weekly TV programme as well. You will know, of course, that the internet was down. One reason why the World Service needs to have the sustained funding that we are asking for going forward is that we had to put in a kind of shadow team because we could not publish out of Bangladesh, which is where all of our team are.

Every mobile signal was cut off. People could not communicate with each other in that country, let alone with people here.

Exactly. We were able to stay on air, in terms of the digital capacity, because we were able to bring a team in and publish from here—publish from a third country. We had to change our operation in order to meet our audiences’ need, so that when they were back online—they were getting back on through various VPNs and via different strategies to get the news—the BBC was able to be there. But we need the agility and flexibility to do that. On your other point about as much World Service content as possible, the news channel is a very big taker of our content, so we see a lot on that. The 10 o’clock news is only 35 minutes, so there is a limit to how many foreign stories they can take. But our offers are always there, and in places of need the World Service is pushing its content as much as possible for domestic audiences.

On that particular story, the audiences for the service itself went up hugely, didn’t they?

Yes.

The World Service English output, which is available in the UK, played it very prominently, and we took a leading role in making sure that that story was front and centre.

With BBC Bangla, could you link to Google Translate, click a button and suddenly it would come in English? I have found that intensely frustrating. My cousins always used to say, “We listen to the BBC when we want the truth.” You have done some good stuff. You had a story on African students trapped in Ukraine. It was crossover, rather than this siloed thing—they can have a website. In Ethiopia, Uganda and Sudan, NUJ figures say that it is prohibitively expensive to go on the internet, so people rely on the old-fashioned wireless and cathode ray. If everything is going online, it is a bit of a worry.

I am thinking about Ethiopia. Our Horn of Africa services remain on radio and digital, because that is how the majority of our audience get on. In some of the most fragile and insecure places in the world, like the Horn of Africa, we would commit to being there. We reach 7 million a week in that area. We always have a website and we are on social media, but it is trying to get that path right in terms of the digital transformation of the market and making sure our services remain where they need to be.

Can you measure the impact factor of these things? Most licence fee payers are probably not even aware that there is this whole other world out there. Could you have a percentage of content that is crossover or a world news show? I know you are closing down HARDtalk. My constituent Stephen Sackur presented it for many years. That is a worry, because it often has dictator-type figures or—they are not all dictators—international-type figures being interviewed. It will be sad when that goes.

To your first point, we could probably find a way of better reflecting the contribution of World Service language content into UK-facing output. I can do that in terms of the content we run on World Service English that is also available in the UK, but perhaps a measurement of how much of that is tracked across different platforms and its place in the UK audience is an interesting thought. HARDtalk was a very difficult decision and probably a reflection of the wider funding challenges the BBC continues to face through having had a frozen licence fee for a couple of years. As far as the World Service is concerned, continuing global inflation is a threat for us and certainly continues to put downward pressure on the budgets. That is something we have to take account of. The HARDtalk decision was a very difficult one. There are other interviews done across the BBC, at length, that can also perform the role of holding people to account, and most of our programmes seek to do that every day, so it is a question for us of how we organise ourselves in such a way as to make sure that that kind of interview and that kind of offer is still available.

Good morning, and thank you for coming in. Earlier this year the BBC said that more than 300 World Service journalists are working in exile because media freedom is suppressed in their country. What are the main ways in which inhospitable authorities try to stop the World Service operating?

Let’s start with the individuals. You are right; it is actually 325 of our journalists who are in exile. The Persian service are subject to extreme harassment and provocation. Some of them have had criminal charges in absentia, we have had death and rape threats that our security services have helped us to deal with, and over the last few years we have had to evacuate journalists and resettle them. Our Russian service are in Latvia, and a lot of our Afghan colleagues, including young female journalists on their own, came to the UK and now work for the BBC from there. The safety of our journalists is of the utmost priority for us, and we are concerned about the trends there. In terms of how that is reflected in the journalism, one fifth of the language services experience some sort of interference. In Iran, the satellite signals are blocked for our television satellites, so they have to go in through VPN—they have to go in through a third server—to be able to get our information. There are obviously internet outages in a lot of places generally. There is a lot of individual pursuit of our services, so internet sites are taken down, social media accounts are blocked—we have a lot of different interference. The BBC needs to spend and invest in trying to circumvent that and get around it. It is a bit of a game of cat and mouse: they shut something down, we open something up. That, again, is an area of increasing concern and one that we have to respond to in the current landscape.

Increasing concern and additional cost as well, I imagine. Is that a spike? What is 325 compared with five years ago? What is the proportion?

Yes. The Persian harassment has been going on for some years, so they have been in exile for a long time, but if you think about Russia, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Ethiopia—obviously, we took our team out of Gaza and they are now settled in Egypt, though one is going to Turkey—all those examples are in the last few years. It has increased hugely. I think it is a 70% increase in the last three years.

What are the practicalities of being in exile and continuing to maintain the integrity of the journalistic content and pursue the stories? Clearly it is not just the journalists, but the sources who potentially risk threats, abuse and hostilities. How is that overcome? Do you end up having to try to protect those sources as well as the journalists when you cannot have covert physical contact in-country, but you are communicating remotely?

In some ways, unfortunately, we have a lot of experience at this. Reporting a country from a third country requires a lot of creativity and resilience. We have journalistic tools—open-source journalism, for example, and the kind of forensics that Jon mentioned earlier with Verify. There is satellite imagery and the consideration of ways we need to look into a country if we cannot be there on the ground. We often retain people who help us do some of that on-the-ground work, whether contributors or freelancers. There is also the expertise of the service. Take the Persian service in Iran: the expertise of that service is fundamental to the success of BBC news on that story. When Israel launched missiles at Iran, I was looking at our notes. Six members of the Persian service were providing for 15 different English programmes across that day. Without them, we would not have been able to cover that story. Their expertise in covering that country of huge importance in our global news output is really key.

That enhances Dr Huq’s point, in a way. On that day, we leant very heavily into our Persian service colleagues’ capability to tell us what the response was going to be. That happens every single day. We are a heavily integrated organisation between the languages and the English network, and that spreads across to the UK-facing output as well. But it is really important for us, in representing global perspectives on global stories, to be able to draw on as much of that expertise as we can.

As you are having to pay for more of that and it becomes more expensive—this cat-and-mouse of infrastructure being closed or blocked and reopened elsewhere—is that coming from the same budget? Is no additional settlement, surcharge or supplement coming from the Government or elsewhere to cover it?

No, although we have had extra investment from the FCDO in the last few years and we are very grateful for that. We try to do our best with the technology challenges—obviously, we are moving to IP and not just relying on satellite. So there are other ways in which we try to mitigate the costs, but in essence they are going up and we are trying to cover it with the same budgets.

And when we have to withdraw because the costs are too great, other actors move in. That is what we have seen in parts of Africa and the Middle East, for example. Again, Fiona is responsible for this output, but we saw how Russian state media moved in on a frequency in Lebanon not long after we vacated it.

That is a pretty serious ceding of space in moving out.

It is. We have spoken publicly about the scale of the investment that, for example, Russia and Chinese state media are able to invest. Beyond that, we also know that they are actively courting other broadcasting opportunities in those parts of the world. This is not something that happens once; it is a continual battle. Distribution is expensive and an integral part of how we reach our audiences; without it, there would not be much point in making the content.

It is a pretty significant example of the soft power that you wield, right?

Yes.

I recognise that description. I think we have spoken about some of it already in saying how we seek to maintain and build trust, and discussing some of the tools we deploy to do that. The combination of rising polarisation—people feeling very entrenched on one side of a discussion or another—and rising disinformation, for whatever reason, are absolutely massive challenges to us. But that makes our work all the more important: it is why we need to carry on doing what we are doing, fully supported with stable funding that we can rely on from one year to the next, to then also address some of the other challenges around the mounting costs of distribution and the circumvention challenges that Fiona has mentioned. All those things come together in one piece. The challenges that we face are not new, but they are rising.

I can give you an example of countering disinformation. In the Nigeria election, when it was clear that Tinubu, who eventually won, was emerging as a winner, a lot of online rumours started to gain a huge amount of traction—that his qualifications had been faked and he had forged degree documents. This disinformation and misinformation furthered and heightened, and we were looking at quite an unstable situation that could tip into violence and protest, as people were out on the streets. Our Nigerian language services were able to put the resources into everything they could to try to find and decide whether or not there was any truth at all in these allegations. A few days after this, they came out with a single, very powerful piece of journalism that said that there was no evidence that these had been faked, and they showed all the different ways they had checked. The mood came down. People on the front pages of the newspapers said that this was the truth. The BBC put into that quite heightened misinformation environment a clear bit of journalism, with all our workings behind it, and that calmed things down. That is just an example of what the BBC can do in markets where things can get a bit febrile.

I definitely would not go that far, because it is very big. What it does show is the importance of the BBC being in markets and what we can give, and what value that brings overall to the world.

It is very difficult to say we are winning when we are being outspent very heavily by others, and that is a factor. We know the kinds of things that our audiences are looking to us for, and we know how to try to get that to as much of our audience as we can, but we need the stable funding to ensure that we continue to deliver it.

It matters a lot, because we are a trusted, independent and impartial broadcaster. We are a public service broadcaster. I think it is essential that we are seen to be independent of all parties and reporting without fear of or favour from all parties. For many years the World Service was funded directly by the UK Government, and there was no issue then in terms of perceptions of independence, so I do not see why there should be as the discussions continue about the future funding of the World Service and whether that sits entirely with Government funding or not. It is very much a matter for the director-general, who has spoken about that. It would not increase concerns around whether or not we were impartial or independent of the UK Government.

Welcome. In October, with the closure of the Arabic and Persian services, Tim Davie stated that there was a loss in viewership or listenership of 40 million people. Did you see that coming? Was it anticipated?

The savings that we made in 2022 included closing Arabic and Persian radio, but we still have flourishing TV channels and digital operations in Arabic and Persian. There were other changes made including programmes in Africa, Hindi radio and Urdu radio. There was a whole suite of savings we had to make that totalled £28.5 million. That was a huge amount that we had to find to take out of the business. That is not easy to do, and they were not easy decisions. We did have an estimated audience loss of around 40 million. That did indeed happen.

In my area, we also had to contribute to that £28.5 million figure, and that involved the closure of 11 titles and a 60% reduction in documentary commissioning. That is a very significant impact in terms of the offer you are giving the audience at that point. It speaks to the wider point about consistency of longer-term funding. We see again that other organisations are spending huge amounts of money in parts of the world where we traditionally have been very strong. What we see coming through as a result of that investment by them is that their trust grows. Where you have presence, you build trust. There is a direct correlation between the two. Where we have to recede from somewhere, as we described earlier with the FM frequency in the Middle East, and others step in, that builds trust in those organisations. We spoke a little bit about soft power. That is not a stated goal of the World Service, but in terms of our desire to reach people with independent, impartial information and to promote democratic accountability and democratic governance, those sentiments chime very strongly.  

Fiona, did you want to come in? Was there anything else you wanted to say?

I just thought you might want a little bit more on the Arabic radio. If you think about the timing of it, we were making those choices because of the financial situation. We were not able to foresee what happened in October in Gaza and in Israel. Looking back on that, would we have made those choices about Arabic radio? Potentially not. It is difficult to say but it does not feel like a good decision, but one that had to be held because of the funding. Since then, we have been able to provide emergency lifeline radio operations. We put in a programme called Gaza Today, which comes twice into Gaza; it is news but also information, including how to treat wounds—it is an information programme as well as a news programme. And we have those, we call them, dial-up services. Having the flexibility and the adaptability to do that as the World Service is a really important part of what we do. When our funding is restrictive, or we are spending all we can on our core services, we do not have the ability to do that. I hope that, whatever sustained funding we have in the future, we will be able to do that. I think we come from a position of strength to do that.

It is a stated aim to grow your listener base, but you have lost 40 million listeners. Where do you think they have gone?

My concern would be that they would be listening to the FM relays that we have had to give up as part of that. We know that in Lebanon’s case it was Sputnik who took that FM. Again, it is that pattern—where the BBC has to retreat, others are waiting to come in. They benefit from the trusted relationship that we had on that FM frequency. It is a real win for them. In the future I hope that we will be able to stabilise and strengthen where we are. We have 42 language services. We want to retain them all. The uplift that has been granted to us—we want to stabilise and move forward. Let’s hope we can grow in the future, but stabilisation is the most important at the moment.

Jon, you gave the example of Lebanon. Are there any other examples where the service has been lost and that gap has been filled by China or Russia?

To be fair, that is Fiona’s area. Where TV partnerships in Africa were given up, then Chinese media came in and paid for content to be distributed on those same platforms. I think that is right, isn’t it, Fiona?

Yes, in Kenya, Liberia and various others. We see it as a pattern.

You see it as a pattern—can you anticipate that happening?

In the sense that there are now clear precedents of it happening, I suspect that were we to step away from any other particular operation, the same thing would happen. As I said before, particularly recently, we have seen how Russian state media have been engaging strongly with public broadcasters in sub-Saharan Africa, to see what opportunities there are for them there. I can only assume that they are doing that because they think there is an opportunity there for them to step into quickly. We have to be very careful to safeguard the operations that we have and the presence that we have, because, as I said before, the direct correlation between presence and trust is there for us to see. If we reduce our presence, we damage the trust that we are able to have with audiences around the world.

I think we see areas where state broadcasters are interested—so, Sahel, west Africa, central Asia—in essence, places which are already quite fragile and insecure. That is where there is interest and investment. I think that perhaps shows the picture of where we might go.

Fiona, can I double-check? From what you said, it sounds like you did not get any extra FCDO money when you set up those emergency radio stations for Gaza and Sudan. Is that correct?

Yes. For both of those, we were able to re-allocate resources within. It was the same for Dars, the Afghan education programme I mentioned earlier. Although we managed to secure a bit of philanthropic funding to help us with Dars, because we want to continue to do it, it is not in the sustained budget going forward.

Philanthropic funding from what?

From the Malala Fund. It was only a percentage of what we have to spend to make Dars, but it was a contribution.

Does that happen regularly?

No. We have some philanthropic funding for some products. BBC Media Action, which is not funded by the licence fee, primarily works in this space, but the education programme of Dars was slightly different. It is a new thing we are forging to see if we can find extra funding to do the things that we feel we should.

Do you think there is future potential for that kind of investment from those kinds of sources?

I hope so. It was about a third of the funding of a series, so it was very welcome, but not complete.

It tends to be project-based funding. It is not ongoing, and therefore sustainable in the medium term. We ran a series about disinformation that was supported by Nobel. It brought Nobel laureates together with young people around the world to try to take on the work that the laureates had done, because the laureates themselves had been subject to disinformation about the work they had delivered. It was called Whose Truth? and we ran it earlier this year. It was a very specific project that we started with Nobel, and it came to an end. Philanthropic is good, but it is not the sustained funding that we need to maintain these operations and be able to flex in times of need.

The Government’s first Budget a few weeks ago included an unspecified amount of extra FCDO funding for the World Service. Can you tell us about how you managed the uncertainty in the lead-up to the Budget decision?

There was a lot of scenario planning for us to think about what we would have to do if funding was not forthcoming. It is very welcome funding. It enables us to maintain all 42 language services, do some essential upkeep and do some of the lifeline services that Fiona has described around Gaza and hopefully Sudan again. We spent a lot of time thinking about what we might have to do if we did not receive that funding. The pressures on our budgets remain, if I am honest. Global inflation remains a factor for us and, as we said, there are other competing costs as well. We will have to carefully manage them going forward, but it is very welcome none the less, because we can commit to the existing services. We spend an awful lot of time thinking about what we might do in certain scenarios. We are constantly having to respond to unpredictable events, which also brings it with cost.

I hope that you may have seen our excellent investigative series called BBC Eye, which operates in Africa, the Middle East and what we call the rest of the world. We have managed to do some great documentaries in Indonesia and India, and about China, but we do not have enough to cover the rest of the world. We are not able to do that kind of investigative journalism that is deep, forensic, holds power to account and exposes social injustice—the key kind of BBC mission and how we would want to appear to the world—everywhere we want to. The uncertainty means that some of these documentaries take a long time to produce. Naturally, uncertainty is felt by an organisation. Where we exist in very hot media markets, where TRT and CPTN are looking to take on our journalists, it is hard to hold on to them. Before the Nigeria elections, TRT took three quarters of our Hausa team. That was just before the elections, which is exactly when you need that BBC journalism in a country. There are unseen effects of instability.

Can you say any more about the amount of FCDO funding you received in the Budget this year?

That is for the Government to say, rather than us.

If you had a message to send to the Government about the importance of future predictability of your funding, how would you summarise that?

I would say that the world has never needed the BBC World Service more than it does now. To go forward, we need to have certainty. We need to be able to operate efficiently and in a stable environment to bring the core missions of accuracy and breadth of perspective. Audiences need us, and by giving us that stability, we can continue and grow our work.

This is the final question, so do you have any other message you want to land with our Committee as we go forward on our inquiry?

Fiona has expressed it very clearly. It is about making sure that there is continuity and predictability of support, because that is what enables us to plan. A lot of our work takes careful planning. Projects take time to spin up, and new services or the developments of existing services take an awful lot of planning. A greater sense of predictability around funding would therefore be welcome.

When something is lost, presumably it is almost impossible to bring it back?

If it involves particular areas of expertise, then yes.

Thank you very much. You have made your points very powerfully today. Thank you for being witnesses. Witnesses: Richard Sharp and Richard Sambrook.

We now move on to our second panel. For this, we have Richard Sharp, Partner at SW7 and former Chair of the BBC, and Professor Richard Sambrook, Emeritus Professor at Cardiff University and former Director of BBC News and the World Service. A warm welcome to both of you, and thank you so much for your time. I will direct the first question to Mr Sharp. When you were Chair of the BBC, you said publicly that there was a case for central Government to fund the World Service. Is that a view that you still hold?

Yes. What I was aware of was the bigger picture in terms of the BBC as a whole—trying to achieve many different objectives—and the impossibility of making a budget fit for purpose, for the licence fee payers on the one hand, and to achieve enormous potential global good with a well-funded—and appropriately funded—World Service. I was also aware of the inevitable sense that central Government was not aware, or was not focusing on, the consequences of what was the earlier settlement, which required the BBC to absorb a lot of the cost of the World Service. At the same time, on the domestic front, the BBC was—and is—facing significant competition from other providers of media services. Hence the issue I was then concerned about is now much more extreme, and much more dangerous, for the potential viability of the World Service in terms of fulfilling its mandate.

Is there any conceivable way in which the status quo—the BBC funded with top-ups from the FCDO—is a sustainable measure?

The appropriate mechanism is to go back to the way it was before, which was to separate the funding for the World Service and make it fit for purpose. What we are facing now is really a bit like the proverbial frog being boiled to death without a twitched muscle. The failure of the Foreign Office, in particular, to observe the consequences of what it is doing as the World Service gets diminished—you have heard this from the previous messages—leads to other negative actors filling the void.

When you were the Chair of the BBC, what conversations did you have with Government about this?

I spoke to No. 11, No. 10 and the Foreign Office without success, hence why I went more aggressively in public on this.

It sounds like you were making quite a pincer movement on this and attacking from various angles. Did you get any sense that there was sympathy for your position in any of those quarters?

Yes, there was sympathy, but there was also a lack of strategic thinking. The forced issue for you and your counterpart dealing with the Foreign Office is: what is the goal? What is the strategy? What are the metrics associated with accomplishment? What are the resources to achieve it? The nexus that you have is also to be aware of the BBC’s obligation to the domestic audience and the consequences of taking away from the provision of the licence-fee payers’ media content by diverting that to the World Service, and the consequences for the BBC in its home market as a result.

How doable is it? How possible would it be to change that funding mechanism in the short term, such as before the charter review?

That is the practicality of politics, and as I said, there has been a lack of strategic thinking. A new Government have the opportunity to think through these things, and the Foreign Office clearly has to think through what role the World Service plays in achieving our mission of driving British values around the world, as well as the benefits of trust and impartiality in addressing conflicts and making people’s lives better. I think you have already heard evidence to that effect. It is probably a greater opportunity, now more than ever. It is a greater opportunity for Britain, and we have a brand and a capability to build on, which is the World Service, that we are squandering and is going to be dissipated.

What do you think is the biggest obstacle? Who or what is standing in the way of delivering that objective?

I think it goes back to the doors that I was hitting on when I was the Chair. First of all, the Foreign Office has to understand and believe in it. It cannot take it for granted that the World Service is always going to be there and succeed, and it must be aware of the consequences of the lack of funding. Ultimately, the Treasury has to agree with No. 10 that this is potentially a pivotal part of the reach of British soft power around the world—to the benefit of the world, not just to the benefit of the UK.

Mr Sambrook, are you persuaded that the Government should take back responsibility for the World Service in full, and if so, why?

Ideally, yes. I absolutely agree with what Richard has just said. When it moved to the licence fee between 2010 and 2014, I had left the BBC, but from my external viewpoint I absolutely thought it strategically unsustainable in the long term, because of the pressure it would ultimately bring in trying to reconcile the overall budget between the UK audience and an international audience. It seemed to me that the position that Tim Davie has outlined—as Richard has just done—was inevitable. Therefore, I think it would be far preferable to return to grant-in-aid funding the World Service in full. I recognise that, in the current financial climate, that may be a difficult ask, and obviously that is going to have to be a strategic decision for the Treasury, No. 10 and the Foreign Office. Are there other options? Well, they are less satisfactory. There may well be other options that are better than the status quo, but ideally it is absolutely right that the international services, because of the role they play, are funded by grant-in-aid.

Jamie Angus, the former director of the World Service, has suggested a different model—foreign language services should be paid for by the Government and the English-language services of the World Service should be paid for by the BBC. Is that a viable model?

That could work. I think the language service budget would be about 70% of what the licence fee currently covers for the World Service, so there would something like a 25% to 30% saving in that sense. We should not forget BBC Monitoring would be encapsulated within that as well, and I think the last figure I saw on that was about £20 million. The obvious dividing line to make is the English language services licence fee, and the language services and everything associated with them to be funded by grant-in-aid.

Do you see that as a possible alternative, Mr Sharp?

It is a question of where the money comes from. If it comes from the licence fee payer, then there is a question. What you are getting at is the operational synergy, which is that English is the lingua franca of the world and, in that sense, there are clearly synergies across BBC capabilities in delivering English language. You do not have to be particularly imaginative to look forward into an AI world where, over the next decade, translation capabilities will be embedded in any event as a result of the compute power.

Can I ask both of you what you made of Ms Crack’s remark about the closure of Arabic radio—“it does not feel like a good decision”; that is what my old-fashioned shorthand says here. Given what has happened in Gaza it does not feel like a good decision, does it? What do you think are the viable alternatives?

I am sure they took the decision with the best information they had at the time, but clearly it looks like a bad decision in hindsight. If you look at the Persian language service, it is the same thing. However, if you see the reach and power of the Persian Instagram service for example, you can understand why—it is a prioritisation of digital services as the world moves to digital scrutiny of media.

Everyone has talked about the need for a secure and stable footing for future funding. Would that suggest three yearly funding, rather than the annual scramble we have at the moment? Five yearly?

From my viewpoint as a former director responsible for these things, I would think at least three years. Five years would be preferable. The point is that gives you some certainty for planning. That is crucial in being able to manage quite complex operations and in being able to flex according to external events that you may have to meet. Certainty of planning makes an enormous difference. An annual debate is really very difficult to manage.

I agree with that, but I think it has to be accompanied by accountability in terms of execution. I definitely think the BBC should get a longer sense of planning capability as a result of a longer settlement. At the same time, the BBC has to be obligated to execute in a way that accomplishes the kind of reach associated with that kind of taxpayer funding.

Are there other ways in which to fund the World Service that might ease the burden of the licence fee?

I am slightly hesitant to suggest them because I think they are less than ideal. I think certainly around the English language services—not the vernacular services—there may be some commercial potential in radio around partner stations, and advertising on genres like sport, music and cultural areas; not news. I do not think that is going to be significant income, however, and I think there are all sorts of potential conflicts of interest that would need to be quite closely managed. There will be some opportunities there, but I do not think they are going to be huge.

Are you aware of whether this has been considered or modelled? You talked about it not being a serious income stream.

I am not aware of anything being done recently. I left the BBC some years ago. In my time there, it was certainly something that we looked at and I think there was some commercial activity at the fringes around partner stations, but nothing very substantial. The potential conflicts and the policy issues around this are quite difficult.

Unfortunately, I would entirely agree with what Richard said. Let us not forget the singular position the BBC has, with an opportunity to present trusted news, free from commercial biases. The commercial biases do not just come in the obvious sense of how you deal with your advertiser; they come in the kind of way you want to report news and sensationalise it and make it more extreme, to engage with an audience. The benefit of not being subject to those pressures is that trusted news may be less dramatic, but it is ultimately more important.

I will come to Mr Sharp first. What was your response to the Budget announcement of additional FCDO funding for the World Service for the next financial year?

I think the sentiment is excellent; the devil is in the detail, and I do not know any more than you do about the amount of funding. I suspect it is inadequate; I would be thrilled to be proved wrong in that sense. It goes to my hope that there is a clear step back, thinking through “What is our strategy for this?” Let’s not just drip-feed a little bit as we manage decline, but let's take an asset and fund it so it can make a significant impact.

The last Government were providing around £104 million a year to support the World Service. Would you see that as a minimum going forward?

Absolutely. I think that is just sticking a finger in the dyke, because the bigger picture, as I said at the outset, is that the BBC itself, in terms of its core capability, is facing a financial black hole, because of some of the difficulties in its own budget, to provide its domestic content.

I agree with all of that. When the Budget announcement was made, it was very welcome, but the fact that the BBC’s response was that it would avoid any further closures indicated that it was basically a kind of tactical sticking plaster rather than a more strategic response. I very much echo Richard’s point that what is really needed is a strategic vision for the value of the World Service and what it can deliver. There are not many things that Britain is widely recognised as being the best in the world at. However, the provision of high-quality impartial news and information is one of them, and it seems slightly perverse to allow that to wither on the vine, precisely at the time when Russia, China and Iran are pouring significant funds into trying to pollute the information environment, when the BBC would be a fantastic tool and probably Britain’s greatest tool, or brand leader if you like, in trying to counter some of that.

I will pick up on that point about information and disinformation. Mr Sharp, in your speech in January 2023, you said, “The BBC now has an opportunity…to establish ourselves as the pre-eminent purveyor of facts to the world in, what is in practice, the disinformation age”. What do you think makes the BBC that global gold standard and what sets it apart from other broadcasters?

I think it has a legacy and a brand associated with trust. That is necessary, but not sufficient. What it has to continue to demonstrate, day in, day out, is that it is adhering to the standards of impartiality. Obviously, domestically it is subject to independent regulation from Ofcom. In addition to what I said in that speech, I think there is possibly room for the BBC to think through how it doubles down on its existing reputation by ensuring that its global news is subject to some measure of independent scrutiny for impartiality, in order to reinforce its own position. The current difficulty it has is that it still marks its own homework in those terms, and externally and globally that has been seized on by people like the Chinese to criticise the World Service, for example. I think it is possible to contemplate the BBC, in addition to receiving extra funding, also being subject to—indeed, being willing and making itself subject to—some form of independent scrutiny. Perhaps, for example, it could be answerable to the non-executive chair of the BBC.

Mr Sambrook, do you have any thoughts about the BBC’s position in fighting disinformation and things like that?

As we heard earlier, particularly from Jon, the actions that it has taken around things such as BBC Verify and absolutely trying to strike interventions that counter disinformation precisely have been very good and quite impressive. I think there is more that it could do. Trust is absolutely about demonstrating impartiality. These are sometimes quite complicated and vague terms. If we break down what we mean by impartiality, in my view it is about resting on clear evidence, diversity of views, transparency and independence. All those things can be measured, audited and reviewed. Therefore, they can be a form of accountability around governance but also, more crucially, they can be demonstrated to the audience. BBC Verify and the work that it does are a good initial step in that direction, but I think it can go further. It is essential to have audience trust to counter the growing amount of disinformation out there.

I think I agree about the BBC not marking its own homework. That is a good point, and it allows the BBC to stand on its own two feet and maintain that trust and that brand. I suppose the challenge for the BBC is how it allows its competitors to get away with not having the same level of scrutiny. It is a different sort of playing field then—it is kind of fighting with one hand behind its back. I wonder whether there is some sort of global fightback against disinformation that could be looked at.

There was a trusted news initiative that the BBC entered into with some other broadcasters. That was a good initiative and a good start. At the time, it was tied into some of the campaigns for free speech and free expression. All of that is good, but the BBC has to be careful that it is not seen to take sides, even broadly—western against southern or eastern powers. It has to be as neutral and as impartial as it can be if it is going to maintain the trust of audiences in those other countries, so it needs to be careful about how it campaigns. The BBC is on the side of democracy—I think we can certainly go that far—but it mustn’t become a campaigning organisation. It needs to step quite carefully.

Mr Sharp, you used three terms earlier: brand, opportunity, soft power. I know you have commented on the favourability of the BBC internationally compared with Russian and Chinese broadcasters. What kind of modelling should we put in place to reinforce that position, and does it happen?

It is a very hard question. One way to look at it is reach, and whether the BBC is connecting and communicating what it is and what it does. There are statistics and data for that, which you will see on page 43 of the annual report, for example. Reach is incredibly important. One reason why I mentioned the opportunity for the BBC to think through how it is marked and assessed is the value of some independent scrutiny. As I said, potentially reporting to the non-execs of the board is external advertisement that the BBC is continuously subject to scrutiny in the way no other broadcaster is in terms of its impartiality, accuracy and truthfulness.

Mr Sambrook, would you like to add anything to that?

In the past, going back over a decade, my direct experience at the BBC relates to the independent review panels that we had at the World Service. I don’t know whether they still exist. I think they were largely an internal mechanism, but they were for external experts in global affairs, media, different regions of the world and so on, to come together and review World Service output across the piece, including the vernacular services, and give a view to its leadership. That was built into the ongoing reviews, functions and reports back to the Foreign Office. Whether that level of review still goes on, I don’t know, but I agree in principle that having some external voice and audit of the editorial performance is a good practice.

I should add one thing in response. As was mentioned earlier, Reuters does do a survey of which news platforms are trusted. Right now is a very difficult period because we have the growth of social media, and new media in that sense. Where TikTok is now as a news source versus five years ago is dramatically different, so it is quite dynamic. Over time, it will be interesting to see the polling about whether the BBC is trusted and in which markets it is trusted. One is capable of instituting such polls to determine whether there is an effectiveness as a result of the quality of the BBC output.

On trust and reach, do you feel the service is in danger of being overtaken by Chinese or Russian media? You mentioned Iranian media as well. Do you think there is a likely threat there?

It is not likely; it is happening day by day, to be honest. The last budget I saw for Russia’s international information services, if I can put it that way, was $1.6 billion a year. That was probably last year; I don’t know where it currently stands. China is not noted for its financial transparency, but we do know that there was a major investment just over a decade ago of $7 billion in launching more international news services, particularly in the global south. They are spending very large sums of money to try to push narratives favourable to those Governments and countries. Iran is similar, but on a lower scale. State-operated and state-directed news channels continue to open every year. Against that, the BBC has the great advantage of its legacy, brand and experience, but it is fighting a battle on a less sustainable and predictable financial base, and that makes life very difficult.

You only have to look at the well-reported situation in Nairobi, with the BBC cutting its capabilities there, and China putting in 500 more people in resources. It is highly visible.

What do we need to do to mitigate that?

My view is that World Service funding needs to be sustainable and predictable. I personally think there is a strong case for increasing it—I would, wouldn’t I? I don’t have to make the hard decisions in the Treasury. It should be grant in aid. It is absolutely part of Britain’s global soft power. It plays an increasingly important role, and to have it play a zero-sum game against the licence fee and UK programming makes no sense at all.

One important point is that, if this year has proved anything, it is that soft power is hard power. Therefore, a sense of it being an afterthought for the Foreign Office is a mistake. We have a massive opportunity to make a difference here, where accurate information will make a difference in what you could call the global Overton window, in terms of how policies are implemented within different countries and on the international stage.

You say it yourself, huge sums of money are going into news media from Russia and China. There are also huge sums of money in the background on major infrastructure projects in countries across the world, from China in particular. Aren’t we fighting a losing battle?

No, absolutely not. There are definitely choices that will have to be made. What I alluded to in the speech I gave when I was chair is that we need to take account of demographics as we do that. You only have to look at the potential growth in the population of Nigeria—close to 400 million by 2050—to see and pick markets where we need to go. The reason it is not a losing battle is that we start from an incredibly important brand. It is going to take a long time for the negative actors to achieve the brand strength that we have. We can squander the brand, but the brand in itself is worth a considerable amount of money. They would have to spend very hard even to approach replicating that in terms of value. What we are doing is potentially throwing away that brand, by not funding it. It does not have to be funded to the same extent as those actors, but it needs to be properly funded, and it is not properly funded.

To go back to pure demographics, we think about parts of the world that are most vulnerable and have very young populations. Is the BBC really as strong as, say, TikTok as a brand?

TikTok is the platform. In conversations I had with Deborah Turness when I was there, which she agreed with and we developed, the idea was to drive BBC product on to the platforms in the right way. So you will now find that we are one of the biggest, if not the biggest, news deliverer on TikTok. We have moved from an era of wireless to 1 billion smartphones 10 years ago to about 7.5 billion smartphones this year around the world—on a planet of 8 billion people. So the digital platforms are the mechanism; the question is: what is the content? And that is where the BBC can absolutely win, because trust, impartiality and truthfulness actually matter. There are other, associated advantages we may have by being here. For example, the Premier League is a very big brand. Culture, sports, the English language and our values are a very powerful combination and very hard for others to replicate.

Do you have anything to add, Mr Sambrook?

I agree with that. The BBC is ahead of the pack at the moment, but I feel it is being slightly undermined from within by the uncertainty around its budget. I think the BBC has done very well over the last 10 years—which I can say because I wasn’t part of it—in adapting to social media and the new platforms, in adapting its content with a new tone of voice, and in trying to attract new audiences. But this is all moving incredibly fast. It is a volatile environment—a very volatile situation—with different platforms emerging every year and content needing to be reformatted and rethought all the time. That is why certainty of funding, in order to be able to plan and manage that, is very important. If the BBC is living hand to mouth from year to year, it is incredibly difficult to be able to adapt to the very volatile environment.

Yes. Tim is looking at real pressure on the home front. The licence fee is paid under a sense of obligation, and the feeling at the BBC is that to deliver on that contract to a licence fee payer, it has to deliver content that is valued to the extent that people are paying the licence fee. If that money is not there, the BBC cannot deliver on that, and then the BBC’s own position in its home market is in jeopardy. So Tim has to look at the bigger picture, and he is right to raise the issue for that reason.

I do. HARDtalk was mentioned earlier this morning. HARDtalk was a programme that was funded by the licence fee on the news channel, but its principal impact was global on the international TV news channel. We have not actually mentioned BBC World News or bbc.com, the commercial aspects of the BBC’s international broadcasting, which have a weekly reach of just over 100 million, I think. HARDtalk was a very important programme and an excellent programme, but it went, under BBC licence fee cuts, and the impact was disproportionately on the BBC’s global audience.

No, and I imagine that the majority of UK licence fee payers would not be particularly happy to say, “We will fund a Hausa service,” over a UK domestic programme that they prefer to watch. They wouldn’t understand the logic, I don’t think.

To remind ourselves, the other context is that the licence fee is over a third less, in real terms, than it was a decade ago. So it is not a constant licence fee that is being asked to be drawn on for the World Service; it’s a diminishing licence fee—significantly diminishing in real terms.

I am thinking about the word “moral”, which is quite a strong term to use. I would say that it is a strategic responsibility that they need to recognise—put it that way.

I would say: what are Britain’s aspirations in contributing to the world order and constructively and positively building on our legacy, values and traditions? The BBC can be central in that.

I suppose that if nothing else changes, that is desirable to be able to protect the World Service. But I still think that it is strategically unsustainable in the long term—it is the wrong form of funding.

I think that would be a mistake and a fudge, because the value of grant in aid is for a proper conversation on not just the amount but what the BBC should then be required to deliver in terms of accountability and focus. It would be a mistake in not just its mechanism but its consequences.

We have already heard from the previous panel—I know you were listening avidly—about the fact that there has been a bit of philanthropic funding for some of the specific work of the BBC World Service. Mr Sharp, do you see that as a good and positive thing? Is there potential for more of that kind of philanthropic funding of these valuable services around the world?

In very exceptional and isolated circumstances, yes, but only in that sense.

Not really, is the answer. In my time there was some philanthropic funding through the international charity that is now BBC Media Action for education and health programmes. I think that is appropriate. I was always very uncomfortable when that funding strayed into editorial journalism and output. That feels very uncomfortable to me, and it again raises potential conflicts and policy issues. Philanthropic funding for educational and health programming, or educational courses and so on, can work. It would be only on a project basis, because that is all that these foundations are prepared to fund, but I am uncomfortable about that straying into editorial output.

If we believe in the BBC World Service, and how it has the power to reach out around the world and deliver the huge benefits you have already articulated, should we not be open to more imaginative ways of funding it?

I think if you believe in it then you should fund it properly, rather than hoping that there will be foundations out there that might pick up the bill.

Hello Richard and Richard—an all-Richard panel! It is very different circumstances, Richard Sharp, from when you came in 2023.

Nice to see you again.

You too. My questions carry on with the theme of what the implications for journalism are of these savings, and the difference between—I think you were both there for the last panel—the World Service that we think of as heroic, moral, polyglot and as having soft power, compared with BBC News, which we kind of take for granted. We think of BBC News as just being there, spewing out 24 hours a day in the background. If the BBC did try to protect the World Service, where else are those cuts coming from? Where else should BBC News make savings?

It is worth saying that the journalism of the BBC is outstanding, and it employs some brilliant journalists around the world. What the BBC also must adapt to is the opportunity to significantly reduce costs as a result of digitalisation. There are ways to do things more efficiently and creatively. It is very hard for the BBC to execute that, given its history, but it is an imperative. It has had to do that as a result of the budget constraints, which I have talked about before, and it finds it very hard. I think you were part of the Committee where we had a discussion about some of the cuts to local radio in Northern Ireland—that was a small issue, but whenever the BBC makes cuts it is highly controversial. Clearly, there will continue to be, as with every media company, opportunities to cut administrative costs as a result of efficiencies and technology—it just has to do that like any other organisation. What I would say is, as a result of the substantial reduction of the licence fee in real terms, the bulk of the operating efficiencies have already been obtained, so that cannot be looked at as a way of producing resources for the World Service now, unfortunately.

Hopefully that will be protected. Richard Sambrook, can you identify where those cuts are coming from?

We know where they have already had to come from, under significant pressure. We have referred to cuts in local radio, we have talked about the loss of programmes such as HARDTalk, and we have seen the reporting ability of Newsnight being cut back so that it has become simply a discussion programme late at night.

It has turned into Loose Women, hasn’t it?

Indeed, but that is a choice that has had to be made because of the budget reductions. We have seen foreign postings close, and a number of very experienced journalists have been made redundant. We don’t have to speculate about it; we can see already where the cuts have fallen. That is where they will continue to fall if they continue. Behind the scenes, a lot of the individual resources that particular programmes and strands have enjoyed have been cut back. There has been a lot of integration behind the scenes, which I think has actually been managed very well, but some critics may worry that it will lead to greater homogeneity of output across BBC services. We have already seen that, and we can expect it to continue unless there is a better licence fee settlement or World Service funding is put on a more sustainable basis.

So this is the sort of direction that we are going to have to expect things to go in if these cuts continue—we have to suck it up?

Well, where else can news find—

You also need to understand that, with all the cuts that have taken place, the BBC is still running at a deficit, to some extent. It is facing serious financial pressure in any event.

HARDtalk, which keeps coming up, is a joint production, I think, between BBC News and the World Service, and it is a podcast—so it is all three. Stephen Sackur has said that the cut is depressing, because it is a pillar of the World Service. To a lot of people, it just seems bizarre.

It was licence fee funded, as I understand it, although there may have been cross-charging where it was broadcast elsewhere. If it is the licence fee, presumably the decision was made because of UK audience reach to some extent. HARDtalk had a very strong international brand, but it wasn’t much watched in the UK. That is a very good example of why hard choices can impact the World Service disproportionately when licence fee funding comes into question.

Is it a worry that everything will turn into lowest-common-denominator stuff for ratings?

I have no doubt that BBC News management are trying to manage that as well as they can, but they have been set extremely tough targets. It is inevitable that some much-loved brands and faces will disappear.

Okay. Well, the management are in the room and, hopefully, still listening. There are also a number of journalists facing the chop, including Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, Sarah Raynsford and John Sudworth. Again, on the World Service values, we think of these people as very heroic. I think that all three of them have been forcibly ejected from countries or have had to flee because of the content of their journalism. There is a worry—I am glad the BBC is still in the room listening—that there will be implications for the quality and depth of BBC News for UK and global audiences. Nowadays, it is difficult to divide the two, because everything spreads on to all the other platforms that we have been talking about.

Clearly, I am not privy to the decisions that lay behind those choices, but hard choices are having to be made. They will not be being made casually—I can assure you of that.

Okay. Does the other Richard have anything different to add?

No.

Right. Let’s hope for a fairer funding settlement.

Thanks, Rupa. On that basis, what is the solution, Mr Sambrook? Is it just to give the BBC more money, or are there other opportunities and solutions?

I think that the BBC has clearly been looking at greater efficiency, to the extent that it can. Some of that is through merging operations and greater collaboration. My perspective would be that it has pretty much come to the end of what can be squeezed out by those means, so it is now at the stage where there is either a better licence fee settlement for the BBC, or the cuts will become more visible and more painful.

Mr Sharp, now that you are freed from the shackles of chairing the BBC, and with the benefit of hindsight, is there anything that you would have done differently or would be pushing for now if you were still there, with this ongoing financial challenge in mind?

I was certainly disappointed that the last Government was unwilling to do what we discussed. I was unsuccessful in my efforts with a succession of Culture Secretaries, Foreign Ministers and Prime Ministers. That failure was obviously disappointing. I had no problems with some of the efficiencies. I think they caused a real struggle in the newsroom. Within the BBC—in any organisation—change is a threat. But given that it is other people's money, we had a duty to spend it as wisely as possible. As a result of change taking place and the consumption of media changing, combining news operations so that they would be less siloed was entirely appropriate. Unfortunately, as Richard said, we had pretty much reached the end of most efficiencies. There will be more, obviously. I think AI is a fantastic opportunity to bring some further operating efficiencies, too. The BBC has to be nimble, though. As I mentioned, it has an opportunity on the digital front, which the World Service is obviously embracing, and it is incredibly important to the people who consume it. I would point again to, let's say, the Persian language Instagram service for the people of Iran. Therefore, I think that in going with any settlement, there needs to be very careful strategic thinking about where it should be applied and the accountability that the BBC has for delivering on that mandate. It shouldn’t just be, receive the money and we will do what we want to do. It has to be fulfilled with an obligation to the taxpayer with more specificity than we provided, certainly when I was there, and I think that is appropriate. As I mentioned, I also think there is room for thinking through the benefit that the BBC gets from Ofcom’s scrutiny in the domestic market and creating something analogous for the World Service, so that it cannot just continue to be impartial and accurate and trusted, but also has mechanisms that it can point to that reinforce it.

So taking your point that this is other people’s money that the BBC is spending and considering that, effectively, despite all the cost savings that have been made, the BBC is still financially struggling to fund the World Service in the way that you or we would want it to be funded, is it time to look at a different way of funding the BBC in the charter review that we are heading towards?

That will take place, I have no doubt about that.

What would be the solution, from your position of having been there at the heart of it and seen under the bonnet?

I am sure you will obtain a lot of evidence. That is a separate topic to this specific one, but what I have mentioned in the past is that, obviously, we need to understand the regressive nature of the licence fee—and there are mechanisms to adjust that—and we probably need to look at the universal mandate for the BBC and decide where we want the BBC to go, and then have funding that is fit for purpose. The one thing I felt very comfortable about with the BBC is that we now have enough commercial competitors to see that, when you look at the cost of what the BBC delivers, it is in fact delivering value for money. On the global stage, though, where we have the dominance of US players in particular, there are essential things that go to the fabric of a society that the media and the culture represent. It’s not just entertainment; it goes with values, identity and social cohesion. You need a successful BBC to do that. Therefore, the funding should be appropriate for that right across the board in terms of the many different functions that the BBC fulfils. Localism is obviously an important one, but identity is another, in terms of the different voices within the UK, so that people see themselves represented in a British way, not just in an American way.

This is the last question. If there is a final message that you think we should take forward as a Committee, as we conclude this inquiry and we come to question the Secretary of State, what would it be? What would your parting message to us be, Mr Sambrook?

I would say to look afresh at the strategic asset that the World Service represents and how, in the current environment, it can play a very strong role in projecting British values, and at its potential role in an increasingly volatile geopolitical situation. It is about taking a strategic view of that and therefore finding the right, appropriate form of funding for that, rather than the tactical view, which is what has happened up to now, in my view.

That is interesting. Mr Sharp?

I would say that in a globally connected world, culture and media have the opportunity to be distributed effectively globally and make a difference. The BBC plays an essential part in that, as Britain does, and the World Service is an essential component of delivering that.

That is very clear. Thank you both for your time today. It is clear from what we have heard from both panels that while the Budget settlement was a welcome short-term intervention, the long-term sustainability and success of the BBC World Service, and how incredibly vital it is, definitely needs more thought from Ministers. We know that our friends on the Foreign Affairs Committee are meeting to discuss this same topic this afternoon. Their focus is going to be more on how the World Service contributes to our soft power. I expect that our two Committees will want to come together in the coming weeks to raise what we have found with the leadership of the BBC and with the Government. Thank you for your contribution today, because it will very much help as we take this conversation forward.