In October last year, after discussions that took place over just nine days, the BBC agreed to take the funding of the World Service off the hands of the government from 2014. At the same time, as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review, the Foreign Office announced a 16 per cent cut – £46 million – in the World Service budget. By the time it leaves its imperious headquarters at Bush House on Aldwych next year and moves into the renovated Broadcasting House on Portland Place, the World Service will have shrunk significantly, shedding language services, listeners, programmes, staff and frequencies. It lost ten of its language services in 2005 in order to fund the launch of Arabic and Persian television channels, and five more this year; in addition, seven services have stopped broadcasting on radio, surviving as internet-only operations. Although the foreign affairs select committee, which has emerged as the World Service’s greatest champion, helped to secure a concession of £2.2 million a year, it has failed to convince the government that the cuts should be reversed completely.
The World Service, originally the Empire Service when it was founded in 1932, is today one of the last remaining traces of imperial reach. It is the largest international public service broadcaster: over the past ten years, its audience has reached 184 million. The Foreign Office’s readiness to take money away from the World Service and then shrug off financial responsibility for it appears short-sighted, especially at a time when international broadcasting is entering a new period of expansion: the Chinese are investing £2 billion a year in overseas broadcasting, eight times as much as the World Service, while the US spends twice as much. But it should be borne in mind that the Foreign Office is itself embattled. Hated by the Treasury and caricatured in Whitehall as a home for cocktail-drinking loafers, it was sidelined under Labour and received a significant blow in 2007, when the Treasury abolished the overseas price mechanism, which had protected overseas spending against currency fluctuation. In a bid to rebuild its status under a new government and a strong foreign secretary, the Foreign Office has shown little compunction in slashing the World Service and the British Council (a 25 per cent cut), while giving itself a comparatively light trim at 6 per cent. As part of the deal with the BBC, the Foreign Office will continue to have a say in setting the priorities, objectives and targets for the World Service even after it comes under the licence fee in 2014, and the BBC will need the foreign secretary’s consent to open and close language services. These conditions were, a senior insider tells me, a potential deal breaker in the negotiations in which the BBC secured the licence fee – frozen at the current level – for the next six years.
Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director general, told me in June that the Foreign Office’s continuing control is ‘a fine constitutional point’ which can be addressed in the next charter renewal – no more threatening, he believes, than the potential the government already has under the terms of the charter for interfering in the business of the BBC. But the Foreign Office veto has in fact been a headache for the World Service, most recently stopping its director, Peter Horrocks, from closing as many language services as he originally proposed as a way of managing the cuts.
Such tensions are not new. ‘We would have extended our broadcasts in a number of ways to different languages,’ recalls John Tusa, who ran the World Service from 1986 to 1992, ‘but because the FCO had this ludicrous power of prescription they’d say no. And we’d say there’s an audience there, there’s a need there. And then sometimes when a crisis developed they’d say: “Oh, would you start broadcasting to such and such a country.” And I found it very unsatisfactory because it seemed to determine that who we broadcast to was determined not so much by whether there was an audience there but by FCO policy priorities and that in itself damages the independence and the perceived independence of the World Service.’ For Tusa, this was an argument for bringing the World Service deeper inside the BBC fold, though he would have liked it to keep its own pot of government money. The fact that the BBC was prepared to accept the continuing veto in last year’s negotiations shows how important it was to push the deal through. The six-year licence fee deal was a coup, protecting the BBC, for the moment, from cuts and further skirmishes with the government.
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