Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Conclusion 14
72nd Report - BBC World Service
Published 13 Mar 2026
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee BBC World Service 2024-25 All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
Performance varied widely across services. Language services that became digital-only in 2022–23 saw overall audiences fall by 63% and their digital audiences by 39%, while services that closed either radio or TV but retained the other declined by less. Within the digital-only group, declines were concentrated in Nigerian language services, which the BBC told us reflected Facebook’s deprioritisation of news in its algorithm. Over the same period, the World Service’s Facebook reach globally fell by 17% to 46 million. The BBC did not analyse why performance varied across services, nor evaluate common factors behind stronger or weaker results, and it has not analysed the extent to which the savings programmes and digital strategy affected digital-only services.31
From: Public Accounts Committee, 72nd Report - BBC World Service (HC 1299), 13 March 2026
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 1 June 2026 (deadline 13 May 2026).