Recommendation 20

We asked the BBC what it would do if it were to receive the funding settlement it requested from the FCDO. The BBC told us that it was grateful that the FCDO had increased funding by £30 million in 2025–26 and it had asked for a similar increase for 2026–27. The BBC explained that this level of increase would not allow for transformational change due to financial pressures such as inflation and continued investment in digital services.40 However, the BBC did set out an ambition to use any additional funding in several ways including extending the use of AI as a translation tool to grow its “slim-line” service in Polish to other markets such as Hungarian and Romanian and investing further in countering disinformation.41 Enabling good decision making