Recommendation 4

At times, the BBC has deferred difficult measures and ducked the hard choices necessary over cuts to frontline content. The BBC is candid about its view that, having driven down costs in back-office functions, it now sees no scenario in which it can avoid making tough choices about frontline services such as content. While we recognise that these choices are difficult, the BBC was unable to name any recent content cuts or future plans to cut content, despite plans to only produce 80% of its current programming. At this stage, we would expect to see a clearer articulation of which programming the BBC views as a priority going forward. This seems to be part of a general pattern of avoiding hard choices. For example, the BBC delayed more than once planned redundancies in its News and Nations & Regions divisions and its reforms to staff terms and conditions resulted in savings of less than 0.1% of the total staff pay bill over seven years. Recommendation: The BBC needs to take decisions about those areas of content it plans to cut from its programming and the financial and audience consequences of these cuts as a matter of urgency, and should write to the Committee within six months with more details of its plans in this area.