Recommendation 18

The BBC told us that its savings programme to date has focused primarily on support and back-office functions, with its indirect costs now among the lowest of comparable media companies. It said that, because those functions have now been cut to the bone, it is increasingly having to look at savings in audience-facing areas which have traditionally been protected, such as journalism and programme-making. The BBC suggested that there is no scenario in which it can avoid these tough choices, but said the licence fee payer would continue to get a very fulsome offer.32 We challenged the BBC to provide specific examples of where these cuts would hit. The BBC provided only one specific example: that of 150 redundancies among frontline staff in the news division.33