The Stage

BBC Trust orders re-think of Corporation’s savings plan

Published Thursday 26 January 2012 at 10:54 by Matthew Hemley

The BBC is having to look again at areas where it can make millions of pounds of savings, after the BBC Trust reported its initial findings on the Corporation’s Delivering Quality First initiative.

In a report detailing its interim findings on DQF – which outlines how the BBC plans to make savings of 20% following 2010’s licence fee settlement - the trust said it is, on the whole, “content for the executive to take forward its budget planning on the basis of the plans drawn up”.

However, it said it had identified some areas where it has asked the BBC executive to ‘re-think their proposals” because of the affect they could have on the Corporation’s “journalistic offer”.

In particular, it said the BBC’s plans for local radio, which included a proposal for stations to share programming in off-peak slots, should be reconsidered.

The trust said the “scale and impact” of the cuts would be “disproportionate to the value of these services and their audience”.

BBC Trust chair Chris Patten said: “We have asked the management to look again at the planned cuts to local radio. We have also asked for a re-think of the plans for merging regional current affairs programmes in England into ‘super-regions’. We want to see a plan that will preserve the regional integrity and investigative quality of this programming, which no other broadcaster provides”.

He added the changes should cost the BBC “no more than £10 million” and added the trust has asked the BBC to “bring us new proposals with suggestions of how they might save the money from non-content budgets”.

Responding, the BBC said that DQF has required it “to make some tough choices” and added that it will be working on changes to its proposals over the next two months.

Earlier this month, both Equity and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain warned that the BBC’s DQF warned that the proposals are a “recipe for continued neglect and decline of original UK drama and comedy”, with writers and actors claiming they will suffer a loss of work as a result.

The DQF report proposes reducing the amount of drama on BBC4 and removing a third of BBC3’s drama funding to invest in dramas on BBC1.