Line of command

Apologies to domestically-focussed blog readers for a heavy week of World Service posts. Here's another one, of interest to those who study BBC management moves instead of watching East Enders, Coronation Street or Celebrity Big Brother.

The House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs has produced its annual report, and, in a two page section on the BBC, opposes any commercialisation of World Service as it moves to licence fee funding from April. This is a problem for the BBC - having been instructed by both the FCO and Trust to swim in those very waters, and having based both alternative future funding strategies on at least some advertising revenue.

The committee also thinks it's being helpful by trying to get the Director of Global News, Peter "Lee Ryan" Horrocks, higher up the Corporation structure. Here's the relevant bit.

88. In oral evidence to this inquiry, it emerged that not only was there no direct representation of the World Service on the BBC’s Executive Board: Mr Horrocks no longer sits on what used to be known as the BBC Direction Group and is now the BBC Management Board, responsible for “managing pan-BBC issues delegated to it from the Executive Board” and “ensuring that the organisation meets its pan-BBC objectives”. Although Mr Horrocks did not accept that this was a demotion, he recognised the “symbolism of representation”. He also acknowledged that the integration of the BBC World Service with the mainstream organisation would mean that it would be sharing resources which it had previously owned and run directly, and the BBC would be balancing the demands of the World Service with those of other, domestic arms of the Corporation.

89. We conclude that the World Service will be ever more dependent on the Director of News for priority access to the resources—both technical and human—which it needs in order to meet its obligations. We are not convinced that the protection of the BBC World Service’s interests within the BBC’s governance structure is as strong as is being claimed, and the picture appears to us to be one of steady erosion of World Service influence within the BBC. The World Service will be heavily reliant in future upon advocacy by a single Executive Board member, who has many other competing responsibilities. The result may be that the World Service is more regularly denied the resources it needs to maintain or develop services. We recommend once again that the World Service should be represented on the BBC Executive Board, and we believe that the Director of BBC Global News should be a member of the Management Board.

This is problematic for Director of News James Harding - who, having assessed his new team at the BBC, chose Fran Unsworth to be his number two, rather than Peter. The organogram would be a right mess.