Cloth cutting

The latest National Audit Office report on the BBC's hunt for savings makes grim reading, especially as the Tories play a typically-shambolic-Johnsonian waiting game on settling the licence fee.

Here's some bits. The BBC is £41m short of its self-imposed savings target for 2021/22. You can get to £41m by combining, for example, the content spend on BBC4 and BBC6music.

The BBC has massively increased the amount of third-party funding for its own productions. The NAO warns "It has traded potential but uncertain long-term returns, in order to secure guaranteed funding to meet short-term cost pressures".

Between 2016-17 and 2020-21 the BBC’s staff costs fell by less than 2% in real terms. Yet  the underlying size of the BBC workforce fell by almost 6% between 2016-17 and 2020-21. Between 2016-17 and 2020-21, income from the licence fee fell in real terms by more than 8%. 

More than 1,800 staff were made redundant between 2017-18 and 2020-21, with almost 1,000 of these only taking place in 2020-21. Almost 1,100 of its redundancies were in the BBC’s Nations and News divisions, which together employ about 40% of the BBC’s workforce. About one third of the 1,100 redundancies involved front-line journalist roles.

The inertia over making savings in the BBC's News and Nations division cost real money. By the time things got going in July 2020, each month of delay cost about £1.7 million a month in lost savings in its News division. 

Two warnings about the News reforms: "News unable to provide meaningful data demonstrating the roll-out of its reforms or the baseline level of performance against which improvements arising from the initiative will be assessed" and "A restructuring of senior management roles. Past NAO government audit experience shows that structural changes have limited impact on improving ways of working. Instead it is creating the right management/leadership environment that has most impact."

The number of staff working in the BBC's commercial operations from 1,325 in 2016/17 to 2342 in 2020/21 - a rise of 76%. Yet the return to licence fee payers in 2020-21 totalled totalled £210 million, exactly the same as 2016/17. 

"We found no evidence of the BBC taking a consistent approach to the identification and application of lessons, specifically from its implementation of savings measures across the organisation"