Competing for control

It was one of the flagship promises in Mark Thompson’s Delivering Quality First document, announced to much fanfare in October 2011: BBC3 would move to Salford by the end of 2016, marking the first real shift of TV network commissioning power out of London.

Yet in March last year, director of television Danny Cohen said the move was “on ice”, as part of plans to close BBC3 as a TV channel and take it online-only. And when pressed by Broadcast last week, a BBC spokesman confirmed that the Salford move has been abandoned.

“There are no plans to move BBC3 to Salford. BBC3 works with teams across the UK to deliver thought-provoking news and documentaries, digital experiences and live events,” said the spokesman. “We are currently focused on our proposals to transform BBC3 from a linear TV channel to an online-first proposition. Once the decision is made, we will review how the channel operates day to day.”

So what promise is there, in 2015, that budgets and commissioning power will be moved outside London? “We now have 35% of network TV spend in the English regions outside London – that’s a very significant number,” says Jenny Baxter, chief operating officer of BBC England.

Regional debate
But what about moving decision-making power out of London too? “What we show people here in Salford is what the opportunity is, and we will now build on that success,” she says.

“It’s less about, ‘does this person have to live in this region, and understand this region, to be responsible for this genre of activity?’ Of course that can be part of the story, but it’s much more about how the whole BBC works to deliver all of the responsibilities to audiences. It’s about connecting commissioners, whether they’re in London or another part of the UK, with brilliant content makers.”

The Midlands has a particularly vocal lobby, with the region’s newspapers and politicians repeatedly calling for it to keep more of the £942m that its residents pay in licence fees.

One idea is for Peter Salmon’s new BBC Studios – a potentially monolithic part of the corporation – to be headquartered in Birmingham. In July, Tory MP for Sutton Coldfield Andrew Mitchell said: “Because Birmingham is a British centre of the creative arts, it is clearly the right place for the BBC to carry through this initiative.” However, it appears Mitchell will be disappointed. “More important than where Studios is headquartered is who is leading it, and what it sets out to do,” says Baxter. “Peter has a fantastic understanding of what the out-of-London regions can contribute to quality production.”

Baxter also points out that by the end of this financial year, BBC spend in the Midlands will have increased to £125m a year – up 50% over the past two years.

Nonetheless, broadcasting minister Ed Vaizey has promised that the “strong case” made by Midlands MPs about the BBC’s low level of spend in the region will be reflected in the government’s proposals for the new charter.

Such sharp elbows will, no doubt, help the Midlands – but equally deserving producers in other regions fear they could lose out as a result. “It’s not about there being guaranteed spend in Yorkshire – it’s about not leaving indies here to compete for a tiny slice of BBC spending, because so much has been guaranteed elsewhere,” says Hugo Heppell, head of investments at Screen Yorkshire.

Yorkshire is part of the ‘North’ region that is supposed to be serviced by the BBC’s operation in Salford, but Heppell says BBC North’s impact east of the Pennines has, so far, been “relatively small”.

He points out that there can be downsides to ring-fenced funding and production quotas. “You enter an artificial, and sometimes absurd, ecology and production business,” he says. “So things will be commissioned out of Northern Ireland, but shot in the south-west and Yorkshire, because, actually, that’s where it needs to be done.”

One budget that the BBC does have to slice up, county by county and city by city, is its regional and local news provision. Regional TV news, in particular, seems to be in rude health: when country-wide figures are added up, the 6.30pm BBC1 bulletin is the most popular news show on any national channel. There is even a possibility – as happened during the general election campaign – that BBC1’s late-evening regional news will be extended by 10 minutes Monday to Friday, to 10.45pm.

The story for local radio is very different, however: Rajar figures show that weekly reach is down by about 500,000 listeners in the past two years. One long-serving local radio producer complains of feeling “unloved” by BBC management, and laments “flip-flops” in its approach to programming: “First we have to do a news agenda – then suddenly it’s all about personality.”

Yet David Holdsworth, controller of BBC English regions, says there is no cause for panic. “There is a certain kind of listener who primarily uses local radio for short bursts of information – the weather, or traffic – and digital disruption means that kind of listener no longer needs local radio to service their needs.

“But for listeners who have the deeper, emotional relationship with us, I think the performance is pretty good. The numbers are still between 6 and 7 million, and there are still a lot of listeners who don’t listen to any other radio stations at all.”

Press objections
Holdsworth says he doesn’t anticipate a threat of closure to any local radio stations in the charter renewal process – despite the BBC’s local presence coming under regular fi re from local and regional newspaper groups.

A recent BBC proposal to fund 100 journalists up and down the country, who would provide public service content that could also be used by local papers, was dismissed by Johnston Press chief Ashley Highfield as “BBC imperialism through the back door”.

But Holdsworth says the proposal is very much still alive, “in the spirit of, ‘we’re listening and we’re open to feedback; to ways to evolve it’”.

He points to improved external linking from the BBC website to local newspaper websites (though he provides no figures about the amount of traffic delivered), and to a pilot scheme that allows local papers to use BBC video on their websites (with a prohibition on pre-roll ads, which could strip the idea of its commercial value).

Holdsworth says the BBC will end up spending about £9m over three years, against an original government target of £15m, buying content from the newly licenced local TV stations. There will be a shortfall because fewer stations have been licenced than originally envisaged, he says – but, equally, he acknowledges that not all of the content is used in any form, even online, by the BBC.

Because it’s not up to scratch? “That would be a qualitative judgement, that wouldn’t be for me to decide.”

But what if the bottom line is that the local newspaper industry simply wants the BBC’s footprint to be smaller in the future? “I don’t think that’s what licence fee payers want,” says Holdsworth. “Whatever our proposals are, they’re about adding to the whole, not taking away from it. There is audience demand for local.”