1 BBC Strategic Review 2010 A response by the Institute of Welsh Affairs 1. The Institute of Welsh Affairs (IWA) is pleased to have this opportunity to respond the BBC Trust’s consultation on the Strategy Review prepared by the BBC Executive. The IWA has been concerned with issues surrounding public service broadcasting for some years. We have given oral evidence to the BBC Trust’s Impartiality Report on network news and current affairs undertaken by Professor Anthony King. We made submissions to the different phases of Ofcom’s second review of public service broadcasting and during that process were commissioned by the Welsh Government to carry out an audit of media in Wales1. Our chairman was also a member of the Welsh Government’s broadcasting advisory group, which published its report in November 20082. We conducted public consultations on the issues in different parts of Wales, in collaboration with Ofcom, and also held a seminar on the future of PSB in Wales, publishing an edited transcript of the proceedings3. Last year we also published a book on what we see as a crisis for English language television broadcasting in Wales4. This was a selection of essays that dealt both with the general situation and the factors surrounding different programme genres. We have also supported the previous UK Government’s proposals for independently financed news consortia to deliver news for Wales on ITV. 2. We start from a firm belief that the BBC is the all-important cornerstone of public service broadcasting in Britain, and should remain so for the foreseeable future. We believe that it enshrines public values that reflect the best to which our society aspires and, at its best, enables those values to resonate through our society and its institutions. 3. We also believe that the BBC has, over the decades, made major contributions to Welsh culture and society, and that it can and should continue to enhance that contribution in the coming years, conscious of the retreat of the other main public service broadcaster, ITV, from its previous extensive provision in Wales. Our connection with the BBC is a source of creative strength, which we should maintain. 4. We applaud the BBC for the initiatives it has taken to decentralise production, to Cardiff, Manchester and Glasgow, and particularly its decision to create the drama village in Cardiff to capitalise on the network drama successes of BBC Wales over the last decade. We are only sorry that Channel 4, now to be the only other significant public service broadcaster, has not so far been willing set itself similar targets, and that ITV has sought to reduce its traditional high spend outside London. 5. For these reasons we are broadly supportive of the overall thrust of the Strategy Review: that the BBC should act as one of the main guarantors of public space, that it should concentrate on being a creator of quality, that it should be a catalyst and connector through making its partnership role with other civic institutions central to its mission. 6. This submission addresses the biggest single omission in the Strategy Review, namely the total lack of consideration of or even reference to the programme services made in and specifically for the smaller nations of the UK. We do so because we have found it difficult to believe that such an omission could have been possible at the end of the first decade of devolved government within this 1 Media in Wales: serving public values, by Geraint Talfan Davies and Nick Morris. IWA, May 2008 2 Communication and content: the media challenge for Wales, a report by the broadcasting advisory group to the Minister for Heritage. Welsh Government, November 2008. 3 Future of Welsh Broadcasting, transcript of an Ofcom/IWA seminar. May 2008. 4 English is a Welsh language: television’s crisis in Wales, (editor) Geraint Talfan Davies. IWA, March 2009. 2 country, in the light of the close attention given to broadcasting by all the devolved administrations, and especially so soon after the severe criticisms of the BBC’s metro-centricity in network news coverage made by Professor King. The omission calls into question some fundamental aspects of the working of the corporation. The Welsh context 7. First, however, we wish to emphasise the context in which the BBC’s services in Wales operate, namely that the media provision in Wales is, overall, substantially weaker than in Scotland or Northern Ireland. The only exception is the provision for the Welsh language. The details have been rehearsed endlessly in the media debate in Wales in recent years but, if anything, the situation continues to deteriorate. 8. Indigenous print media in Wales are already limited, particularly at the all-Wales level. No London newspaper publishes a Welsh edition. As the IWA’s media audit concluded: “perhaps the most startling fact of all to emerge from our researches is that each day only 100,000 readers in Scotland read a newspaper with no Scottish content, where as in Wales 1,760,000 (nearly 90 per cent) are reading papers with virtually no Welsh content. It seems to us impossible to argue that those figures do not have serious consequences for informed democracy in Wales.” 9. Wales is the country where the BBC is most dominant in radio and television. Wales has the weakest commercial radio provision, with no speech radio competition for the BBC. It is the only one of the three nations where none of its commercial radio stations is indigenously owned, and the only one whose ITV franchise-holder was absorbed into ITV plc. 10. English language television has born the brunt of recent structural changes. ITV programming for Wales has declined from a peak of 624 hours per annum to the current 286 hours, of which 208 hours are news. Without some government intervention (currently unlikely) the remaining 90 minutes per week of general programmes for Wales, will disappear soon. 11. BBC Wales television output in the English language, has also declined from its peak of 883 hours of originations in 2003-04 to 721 in 2008-09, a reduction of 18%, with a concomitant reduction in the range of programming. A further reduction has taken place in 2009-10. From its peak of more than £26 million in 2003-04 spend on the service has already declined to £23m and, at the current rate, could well be below £20 million by 2012-13 when the current savings programme comes to an end. 12. Wales will have the lowest population coverage of any of the four UK countries for terrestrial digital transmission systems in both radio and television. In terms of coverage DAB transmission is sure to be significantly inferior to the current FM/AM mix. 13. Broadband take-up has been slower in Wales than in any other part of the UK, and it is likely that high speed broadband will have even greater difficulty is establishing effective coverage and penetration. 14. The Strategy Review enunciates many sound principles to underpin and prioritise its programme investment, and we full endorse them. But these principles need to be applied not only to the BBC’s network services but also to its services for Wales and the other smaller nations. However, these principles cannot be applied effectively without the resources to deliver the volume and range needed to create a rounded service. We would refer you to the conclusion of the Welsh Government’s Broadcasting Advisory Group5: 5 Ibid. paragraphs 2.4-2.7 3 “As a nation, the people of Wales have a right to easily available media in the English language that reflect all the purposes of public service broadcasting as defined both by Ofcom for all PSB providers and by the Government for the BBC. “Such provision should be in addition to the specific and different needs of Welsh-speakers, for whom S4C remains the only television platform available in their own language. “The totality of media provision in Wales must contribute to and fully reflect: i) a properly informed democracy, able to access high quality reportage, analysis and investigation from a variety of professional sources. ii) a culturally rounded society, for which the media provide adequate room for full and varied expression. iii) A visibly creative economy in which the media pioneer innovation and are a driver of the creative industries.” “The current system does not achieve all these goals now, and needs substantial enhancement. Without significant intervention it will weaken further and the opportunity to fulfil Wales’s creative potential, with all the economic and democratic benefits that that would entail, could be missed.” 15. With the effective demise, outside news, of the ITV service for Wales the BBC has a particular responsibility to fulfil this task, especially in television for the majority non- Welsh-speaking audience. It needs to be accorded a far higher priority than it has been given hitherto by the BBC, in order to fulfil the first two principles enunciated in the Strategy Review, namely ‘putting quality first’ and ‘doing fewer things better’. Prioritising quality services for Wales 16. An examination of the service licences issued by the BBC Trust shows that the total spend on the BBC’s four main UK television services, plus channels for children, news and Parliament, is now £1.814 billion. The spend on the BBC Wales English language television service is slightly more than £23 million, less than 1.3 per cent of the UK spend. 17. Another 1.4 per cent is spent on BBC Wales programmes for S4C, but it should not be forgotten that when S4C was established the BBC received a small addition to the licence fee that has been built into its baseline ever since.