Let’s have a smaller, better BBC

Now is the moment to save our national broadcaster from itself, says producer david cox

Gordon Brown's refusal to award the BBC inflation-beating increases in the licence fee last January is having more impact than expected. Programme spending, not just the corporation's bloated bureaucracy, is to be cut radically over the next five years.

What's more, instead of simply axing less essential activities, managers plan to salami-
slice across the board. Since cuts are hardest to make in fields in which the BBC faces competition, like entertainment, core public service output is hardest hit. Newsnight has already been cut by 15 per cent and faces a further cut of 20 per cent. The documentary series Storyville could be cut by 60 per cent.

Meanwhile, the BBC's populist programmes and its profusion of digital services remain sacrosanct, however irrelevant they may seem to its central mission. They are intended to extend the organisation's overall reach.

Newsnight’s budget faces another 20% cut while populist programmes are sacrosanct

This is because managers believe audience size must be maximised at all costs, to maintain public support for as high a licence fee as can be secured.

Paradoxically, the reason they require such a high licence fee is to maintain the scale of this self-same corporate empire.

Soon, the corporation's new regulator, the BBC Trust, will have to decide whether to endorse this strange, circular logic. Later this month, it will meet to consider the cuts proposals. Its easiest course would be to rubber-stamp the management's plans. Those who care about the future of public broadcasting must hope it shows more guts.

The Trust should tell managers that the time has come for a new approach. Trashy entertainment and unnecessary outlets should get the chop, not reporters and documentary-makers. In future, the BBC should concentrate on high-quality, serious, innovative and social-cohesion-building output of the kind that commercial broadcasters will not provide. In short, it should do much less, and do it better.