Next up for Lord Patten – several years worth of tricky decisions
Raymond Snoddy: If Lord Patten can handle the sometimes sulphurous politics of a major university, never mind the Tory party, then the manoeuvrings of the BBC are tame by comparison…
Lord Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, likes to tell the story of what US President Woodrow Wilson said when he resigned as President of Princeton to run for public office.
Wilson noted he had decided to give up “active politics”.
The implication for Patten, Chancellor of Oxford is clear. If he can handle the sometimes sulphurous politics of a major university, never mind the Tory party, then the manoeuvrings of the BBC are tame by comparison.
Today Lord Patten was able to demonstrate for the first time the advantage of having a former political heavyweight at the top of the Corporation. Patten has managed to find an extra £15.6 million over three years to at least mitigate cuts imposed on the World Service by the Government.
He persuaded Foreign Secretary William Hague to come up with £6.6 million, with the rest coming from lower than expected re-structuring and pension costs.
Modest maybe, but the first bit of good financial news to come out of the BBC for a while, and an indication of how much Lord Patten values the World Service as an exporter of “British values of fairness, accuracy and impartiality”.
The BBC Trust chairman added: “As Aung San Suu Kyi said only this week, the World Service is a lifeline for those hungry for unbiased news about their country and the wider world.”
This in unlikely to mean a return for Dave Lee Travis but it will sustain the Hindi short wave services, support the Somali service and mean more broadcasts in Arabic and Pashtun.
Next up for Patten – several years worth of tricky decisions, which will all have to be taken in the next six months.
A quick and dirty “governance” review is already under way, mainly so that the issue can be parked for the rest of his four-year term as chairman.
The biggest issue was resolved before Patten agreed to take the job.
The Government was warned that any attempt to appoint a chairman for the BBC executive committee would be a deal-breaker because of the ambiguity that would have been created about who really was chairman of the BBC.
Patten has also made it clear that he is totally opposed to any privatisation of BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC – an idea that re-emerges from political circles from time to time.
The BBC chairman clearly believes the regulatory and competition hurdles involved would be insuperable and anyway he wants to see an expansion of Worldwide and BBC World as a way of boosting the BBC’s reputation around the world and earning extra revenue.
The current sale of BBC magazines will be followed by the sale of the Lonely Planet business, a deal that Patten clearly believes should never have happened. Issues involving the state of the Australian dollar, however, stand in the way at the moment.
Then there will be a review of the entire salary structure of the BBC with the BBC Trust clearly believing that more than 16 pay grades at the Corporation are far too many and some at the lower end of the scale who actually make the programmes might actually benefit from a fairer system.
But all of these decisions are mere entrees, the main course and the one that will define Lord Patten’s reputation as BBC chairman, will be how up to 20% is cut from the overall BBC budget over the next five years.
He will have read of commercial radio executive John Myers’ surprise to find out that there are 52 staff on Radio 1’s Newsbeat programme and then there are the announcers who don’t actually write any of the news.
As a former politician Lord Patton will be aware, as Mrs Thatcher famously was, of the sometimes considerable number of BBC staff from different outlets across the Corporation who come to conduct remarkably similar interviews.
The existing system of widespread autonomy for programme and strand editors helps to provide editorial variety but such duplication, though not as bad as in the past, is a luxury the BBC can no longer afford.
And if Bernie Ecclestone wants to keep Formula 1 on terrestrial television, then he will have to greatly reduce his sights from the £300 million five-year deal signed in 2009.
It was a huge deal at the time with the BBC believing it was bidding against ITV, when in fact the commercial broadcaster had quietly decided to fold its tents and steal away.
It is hoped that the Trust will also have a very serious look at all departments not involved in the commissioning and making of programmes.
But there is a clear realisation at the BBC Trust from the continuing conversations with BBC management that there will still be a gap even after the maximum efficiencies have been achieved.
Then “difficult” decisions will have to be taken.
The licence payers will not be allowed to have formal access to the list of options now under consideration – though some have been announced and many of the more extreme examples leaked on a regular basis.
If all goes according to schedule, a list of “proposals” will be published in September and there will be a brief consultation period.
If Lord Patten is wise and wants to avoid an outbreak of Princeton style “active politics”, he will find a way of ensuring that the proposals do not including closing major services such as BBC Four or BBC Three.
Four is among one of the best things the BBC does and Three is an accurately targeted service that keeps the Corporation in touch with younger viewers, and sometimes even produces hits for transfer to the mainstream channels.
Above all, the urbane Lord Patten has got to find smarter ways than that of using guaranteed income of £3.5 billion a year to better effect.