Foreign Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: The future of the BBC World Service, HC 384
Tuesday 19 November 2024
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 19 November 2024.
Members present: Emily Thornberry (Chair); Aphra Brandreth; Dan Carden; Richard Foord; Claire Hazelgrove; Uma Kumaran; Blair McDougall; Abtisam Mohamed; Edward Morello; Sir John Whittingdale.
Questions 1 - 56
Witnesses
I: Dr Jieun Kiaer, Young Bin Min-Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Linguistics, and Senior Research Fellow and Dean of Degrees, Hertford College, University of Oxford; Professor Martin Scott, Professor of Media and Global Development, University of East Anglia; and Dr Nicholas Westcott, former UK Ambassador to Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Togo and Niger, former High Commissioner to Ghana, and Professor of Practice at SOAS, University of London.
II: Jamie Angus, Chief Operating Officer, Al Arabiya News Channel, former Director of the BBC World Service; and Baroness Arminka Helić, Peer in the House of Lords, former Special Adviser to William Hague during his time as Foreign Secretary.
Witnesses: Dr Kiaer, Professor Scott and Dr Westcott.
Chair: Today the Committee is holding its first evidence session on the matter of the BBC World Service. The World Service provides news to radio, television and digital audiences around the world in 42 languages and is a key plank of the UK’s soft power.
We have two panels of experts today to give us context and detail about the BBC’s operations. Thank you ever so much for coming in; we are so pleased to see you. Having read your bios and what you have said, I think we have an extremely impressive panel in front of us, and we would love to have your help. Could I ask the panel first to introduce themselves to the public?
Dr Kiaer: Hello. My name is Jieun Kiaer. I am professor of Korean linguistics at the University of Oxford and senior research fellow at Hertford College.
Professor Scott: Hello, everyone. My name is Martin Scott. I am a professor of media and global development at the University of East Anglia. I have done research on public diplomacy, the BBC World Service and other topics.
Dr Westcott: I am Nick Westcott. I am the professor of practice in diplomacy at SOAS, University of London, and a former British diplomat.
Q1 Chair: Thank you ever so much. We have a lot of questions to get through and we would like to direct them to individuals, if that is all right. If you want to add anything, please do indicate but could I ask for answers to be kept as concise as possible so that we can hear everything from everybody? If you agree with what somebody else has said, please do feel at liberty just to say you agree and not necessarily to say why you agree. There is no problem with not adding anything if it is not necessary, because we have so many questions and so much to get through, and we have such fantastic witnesses—so let’s get on with it.
I want to ask Dr Westcott some questions about the concept of soft power, as I think that is probably a good place to start. It is in the context of the impact of the BBC World Service on foreign policy. How would you describe Britain’s soft power strengths and—this is important—how are they measured?
Dr Westcott: Soft power is a rather amorphous concept and therefore it is quite hard to objectively measure, but there are some commonly recognised components. In relation to the UK specifically, I think there are three components in particular that constitute the main bulk of our soft power.
The first is values. That constitutes everything that the UK represents in terms of democracy, support of human rights, freedom of speech and rule of law. That is quite important, but it is something simply from what we are. It is also vulnerable, if people see that we are not abiding by those values.
The second is the education system, which is more concrete in that it brings people here or it sends people out. It is seen as an area of global excellence and it is one through which there is a huge multiplier effect—people who have been to study here go back to their countries of origin and take with them an image of Britain.
The third is what some people more classically think of as soft power, which is culture—through the English language, the royal family, arts and crafts, music and football: what makes up what we think of as British culture. That is very strong but again is quite amorphous.
Those are the three key areas, but how does that create impact for Britain? It is through our reputation, through interest in what we do and, if you like, through the power of attraction. People think: “Oh, Britain is a good place, I want to meet British people or visit Britain or find out more about it.”
Chair: It is a very interesting answer but it does not tell us how soft power is going to be measured.
Dr Westcott: There are various international measures that try to measure soft power. The Pew Research Centre in the US, for example, does regular surveys to find out which are the most attractive countries. They use different criteria, including countries that are popular or regarded as good places to live—these things can be measured—and there are league tables. You want to get yourself up the league table, either as a country to visit or a country that is respected, for example.
Chair: I hope the weather has nothing to do with it.
Dr Westcott: The weather, fortunately, plays a small part—but ease of access to a country plays a big part. If it is quite hard to get to a country and visit for whatever reason, that diminishes the attraction. The UK has scored pretty highly in quite a lot of these, but it has been sinking down the rankings lately.
Q2 Chair: Okay. How can we convert the soft power of the World Service into something tangible in terms of politics or diplomacy?
Dr Westcott: The BBC World Service constitutes a key part of soft power because it represents free speech, transparency and objectivity. It is respected because it is regarded as not pushing a British Government line or a particular line but being open to all. That is a core value and its core advantage. Now, how do you convert that into some form of hard power? Soft power does not give you explicit influence in the world in terms of protecting Britain’s national interests. There has to be a gearing mechanism—a conversion process. Soft power creates fertile soil, but nothing will grow in that unless farmers—sorry, I have farmers on the mind—come and put something in and make it grow. That is a political process.
Q3 Chair: I want to keep pushing on the soft power advantages of the World Service. In what ways might the World Service enhance the soft power capabilities of the UK?
Dr Westcott: People have heard of it. You do not notice it so much here, but BBC World Service presenters are global celebrities. You go to Ghana, and everybody has heard of Komla Dumor, the late presenter on the World Service. He is a national hero. There is huge recognition that to work for the BBC is the dream of many people working in the media throughout the world—certainly in Africa, where I have worked, and also to some extent Asia. That is very direct, and it gives you access and reputation. To deliver a speech or be reported on the BBC gives you huge impact across the world because so many people listen to it, and they listen to it because of the values I mentioned it represented and if the coverage is there. It is not an instrument to be manipulated to give you power. On the contrary, it is through not manipulating it that it has power, but the power is of opening doors, of recognition and of representing what we like to think Britain is.
Q4 Chair: So the way interviews are conducted on the BBC is a positive advantage?
Dr Westcott: Yes, there will be upsides and downsides.
Chair: I can imagine.
Dr Westcott: If on “HARDtalk” you are grilling another country’s president, they might not like all the questions you ask, but the listeners will think, “We could never ask him that question at home, and thank goodness somebody has asked him. What does he say?”
Q5 Chair: Has it had an influence on decisions? Have there been times when a president has been grilled hard and asked to justify themselves, and decisions have been changed as a result?
Dr Westcott: I cannot think of a specific example, but a president, leader or politician coming on the programme knows they have got to have an answer. They may avoid it, if they do not want to answer it—I am not sure the last time Mr Kagame was interviewed on the BBC, for example—but, for those who do, it may influence how they act, because they know they will have to defend it.
Q6 Chair: My last question is about “HARDtalk”. I am told that it is under threat. Is that right?
Dr Westcott: I have heard the same rumours. You would have to ask the BBC itself.
Q7 Chair: Before we do ask the BBC—and I can assure you we will—would you like to give evidence about how important a programme like “HARDtalk” is?
Dr Westcott: Yes. It is very widely respected and very widely listened to, and the fact that it is direct and honest in its questioning is seen globally by most of the audience as a real advantage. There are a few cultures in which it would be considered not appropriate to ask a distinguished public figure embarrassing questions, so there can be some pushback if it is too firm, but that is a judgment on the presenter’s side as to how hard to press.
For example, there was an interview with a man called General Hemedti, who is one of the warlords in Sudan. He was grilled. He did not reveal much, but it was very important that he was asked those questions and to hear what his answers were, even if we know that he is lying. It serves a global public service that this exists in order to call people to account.
Q8 Sir John Whittingdale: Can I quickly follow up on that? The Chair raised “HARDtalk”. I am a fan of “HARDtalk”, and I think it is a little more than a rumour that it is under threat. Stephen Sackur has posted: “Today BBC News has announced plans to close @BBCHARDtalk after 3 decades holding the world’s politicians and powerbrokers to account.” I have raised this with the BBC already, separately; they said, “Oh well, it had very small audiences and it cost a lot.”
It seems to me that those are not the measures by which the BBC should judge a programme. Actually, it was doing something that I doubt many other broadcasters do, which you have described—asking hard questions, in an impartial way, of leading statesmen. I just worry that the BBC is, as it is domestically, worried too much about audiences and cost, and not enough about public service broadcasting. What would you say?
Dr Westcott: I would broadly agree with that. I think the BBC has to manage itself so that it continues to attract an audience, meaning it needs to provide—coverage of the Africa cup of nations gets hundreds of thousands or even millions of listeners, and is probably one of the most listened to things that it does and it brings huge respect; “HARDtalk” far less. It needs to be able to do both, which means accepting that there will be some programmes that are less popular but serve a purpose in terms of the overall objective.
Chair: I probably ought to declare an interest. I have spoken to the BBC about this, too. I am also a previous victim of “HARDtalk” so I should probably declare that.
Professor Scott: I guess there is a contradiction in the questions. Your questions were, “How can we know it? How can we prove it? How can we leverage it? How can we measure it?” If we follow that kind of rationale—that we push the BBC World Service and the journalism that we support in that particular direction—that means that we don’t answer the “HARDtalk” question very well.
Well, if we follow the line of questioning that we only fund things that we can demonstrate, measure and show with graphs that are going up, then we close “HARDtalk”.
Therefore, the BBC World Service has to be funded on the basis of values; the value is that we appreciate what “HARDtalk” does and, regardless of the outcomes of “HARDtalk”, we are a country that believes in democracy and press freedom, and that is why we support it, regardless of its metrics.
I just thought there was an interesting contradiction there.
Chair: Very good. Edward, did you have a question?
Q9 Edward Morello: We have obviously focused on soft power. In the Grade report for the FCDO on the World Service from 2020, Grade says that the World Service does not just support soft power; it also supports trade and national security. Do you agree that it supports trade and national security, and if that is evidencable in the way that we have talked about soft power?
Dr Westcott: I agree that it does, but it is fairly indirectly. It doesn’t land you specific contracts, but through this power of attraction—people say, “Ah, I’m looking for a British company” or they may hear about it on the BBC. There might be a British company innovating in, for example, renewable technology, and because it has been reported on the BBC, people think, “We could use that here.” It definitely has value in the commercial world from that point of view.
On security grounds, I think it is very important. One of the most valuable functions that the World Service fulfils is providing news about areas that otherwise cannot receive any news about it. I am thinking particularly of Sudan at the moment. The Sudanese population listen to the BBC because nobody else consistently provides reliable information. Both sides are busy pushing their case—propaganda—and other international media take a side, and the BBC is assumed to be objective. That plays a role in global security because it enables people to understand exactly what is going on there, including those who are on the ground.
Chair: I think Claire has questions related to that.
Q10 Claire Hazelgrove: Dr Westcott, to expand on the point you were just making on Sudan, how important would you say the role of the World Service is in providing information during crises and conflict—you were talking about Sudan there, but also with reference to Ukraine and Gaza? It would be useful to hear about any impact of the World Service that you feel is particularly important in such situations.
Dr Westcott: I would regard it as very important, because increasingly we are in a world where there is a dearth of reliably objective information. Ukraine or Gaza are very difficult to report on, because nobody will regard your reporting as objective. On Sudan, most people know nothing about it and hear nothing about it, but the BBC has consistently covered it through its east African service and its Arabic service. It is one of the very few international agencies that has done so.
Q11 Claire Hazelgrove: Following on from that, do you believe the Government currently makes sufficient use of the World Service to reinforce British foreign policy goals in any given conflict, or could it do more?
Dr Westcott: It could liaise more. I am not sure I want the Government to do too much in relation to the World Service, because it has to remain independent to retain its value. British diplomats overseas listen incessantly to the World Service. It was my main source of information about what was going on at home as well as overseas. There needs to be a more proactive dialogue between Government Ministers, the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence and the World Service to understand where each other is coming from, and perhaps to pick up areas on which it would be helpful for the Government to get more information.
There used to be a BBC listening service. I honestly do not know whether it still exists, but it was invaluable at providing additional information—intelligence, if you like, but from open source. I think to some extent that has been absorbed by the internet. Open-source information is very important. The BBC has very good access to it, and there is a real value to the Government in sharing that kind of information—“What are you hearing?” Overseas, we always talk to BBC reporters as well as diplomats, because they often know more. They have different sources to the ones we have. Locally there was always very good contact, but maybe at headquarters there needs to be a bit more.
Q12 Claire Hazelgrove: I have a final question on this. There is some interesting information about the different types of medium that have been used alongside the World Service—for example, using different social media platforms to complement the work done via traditional channels such as radio, particularly in some conflicts, or setting up TikTok channels, and so on. Have you heard about the impact and influence of that? Has integrating those more modern mediums been successful, or has it been tried but not been as impactful as hoped?
Dr Westcott: The BBC is active in using all these different social media, and it is important that it does so, but that is not its most important channel at the moment. The way many social media systems work—others are more expert on this than me—is that they multiply through outrage. The BBC is not into promoting stories that will provoke responses; on the contrary, it is trying to be objective. It is important that social media is there and that the BBC refers to it, but that broadcast information and its website remain the core values. It would be wrong to divert too much into social media because it is a world where you are always going to lose. That is the trouble.
Chair: I am afraid we have a disrupted afternoon because we are anticipating votes. We can soldier on, but I want everyone on the Committee to promise to go straight downstairs and straight back up again.
Q13 Blair McDougall: Professor Scott, I would like to develop an idea Dr Westcott introduced about what the Government seek to do through the World Service, in terms of both foreign policy objectives and soft power objectives. Are the Government clear-minded enough on what they want to achieve, or do they expect the World Service to achieve things that it cannot?
Professor Scott: That is an important question. I have just published a book with my co-authors, Mel Bunce and Kate Wright, that looks at other international public service broadcasters and how they have their editorial independence compromised. One of the ways is through how the Government does or does not clarify its objectives for the broadcaster.
As we have just heard, soft power is a vague term. Currently, the BBC World Service is required to be a global ambassador for the UK, protect our values, aid understanding of the UK and reflect the United Kingdom to the world. Those are vague, nice ideas that we could all agree with, but it is clear from our previous research that you could very easily reinterpret those vague values in ways that allow you to politicise the BBC World Service. If you want to “reflect the United Kingdom”, in a more politicised environment I could say, “Well, why aren’t you projecting the Government’s view? Why aren’t you interviewing more Government Ministers? If you want to be a global ambassador for the UK, you should have a more positive view of the UK.” There are plenty of examples of where Governments that are less well-meaning could reinterpret vague soft power ideas in ways that compromise editorial autonomy.
So the first answer to your question is no: soft power needs to be defined far more concretely to prevent future editorial compromise. I realise that is hard to do—well, I am not even sure it is hard to do. The BBC World Service directly fulfils soft power because it embodies the political values that the UK supports. It supports media freedom and democracy, so much so that the UK Government, by virtue of funding the BBC World Service without editorial interference, is embodying and projecting the idea of media freedom. If that is the definition of soft power, you do not get into fuzzy, interpretable bits like this.
On the second part of your question, what if a vague idea of soft power can be reinterpreted very easily? I think you mentioned a phrase in your question that has come up a couple of times: foreign policy agendas and foreign policy goals. Just as Nick was saying, they should not be in the same sentence—
Chair: We’re the Foreign Affairs Committee—what do you expect? [Laughter.]
Professor Scott: The Foreign Affairs Committee should want to pursue the UK’s national interest, which is supported by the promotion of soft power—and that is it. The moment you begin to instrumentalise specific foreign policy agendas, you inadvertently introduce incentives whereby it becomes easier to politicise broadcasting in future.
If I know that you have strategic interests here, or you do not like this kind of disinformation, or the Government have a particular agenda around this, and you hold the purse strings, then you can very quickly—there are many cases where this happens—even if inadvertently, not just potentially compromise the BBC’s editorial independence but, just as importantly, compromise the perception of the BBC’s editorial independence.
For example, take the idea that the Foreign Affairs Select Committee explicitly asks, “If we pay the BBC World Service more money, can we use it to pursue our foreign policy objectives?” That is my sentence, not yours, but that sentence could easily be reinterpreted and weaponised against the BBC World Service to say that it is just another state broadcaster, even though it is not. We have to be super, super careful. Sorry, I have gone on too long, but you get the point.
Q14 Blair McDougall: The idea of that sentence being put alongside comments from the editorial controllers of Russia Today is an important point, because they would talk about things in a similar way. Is it inevitable that increased Government support for the BBC World Service comes with that risk, or can it be avoided?
Professor Scott: Great question. It definitely can be avoided, but there are lots of things to do. At the heart of reducing editorial independence, or reducing the risk that you are being seen to be doing that, is that you must understand that editorial interference does not just look like someone ringing up a journalist and saying, “Do or do not do that.” If that is happening, it is already too late. If a journalist is so compromised that a Minister or a politician feels they can ring them up and say, “Do or do not do this,” the game is up.
What our research, and plenty of other people’s research, shows is that, early on, the working conditions of journalists need to be secure in order to ensure that journalists do not feel compromised, so that they are not in a position where they are vulnerable to politicisation. The politicisation of international broadcasting can occur via imprecise definitions of soft power. It can occur via constraining your resources—“I will give you one more year, maybe six months, maybe another year.” If you have a lack of job security, a politicised environment in which perhaps you are being criticised publicly by people, unclear definitions of what soft power is—“What am I supposed to be doing?”—and any indirect governance interference, and if those four things combine, you have got journalists who will rapidly self-censor because they fear for their jobs, they are not sure what they should be doing and they do not have governance support.
To answer your question, you can definitely introduce lots of safeguards to support the editorial independence of the BBC World Service if it gets more money from Government, but to do that requires multiple levels—short term, long term, explicit and implicit. If you do not do that, you could very easily compromise the perception of editorial independence. So the two must go hand in hand: more funding must come with guarantees—not just a few nice words—of editorial independence.
Q15 Blair McDougall: Leaving aside the independence aspect, I want to look at effectiveness and the idea of what the Government expect the World Service to deliver that it perhaps cannot. I worry sometimes that we are in a 20th-century mindset with tackling disinformation, as you mentioned. We might think it is two news organisations against each other, when disinformation actually seeks to do something completely different to polarise and destabilise societies. Are there things like that we are expecting the BBC World Service to do, when we should actually be looking for other tools to achieve the outcome?
Professor Scott: Perhaps, but I think there is a bigger context. The context of this discussion is that media freedom globally, by any measure, is in massive, significant and protracted decline. Any other similar broadcasters supported by democracies around the world like the BBC World Service are also facing massive politicisation and budget cuts and constraints, at the same time as we see rising authoritarian-backed competitors to the BBC World Service.
I see your point that things have changed technologically, so perhaps the BBC World Service needs to change in its delivery and be more digital first. There is certainly a case for that, but that would miss the big picture here. The big picture is that the UK has the most respected, impactful and historically trusted service. I am not here to be a voice for the BBC World Service, but it is undeniable that any other country would very much want to have the BBC World Service’s impact, reputation and scope. It would be foolish for the UK, which continues to believe in media freedom and democracy in ways that many other parts of the world are struggling with, to neglect the World Service. It would be ridiculous. Your question is a good one, but I think there is a bigger point.
Q16 Sir John Whittingdale: Professor Scott, I completely recognise the risk that the perception of the World Service may be influenced if there is more Government funding, and that could put at risk its independence. You talked about the need for safeguards; am I therefore right in my interpretation that you are not completely opposed to the BBC’s suggestion that the funding for the World Service should come wholly from the Foreign Office rather than the licence fee payer, but that it could happen only if there were very strong safeguards? How could we ensure those safeguards?
Professor Scott: Whatever the funding model of the BBC, there are big pros and cons to it. There are big cons to the BBC World Service being funded out of the licence fee because the licence fee is funding for the BBC, and often the BBC World Service will be second best there. That is a problem. That is what the BBC director general believes—that it should not be funded by the BBC itself. There are a whole bunch of other problems with Government funding for it. It is a massive judgment call to be made. The BBC used to be, before 2014 or 2011—
Sir John Whittingdale: Before 2010—that was when my Government came into office.
Professor Scott: Thank you. Before then, it was funded by the UK Government, before it was funded by the licence fee, so there is a historical record of that. During that time, there were fluctuations, but the BBC World Service maintained its reputation. I guess the answer to your question is yes, but I think we need to be even wiser about the safeguards—not just now, but in a small number of years’ time, in which other people who might hold the reins to the BBC World Service might interpret its charter, funding and governance in different ways.
It is your job, not mine, to decide what the most appropriate funding model is, but if you are looking at the Government giving more money—maybe even exclusively giving money—I do not think we should rule that out out of hand. We should accept it alongside a massive and very clear set of safeguards. The current one—“I guarantee that I will not intervene editorially”—is just not sufficient. It is an out-of-date view of how you protect editorial independence.
Q17 Aphra Brandreth: Thank you to the three of you for being here. Dr Westcott, I have a couple of questions for you. As a former diplomat and from your time as an ambassador, how strategic and useful did you find the World Service to be in furthering the objectives of the Foreign Office?
Dr Westcott: Very useful. First, as I was mentioning earlier, diplomats in the British diplomatic service listen to it all the time and use it as a source of information, and we liaise locally with its journalists to exchange ideas, contacts and information. From that point of view, it is invaluable.
Secondly, in terms of projecting the image of Britain, I mentioned the values that the Government have consistently supported, and the BBC reflects the same values.
Thirdly, it is visibly global. A lot of the presenters on the BBC World Service are from the countries that they report on. That is very important, because it to some extent reflects a fact about Britain. It also illustrates that the BBC itself is global. It is not British people talking about countries in Africa. There may be British people, but the point is that they do not look like—if I may be explicit—old white colonialists. That is a good thing. The people can associate with the BBC because it looks and sounds like them.
The language services very strongly reinforce that. The BBC’s credibility in Iran is because most of the people there are Farsi speakers speaking Iranian. The regime do not like it and will therefore accuse it of representing subversive influences, but ordinary Iranians will listen to it if they possibly can, because they trust it, it sounds like them and to some extent it is them.
Dr Kiaer: It is really important for the BBC World Service to give local language services. Of course English is the lingua franca, but often we presume that everybody understands English and should understand English. In fact, trust can be earned when locals hear their own language. We sometimes forget that not everybody can speak English. Particularly in the global south, many people do not understand the language.
If you give a news service just in English, so many people who are in need would not be able to understand the news. It is terribly important that we provide the service in local languages for those people. Perhaps that is where the UK and the BBC World Service can play a very unique role for the wider population and the people who are in need.
Dr Westcott: Just a footnote: on some occasions people might trust what the BBC says more than they trust me as ambassador, because I would be speaking with the voice of the British Government. The assumption was that the BBC would not necessarily be doing that.
Q18 Aphra Brandreth: I was really interested in your response earlier about digital and news spread through outrage. How do you see the World Service staying a widely consumed source of news on the ground, especially in places where you have been ambassador and where people are increasingly looking at different formats in terms of where they consume their information?
Dr Westcott: It is a very current issue in west Africa, where growing numbers of people—particularly young people or those now with smartphones—get the bulk of their news not from radio broadcasts but from social media. Therefore, it is very important to be present and make sure that you have a visible and attractive presence on social media, because that is where people are getting their news. It is an area where some of those wishing to spread disinformation are even more active and effective, because they wish to provoke outrage.
We have particularly seen that in the Sahel, where it looks like—I can’t prove this—anti-French sentiment has been spread and promoted by forces from outside the region, but through local influencers and the rest, and is being multiplied through the use of bots that are organised for them. That has significantly affected public opinion and perceptions of France in that area. The French have found it very difficult to counter that. It is important that the BBC engage in this, but you have to do it in a way that preserves your reputation for objectivity.
Q19 Aphra Brandreth: That is the challenge. Professor Scott spoke very passionately about ways of funding. Dr Westcott, you have spoken before about the World Service being overwhelmingly trusted, so I wondered what, in your view, would be the most appropriate funding model to secure its survival while maintaining trust in its impartiality.
Dr Westcott: The challenge there is to what extent you can commercialise its services. The commercialisation also runs a risk of impinging on the objectivity. You could find a billionaire benefactor, like Mr Musk, who would give you a very large sum of money, but it might undermine your credibility without some constraints. Most people of that kind will want some return for it.
There is a challenge in that if the BBC World Service is funded by the British Government, people will assume that the British Government are looking for some kind of return. While it is a sensible source of funding because of the wider benefits to the UK, as Professor Scott was saying, it needs to be clear that it is hands-off funding.
It feeds into the wider questions about the funding of the BBC as a whole, and the licence fee. I would certainly argue that licence fee payers get significant benefit from some of that money going towards the World Service, even though they may not be listening to it themselves. The growing number of British people who live overseas—about 12 million now—get some benefits from the World Service that they don’t get from the home broadcasts.
Q20 Chair: Can I abuse my position as Chair and ask you a follow-up question? You were talking about misinformation in the Sahel, and influencers being magnified by bots, as well as the challenge for the French through the undermining of their reputation. Do you know of any examples of a counter-attack that has been successful and might be worth looking at? It is a challenge internationally and something that the Committee is interested in potentially looking at in the future. Since you have raised it, are you able to give us any further details? Perhaps not today, but if you have some ideas, we would certainly want to follow that up.
Dr Westcott: In that specific case, France 24, which likes to emulate the BBC World Service, has continued to try to put across a more—as it sees it—objective French point of view. But it has been very hard to combat that. I am trying to think of a case when the US has explicitly tried to combat that kind of misinformation. It is quite hard to do without using the same tactics that are being used to promote it—in other words, flooding the market with information. That requires somebody to pay, as Wagner did, to set up the little factory that shoves all this stuff out. If that is being done, it is not something that should be done by the BBC.
Q21 Chair: Is there anything that you want to add, Dr Kiaer, from your experience of attempts to spread misinformation in the way that has been outlined?
Dr Kiaer: I cannot give a more specific example, but AI fake news is very much what we face each day. The fact is that the world is inundated with information. Perhaps the role of the BBC World Service before was to give the information, but now I think it is to protect the information and give more reliable information. The BBC World Service has earned the trust of the locals. I am talking about stakeholders in Asia and Africa.
The BBC became a name the locals could trust and that could give them an international perspective. It is more important than ever to provide them with trustworthy information, given social media right now; we do not know how that will also lead people to opinions. What people really need are trustworthy broadcasters. BBC World Service, over the last 50 years or so, transitioning from the colonial period to post-colonial, has built a legacy and a trust with the locals. I think nothing can replace that. This is a very important role—not the information per se, but for the BBC to bring people information that they can trust. I think that is the real value of BBC World Service in the era of AI fake news. Particularly in China and in the world, there is so much fake misinformation. Who can fight against this misinformation? People can trust the BBC’s name, and it is important we keep it and give the BBC the right role to play in the region, particularly in our engagement with Asia and Africa.
Q22 Aphra Brandreth: I know that we are going to come onto more questions on misinformation, so that is really useful. We have talked a lot about funding models, and there have been cuts to funding of language services. I just wanted to understand what your observations have been, particularly on the ground, about what these kinds of cuts might mean for people’s perceptions of the World Service in different regions.
Dr Westcott: In west Africa, if I remember, I think Hausa was one that was cut. The impact of the cuts is far greater than the benefit of the savings. There is not a huge audience to listen, but it is the only service that is broadcasting, apart from very local broadcasters. A lot of it is done through a franchise system. The BBC’s programmes are rebroadcast through local franchises, and having some Hausa service, for example, that can then rebroadcast to the people is important.
This is a key constituency in relation to the strategic security of the Sahel, because these are people who are subject to the kind of social media influence, and other influences, from groups in the region. Without objective information being made available to them, or indeed information about the wider world, there is no other source that they can find. I feel like the impact exceeds the relatively small savings made through cutting it. Now, we know that the listenership is not that great, but I would argue that the broader social and security benefits of saving some of these is very important.
Chair: Abtisam is going to talk about misinformation. After that, we will go to Uma—unless you have questions on that?
Uma Kumaran: My question is related.
Chair: Go on.
Q23 Uma Kumaran: Yesterday, we questioned the permanent under-secretary of the FCDO about his views on the cuts, in particular to BBC Arabic. We know that last year the BBC cut BBC Arabic, Persian, and Hindi radio services, amongst others. I gave a stark example that in Lebanon, where we have cut the radio service, Russian-backed media has taken the same frequency. When we are talking about diplomacy and soft power, I am really keen to know, from your perspective, what the effect is on the ground—to our diplomats, to our politics, to our government, to our stability and security—of this spread of misinformation because of the cuts. The head of the BBC said just last month that they are struggling to counter the rise of pure propaganda from countries like Russia and China because of cuts to the World Service. What is the panel’s recommendation to us?
Dr Kiaer: London, Britain and the United Kingdom are full of linguistic cultural diversity which you are not able to capitalise on very much. If you cut these language services as well, people will turn to AI generated news, and that will cause so much trouble to get back on track; whereas the BBC, which people trust—enabling people to listen in their language, with human voices, and with news that provides information—will bring so much stability.
As soon as we cut those language services, that means that all the legacy we have built over the last 50-plus years will go, and there will be nothing to stop people from turning to AI-generated fake news. There is no foreign media that I can think of that would replace the BBC World Service in bringing such trust to locals. In a way, the UK—perhaps even the BBC World Service—has a responsibility to protect the world from fake AI-generated news, and the BBC World Service could play a very new and important role in this area. Simply cutting these languages would just bring more AI-generated news. The fact that those languages are very minor languages makes it easier for AI companies to generate and spread the wrong information, and it will be so difficult for us to rectify the situation. If we give it up, we will lose it. Once we lose it, we will never get it back, and the loss and misfortune we experience later will be incalculable.
Dr Westcott: I agree with that. Geopolitics, like nature, abhors a vacuum: if the BBC is not there, the vacuum will be filled by others who have a different motive for wanting to do so. The permanent secretary will be better informed than me on the impact in Lebanon, but rather like with the situation in Sudan, if there is not an objective source of information, people will grab whatever is available. If that is disinformation, that will often exacerbate the situation.
Chair: Abtisam, forgive me—let me bring Richard in and then we will definitely come to you.
Q24 Richard Foord: One other thing that the permanent secretary talked about was the cuts to international development funding—to the ODA budget. Now that it is so limited—way less than 0.5% of GNI—do you think that there are alternative sources of funding that we could look to for world language services besides ODA?
Dr Westcott: My one thought would be to look for benevolent foundations who have an interest. It is a less potentially prejudiced source than billionaires, but it is not necessarily so. You could go to the Open Society Foundation, for example, who promote free speech, but it becomes a more complicated relationship, and there are people out there who do not regard the Open Society Foundation as objective at all, and that might therefore have an impact. So there are rather limited sources of funding. The BBC commercialises what it can—it does sell a lot of its products, particularly the drama stuff—and that is fine as a source of funding. Outside of Government, however, there are options, but none of them are ideal.
Dr Kiaer: I think perhaps one of the ways to make it more sustainable is to broaden its partnership with the BBC World Service. As you know, the cultural engagement, or the ground of soft power, is very much with European partners, but if the BBC World Service could develop more partnership with Asia and Africa, then—because of the trust it has built—there are a lot of opportunities to build and use this service for better engagement and make soft power a real cultural asset for Britain. I think that kind of engagement is less obvious, so it is maybe something that has to be further developed to make it sustainable.
Chair: Very good. We are going to go and vote. When we come back, Abtisam is definitely going to answer some questions.
Sitting suspended for Divisions in the House.
On resuming—
Chair: The vote has finished; people are still coming back, but we are pressed for time so we are going to move on. Thank you very much for your patience. Fortunately, it was only two votes—it can be worse. Abtisam, I think you had some questions.
Q25 Abtisam Mohamed: My questions are for you, Dr Kiaer. Many of my colleagues have discussed a number of issues in relation misinformation and disinformation, including the dearth of objective news and what that means for the World Service. The angle that I am interested in, and which I think you referred to, was in relation to the east: China and Korea. What particular issues are presented for the World Service in that regard, and how can we counter them? We all know that that issue is there; there is a problem there. What specific things can the World Service do to maintain integrity and fulfil the need for objective news?
Dr Kiaer: AI-generated information is growing very fast in the region. AI technology in this region is moving very fast. It is important that we present information that the locals can trust. The one thing that BBC World Service can provide is trust. It is really important for the service to present the international perspective, but also trustworthy information, to the locals and the wider population, not only in Korea and in China but in the wider region.
I want to bring up one more AI-related issue. I did research last year about how AI translation could work. When it comes to translation between western European languages and English, the AI large language model is pretty accurate, but it is very easy to fake information when it comes to less-known languages, such as Asian languages and African languages, because the large language model does not have enough data. In a way, manipulation is much easier. If you do not have the authority of the BBC World Service to present trustworthy information, it is very easy for the AI large language model to manipulate information, and that could bring a lot of chaos. At the peak of this AI era, misinformation is becoming the norm. That is terribly important for the region and its linguistic diversity.
Q26 Abtisam Mohamed: Do you think that Governments have a stronger role to play? Do you think that our Government have a stronger role to play to counter misinformation and disinformation? Is there something more we can do to challenge the level of input that external Governments—foreign actors—have in the way that media is presented?
Dr Kiaer: That is a really good question. This comes back to what I said about trust. Trust cannot be generated in a day. For the last century, the BBC World Service has gained the trust of the locals, and that makes it work—people trust the BBC World Service. In that part of the world, there is so much misinformation and it is very easy to fake information through AI generation, so they need something they can trust. The BBC World Service has gained that trust. That is very important, and we need to keep it.
Q27 Abtisam Mohamed: Can I ask a question of you, Professor Scott? You might want to come in on the first question as well. My colleague mentioned earlier that people get their media from a range of sources now. Are we behind the times with the BBC World Service and how we project the news? People have moved on so far now, and they are taking their media and their news from various sources, TikTok being the main source of media in a range of areas. Has the World Service failed to catch up to how people take their news? Is it too late?
Professor Scott: No, I don’t think the BBC World Service is necessarily behind. It is aware, as international broadcasters and broadcasters in general are, of the massive flux in the way that people consume media, but there is a politics about how it chooses which platforms to engage in. Lots of the BBC World Service’s audiences are unable to get online or are not online. In lots of parts of the world where the BBC World Service is very important, it is crucial to keep providing radio.
There is also the politics of whether the BBC World Service goes on third-party providers—puts all its content out on X or Twitter, or YouTube and so on, where there is a lot of disinformation and AI-generated material.
Another way in which the BBC World Service is unique is that a lot of its audience come to the BBC itself—they might have the BBC app, so they go and listen to the BBC World Service. It controls its own delivery in a way, and it is well trusted, well used and big enough and has enough critical mass that people come to the BBC rather than being dependent on other providers, though to a degree I am sure it is still dependent on other providers. But as Dr Kiaer keeps saying, if you lose that and the BBC World Service were to disappear, you could not bring it back.
Your question was about AI and disinformation, but the BBC World Service is big enough that audiences come to it, and that is very rare. I am sweeping the world into my characterisation here, but it is trusted enough that audiences go to it rather than just logging into Bluesky or Twitter or something and expecting journalism to appear. That is why it is so important.
Q28 Chair: But Professor Scott, surely you are making sweeping generalisations about generations too. If you look at a younger generation, is that not the big challenge? And the world is a young place.
Dr Kiaer: If we think about it from an Asian perspective, and speaking from a South Korean perspective, the news that is covered in the BBC World Service gets picked up by local services and local media, and it is taken seriously. That is a good sign.
The way that radio functions is very important. It is so crucial, but sometimes I think that it now must revolutionise its ways in order to engage with young people. English is the lingua franca, which means that everyone speaks English and can engage globally in English. The BBC World Service could be a very important tool and format that also has some objective functions for those many people. Speaking from a personal perspective, having worked in Korea, in 2021 there were 7.8 billion K-pop related tweets, and they were all in English. I was thinking, “Why can’t they do that in the BBC World Service, which is more reliable?” I think more effort has to be made to revolutionise and make it more culturally attractive to people—not only to UK citizens but to people globally who use English. Keep the tradition but revolutionise, so that it can be an engaging format for many people.
Q29 Blair McDougall: Your response in terms of disinformation focused on the BBC World Service’s role in informing people. Can I ask about the role of educating people? One of the attractive things about the simple, polarising narratives of disinformation is that they make people feel smart, because they are not complex. Is the World Service doing enough to make people feel confident and comfortable as they digest the different forms of information that are there now, and does it educate people to recognise what disinformation looks like and to feel comfortable with complexity?
Dr Kiaer: It probably depends on whether you have a diverse perspective. Thinking about it from the point of view of my expertise, it has to have the right tone to reach out to the people who need to hear it, but I think it has to have some edge to include some of the younger generation. It could cover neutral information that is very important, but it could also have information that could attract young people too. It has to stay in format but have a more radical update. If that were the case, the BBC World Service may have the great potential to be a place where people can communicate.
Britain’s soft power can flourish from using the BBC World Service. On misinformation, although you have not asked about AI translation, one of the ways to cut funding for the BBC World Service would be to use AI translation. In many of the languages that we perhaps register as marginal or endangered, large language models can easily manipulate and lead you to different places or to misinformation. The BBC World Service could act as an anchor that people could reference back to and say, “This is what he says,” and then compare. It would be a reference point for so many people who need it.
Uma Kumaran: I have a specific question related to your viewpoints, Dr Kiaer. Colleagues will be surprised to know that I have actually appeared on the BBC World Service—on BBC Tamil.
Chair: No, really? What language were you speaking?
Q30 Uma Kumaran: It is a running joke here, but I have been on BBC Tamil. I absolutely identify with and understand the point you made about trust and authenticity when it is your own language media. They did subtitle and caption me, but that is a thing for another time.
You talked about misinformation and disinformation. I found it really interesting that this clip of me speaking to BBC Tamil was shared through south India, Jaffna and northern Sri Lanka, picked up by the state media in Sri Lanka, translated into Sinhalese, and then shared through WhatsApp, before eventually making it over to my own family WhatsApp group. The trust and pride that friends and family felt when they saw me on the BBC World Service was like nothing else since my election, which was quite something.
You made the point about misinformation spread. WhatsApp seems to be one of the key ways misinformation is spreading, but the example I have given you of a BBC clip being shared on WhatsApp was really interesting in seeing how we can share, through the BBC World Service, our culture and values, and soft power in the case of the first person of a certain heritage—Tamil heritage, in my case—elected in Britain. It kind of encapsulated all of that. Looking at modernisation and AI, should the BBC modernise to be fit for purpose, and use the World Service on WhatsApp and different channels, such as Bluesky, Twitter and TikTok?
Dr Kiaer: It is important to demonstrate how the UK values the multilingual, multicultural nature of the nation. There are 300 languages spoken in London alone. It is the most diverse city in the entire world, but I do not know how much this linguistic cultural diversity is celebrated in our media or more widely. I think the BBC World Service is very much a token of how this is celebrated. If it is closed down or somehow made using only AI voices, like in China—in many places, as you know, they have avatars giving the news—there is a risk. As soon as we lose the human touch, we lose trust, and we will lose the opportunity to use the UK’s linguistic cultural diversity as an asset to boost its soft power. The BBC World Service’s representation of linguistic cultural diversity through marginal languages in the UK, or in Asia and Africa, is a big statement about how we as a nation care about our diversity. That will speak so much to our nation and globally to those engaged in the English language.
Q31 Sir John Whittingdale: I think we are coming to the end, so I will ask a wrap-up question. The World Service has obviously suffered cuts to its budget. There have been questions sometimes about its impartiality in certain areas, and its global reach has fallen quite considerably in the last few years. Do you think that trust in the BBC World Service and its reputation and influence are as great as ever, or is it now in decline?
Dr Westcott: The last few years have been quite rough for this country in a number of ways, and the BBC World Service has, to some extent, reflected that. The BBC as a whole has seen controversies that have penetrated to the global perception of both Britain and the BBC. There has been a shrinkage of its global impact, but from a very large footprint that is still, as has been said, envied by others around the world. It is therefore not an irremediable issue, but the World Service needs a demonstrable investment that it is something the country cares about and wishes to sustain.
Sir John Whittingdale: So it is a money question.
Dr Westcott: It is about money and resources. But I think its reputation has survived sufficiently intact to provide a foundation solid enough that, given the necessary resources, it can re-establish itself. I would argue that, for Britain’s national interest, it is more important than ever that it does that, given the way in which the world is going, which is a bigger issue.
Sir John Whittingdale: Would the others agree?
Dr Kiaer: This may not be totally related to your question. The BBC World Service is a wonderful service, but the great thing is that our Asian and African stakeholders still trust it. Given the way the BBC World Service operates right now, I think more effort could be made—maybe not just by the BBC World Service, but by Britain as a whole—to engage and have more strategic partners post Brexit, and to have Asian and African engagement and cultural exchanges. The same thing is happening on that side of the world—looking for alternative strategic partners. The BBC World Service would be a good opportunity or a good medium for us to engage. It is time to go beyond Europe and make the most of the diversity we have.
Professor Scott: I will be brief. While the BBC World Service has faced cuts—so there has perhaps been a slight decline in its reach and influence—the global media environments have declined significantly during that time, so relatively it has become more important. That is the best way to characterise it.
My final point is that you cannot treat the BBC World Service like other things that you would fund. The BBC World Service is journalism. Journalism—unlike building buildings or funding education, schooling or other things—is a profession that is shaped by professional norms that are easily challenged even by perception, and even indirectly, so you cannot treat Foreign Office or British Government support for journalism in the same way as other things. When you cut it, it is not just that there is less of it; it undermines the trust, the long-term capacity, the institutional memory and the working conditions of the people who have not lost their jobs—should they look elsewhere because they might lose their job next? Journalism has different dynamics to other things that you fund and is much more precarious.
Q32 Chair: On that note, it is so nice of you to have come in. We have learned so much from the three of you. Thank you so much for giving us your time. We have rushed, and I am sorry about that. If there is anything that you think we should have heard—perhaps when you are on the way home tonight, you will think, “I wish I had said that”—please write. If, when we are writing it up, there is anything that we need to clarify with you, may we get in touch? Thank you again for your time. We really do appreciate it.
Witnesses: Jamie Angus and Baroness Helić.
Q33 Chair: Thank you both very much for coming. I am sorry that we are late. I know the Baroness will know what it is like when we all have to rush off and vote. We are trying our best to keep ourselves to time. I also know that you need to leave at 4.15 pm, Baroness, so we have some questions for Jamie at the end when we have him on his own. Could you introduce yourselves formally, please?
Baroness Helić: I am Arminka Helić. I am a Conservative Member of the House of Lords. I am a massive admirer of the BBC World Service, so I have to put that on the table to start with.
I was a special adviser to William Hague when he was the Foreign Secretary between 2010 and 2014—until 2015, actually. Prior to that, I was with him when he was shadow Foreign Secretary in preparation for taking one of the grandest and best offices in Government.
Jamie Angus: Hello. I am Jamie Angus. For the purposes of this inquiry, I was director of the World Service from 2017 to 2021. I am currently a news executive working in North America and the Gulf, including in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
Q34 Chair: I will kick off with a few questions. First, to Mr Angus, what are the financial needs of the World Service in the coming years? Is there likely to be any damage in the short term, if funds are not forthcoming?
Jamie Angus: In a way, it depends what the mission is. I think one of the reasons that this inquiry is incredibly welcome is that as we head towards a new charter period, for the second half of this decade, it is useful to set out what the mission and strategic objectives of the World Service are and, therefore, what is needed to fund it.
In the recent Budget, the Government increased their funding for the World Service. It was very welcome, of course, that they did so, but that goes alongside a series of cuts that have happened on the BBC side, so the overall size of the pot, as far as I can make out, has not necessarily increased, while the demands and costs have continued to do so.
In my written evidence—you have probably heard this from others—I put some indicative numbers about what other mature and influential western democracies are spending on their international news broadcasting. I think we are kind of at or thereabouts with France Médias Monde and Deutsche Welle, but if you look at what the Americans spend on VOA, the USAGM family of content, that is a significant amount larger than what is spent on the World Service.
Depending on how the mission is set out for the rest of the decade, there should be room for the funding to increase, both for the actual journalism activities that journalists are doing on the ground but also for the distribution, the technology and the way people get their news. That was referenced really interestingly in the previous panel. All of that should be redefined and the resources set out for that.
Q35 Chair: Do you think that the recent Budget allocation to the World Service shows that the BBC’s arguments for increased funding have been successful? What do you think of the argument that that increase should come from the Foreign Office?
Jamie Angus: I think it is good news. It would be churlish not to say that it was good news, but, as I referenced in my previous answer, it has broadly only made up a gap in funding where the BBC side had fallen. In the second half of this charter, as the Committee will be familiar with, the BBC no longer seeks to ringfence £254 million a year spending on the World Service.
The other point is about this in-year or year-by-year settlement for the World Service. When I was director, I was lucky enough to be in the final years of what was then the World Service 2020 agreement, which was the expansion between 2016 and 2020, with additional language services—11 new language services. For that period, the World Service had a consistent funding plan that allowed us to invest and have confidence over a five-year funding period.
Since 2020, that has not been the case. There has been a series of in-year or ad-hoc agreements made between the Government and the BBC. That is not a good climate to invest in very long-term things. We talked a bit about disinformation. We could talk about AI. We need to talk about digital distribution and digital product. All those things require a longer-term stable funding plan. I think that with the CSR that is coming and the new charter review, a sense of setting that out for the rest of this decade would be—it is not even the amount so much as the ability to plan to invest.
Q36 Chair: I hear what you say about what happened up to 2020. Since then, there seems to be almost a feeling that a decline is going on. It may be a managed decline, or it may be even worse than that. It is almost like an orphan child, with the BBC saying, “We do not want responsibility for it” and the Foreign Office saying, “Well, we do not want responsibility for it.” Is that fair?
Jamie Angus: I said in my written evidence that the World Service is never the BBC’s biggest problem and never the Government’s biggest problem, and I think there is something in that. Sir John will remember, as he helped with it, that I spent a large part of my time as director going around Whitehall and Government Departments saying, “Look, there is a real crisis coming here,”—this was specifically around the funding of BBC World News—“and you might wake up one morning and BBC World News as you know it will no longer be there.” I am sorry to say that that is exactly what happened. We no longer have a dedicated international news channel, though that is never the biggest problem, either for the FCDO, in that case, or for the BBC.
Despite the best efforts in good faith of everyone involved, it is hard to reach that kind of longer-term funding. The tail-off in the global audience reach figure, for example, which Sir John mentioned—these are the kinds of impacts that we will see more of if a longer-term funding settlement is not reached.
Q37 Chair: Is there anything you want to add, Baroness Helić?
Baroness Helić: This was a positive action that was taken by the new Government to give some reassurance to the BBC World Service. However, positive blips that you occasionally experience cannot provide long-term security and long-term planning. In the same way, negative stresses undermine the confidence of the people who work for the BBC World Service. Consider just how important it is. When you live in a democracy, it is so difficult to imagine this, but news is not a luxury; it is the most precious thing in terms of insecurity and instability in countries where the level of corruption means that you cannot get the right content or read the right news, or the news is often manipulated. It is absolutely irreplaceable as a commodity that we provide not because we have to, but because we can. It is in our gift to share news.
In 2010, foreign policy and foreign affairs were not a regular occurrence. You could actually plan what you wanted to do. Though there were surprises—the Arab Spring, for example—you could find yourself in a situation where you would know exactly where you wanted to head to. You knew who your friends and your adversaries were. Right now, we live in an era where you can write a speech on Monday, and by Friday you have to tweak it and change it. In an era where that development is interpreted, whether intentionally or unintentionally, in a way that suits a particular narrative, you do rely on traditional sources of news such as the BBC World Service.
I was born in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and during the war in the 1990s the BBC World Service was a source of information for me. Having something that gives you the right information—this is what happened, this is who arrived, this is who is trying to help, this is the diplomatic effort to achieve ceasefire—is invaluable, and we cannot feel it here. I often come across people who say to me, “You love the BBC World Service, but why would we be paying for someone to have a service in their language?” To me it is like saying, “Why would I be paying for the MoD to protect this country?” It is the cheapest and best way of protecting the interests of this country and of our allies, because you can put out what is truthful and push back against propaganda, disinformation and misinformation.
Q38 Chair: You talk about blips and the difficulty with a blip of money. Perhaps I also ought to ask Mr. Angus what he hopes for from the spending review in 2025. Now is your moment.
Jamie Angus: In comparison with what, say, the Chinese state and the Russian state, or even the Qataris and Al Jazeera, are spending on international broadcasting, we are below where we would want to be. But I want to be realistic, and even from abroad, looking at the public spending pressures in the UK, it is probably not realistic to be asking for the additional hundreds of millions of pounds which could be well spent and would provide good value.
I think it is a question of whether the CSR mechanism can unlock at least a three to five-year funding span that—alongside charter review—could provide some clarity both on what the BBC puts in and what HMG puts in, and is relatively clear on how that would last, certainly over a span of three years. There are really good cases for new investment around additional language services, digital distribution, in particular, and the digital transformation of the World Service. These are all really important priorities, and it seems like the CSR would be the time where some of that would be settled.
Chair: Edward Morello has some questions relating to that.
Q39 Edward Morello: There is the CSR, but there is also the charter review coming up, which is theoretically another opportunity to look at a long-term model. What is the ask for the charter review?
Jamie Angus: When you see Tim and others, you can ask them what their actual ask is. In my written submission, I put a suggestion where the BBC would remain responsible for international output in English and the Government would take on the funding of all the language services. Broadly, that is an elegant, sensible solution, because the licence fee payer has a strong connection to services in English—it is a bit of a generalisation, but it is a language that everyone in the country can understand, and they can receive and consume those services—and it reflects the great complexity of the provision of language services and how that fits more explicitly into the UK’s international soft power project and its national security infrastructure.
I suggested in the written evidence that the language services would be funded by HMG, and that their oversight could be passed to the Cabinet Office rather than the FCDO, and that Parliament itself might have a role—in a parliamentary Grand Committee—in overseeing the work of the World Service, which would reflect the extraordinarily deep and bipartisan support for the World Service in this institution that we are sitting in. That reflects much more the way that international broadcasting is organised in both the United States and in Germany, for example—Deutsche Welle and the American services, VOA and USAGM, are funded and overseen through the Parliament. The UK does not work in that way, and maybe it is fantasy and cannot happen, but that would be my suggestion. It would reflect the deep support in this institution for the World Service.
Q40 Chair: I think you are getting that, with our Committee and the Culture, Media and Sport Committee doing inquiries; we think the International Development Committee also intends to, and there may then be a joint hearing of the three Committees. We are doing our bit, but we are not necessarily without questions or criticisms.
Jamie Angus: Very briefly, one of the issues is that the charter review and the CSR do not quite align. That is precisely why this kind of big-picture thinking is really welcome, because it allows a Government and the BBC leadership to plan for those two things to come together.
Q41 Edward Morello: Obviously, a lot of this comes back round to money, and you have referenced where we sit in global league tables—below the Qataris, on par with France, and pretty much half of what the Americans are spending. But then we look at Russia Today, at £1.5 billion, and China somewhere in excess of £5 billion, in terms of what they are spending on pushing out their messaging and their world view, and I am wondering whether we are in the game. Do we compete? There is such a huge discrepancy in budget.
Jamie Angus: Every pound that we have spent has additional leverage because of the brand, if you like. We have heard a lot about the trust relationship with the World Service, where any investment has an outsized return because there is already a propensity among the audience to trust and engage with what is being provided.
I think your point about China and Russia is relevant and important because they are not just investing in journalists on the ground—what you and I would think of as the day-to-day journalism—but investing very heavily in technical infrastructure, particularly in African markets but also in Asia. They are entering those markets and offering assistance around radio distribution, television distribution and digital development. Those are almost bottomless—you can spend a very significant amount of money on those kinds of initiatives. These transformational new technologies like AI and free internet from satellites are the kinds of things the World Service should be thinking about. These are the kind of big, significant capital investments that an organisation like the World Service should be making the case for. The Russians and the Chinese are certainly ahead of us in that respect.
Q42 Blair McDougall: I think you were here earlier when Professor Scott was talking about the very fine line between us even just writing down that the BBC World Service should be an instrument of foreign policy, and the editorial values of the other broadcasters you have just listed. I am interested in your perspective on how to ensure that the idea that underpins the brand you are talking about is protected. Does the difference between the funding coming from the BBC and the funding coming from the Government make that more difficult in practice for you?
Jamie Angus: That is a really good question. There is no question that the greater the amount of money that the state puts directly into the World Service, the easier it is for our country’s enemies to argue that—
Blair McDougall: “It is just like Russia Today.”
Jamie Angus: Yes. “It is just like Russia Today, but British.” I am very alive to that argument. There are really good answers to that, which are the protections that the BBC charter and BBC editorial independence offer, and how you can ensure and verify that, but I do understand the argument.
I suppose what I would say in the end is that it does not really matter. People who wish the UK ill will make exactly those arguments anyway, through disinformation, whatever way the World Service is funded. They made those arguments even when the BBC had sole responsibility for the funding of the World Service between 2014 and 2016. In a sense, I think it does not really matter what we do. People who wish the UK ill will say what they want anyway. The relevant question is whether we can come up with a structure that continues to guarantee that editorial independence, which the previous witness spoke really engagingly about.
Q43 Chair: Do you have anything to add, Baroness Helić?
Baroness Helić: I think it is important to preserve the image of independent reporting, and the BBC has done pretty well. I happen to follow Russia Today and Sputnik, and the majority of these, and how they have interfered and influenced the understanding of world events, for example in the western Balkans. There is undoubtedly a particular trust that is attached to the BBC and BBC World Service. It is a service that goes back not hundreds of years, but tens of years—70 or 80 years—and the brand is really strong. It is, however, obviously important that it is not portrayed as a Government tool. I agree with Jamie that for those who wish to believe that, there is nothing you can do to persuade them that it is not the case. The only way of countering that narrative is through balanced and independent reporting.
That is something you cannot achieve if you watch Russia Today or Pravda, which has launched in the western Balkans. I actually went on their webpage the day before I came here. You just would not believe what the world looks like when you read Pravda from Serbia. It says that the Ukrainians have lost 900,000 soldiers. It says that five missiles launched today have been destroyed. It says that Russian women and children are being attacked and violated. When you read that somewhere where you do not have balanced reporting, pretty soon, after four or five visits to that website—it also has other stuff like celebrities and football—you slowly start believing it. The speed at which Pravda was launched in the western Balkans, and how quickly it managed to get followers, is quite astonishing.
There are still sceptics who will go and double-check and see what the BBC is saying. There is a brand that needs to be protected, but there is a lot that needs to be done for that to happen, and the BBC needs to be constantly present, and safe and secure, in order to deliver that.
Q44 Uma Kumaran: I would like to ask you a question that I put to yesterday’s panel—which consisted of the Permanent Under-secretary to the FCDO—and earlier to our panel of experts, specifically on the cuts to BBC radio in Arabic. I have an extract of a speech here from the current director general of the BBC, and he said that, “As a result of the cuts, propaganda is going unchallenged” and that “the world faces an all-out assault on the truth”. The example I have put forward is where in Lebanon, Russian-backed media transmit on a radio frequency previously used by BBC Arabic, where listeners are now hearing unchallenged propaganda, just as we have heard. Mr Angus, as the former director of the BBC World Service, how were these operational decisions on which services to close down made, and does the BBC set out to Government the impact of these cuts?
Jamie Angus: I would say that the cuts to BBC Arabic radio and BBC Persian radio, which was closed in the same round of savings, are extremely regrettable and counterproductive. To be fair to my former colleagues, nobody closed them because they do not like radio or do not believe in its value: these savings decisions were taken because—in a very difficult funding climate—the World Service was forced to choose where to place its future bets. That question of digital transformation and looking to the future tends to militate against radio, which is clearly the primary platform of a much older generation and in steep decline in many parts of the world.
Having said that, I believe it is very cheap to distribute, and the savings that have been made both in the staff who were producing Arabic and Persian radio and the quite significant costs of distribution, were false value if you like. For those radio services, and for existing services—obviously the global distribution of the English radio network, but also really important services like BBC Hausa, which Dr Westcott talked about, which still has a really significant audience in Africa on shortwave radio—the preservation of those audiences while they are still there always feels like good value to me.
You quite rightly give examples of where no sooner were decisions taken to close those services than immediately events occurred which were very important for the Arabic radio audience—7 October, the conflict in Gaza, and the situation in Sudan, for example. The BBC should be given credit for wisely spinning up emergency stopgap services for Sudan and I think Gaza, but it probably would have been better if the services had not been cut in the first place. You have to understand that in the Arabic-speaking world, there are millions of car radios tuned to that medium-wave frequency, and people just turn the radio on and listen to whatever is on that frequency. Now, in some cases they are getting Russian disinformation, and that is not a good outcome for anyone.
Q45 Uma Kumaran: Thank you for that answer. Does the BBC have any chance to make representations to the Government on the impact of those cuts as you have set out?
Jamie Angus: I think it is an important part of the BBC’s operational independence that it is given an agreed funding envelope and then decides what its recommendations are for preserving or closing services. I don’t wish to argue that the World Service should be preserved in aspic and should never close radio services, for example—as I have indicated, there are good reasons around digital transformation for why that would need to happen over time. I suspect that as part of the BBC’s relationship with the FCDO under the charter the BBC would have shared its audience impact assessments of what would happen.
You mentioned service closures, and this is a good example of how the radio services close, but of course BBC Arabic television and BBC Persian television and their associated digital services continue. There is quite a lot of focus in the existing relationship on service closures and preventing service closures; but I think that what has happened with radio services shows that you can take a big chunk out of an audience without actually closing the overall language service. I think there should be more focus on the overall audience experience and less focus on trying to avoid any individual language closure.
Q46 Chair: Before we go to Abtisam, may I ask you a question about something I have often been told: that Al Jazeera would not exist if the BBC had not sacked or made redundant the Arabic staff, who then went off to work for Al Jazeera. That is a story that does the rounds—is it right?
Jamie Angus: That is a longer story than the Committee has space for. To be fair to all sides, it is true that the BBC did try to open an Arabic television service—or did, in fact, do so—a generation before the 2008 service launch, which is the one that exists today. For all kinds of complicated political reasons, to do with the politics of the region rather than the politics of the UK, that service was not sustainable and closed. It is certainly true that many of the people involved in that launch went on to work for Al Jazeera. I think that the Al Jazeera experiment and experience, both in English and in Arabic, has been successful on its own terms. You can’t take that away from what they have done.
Q47 Abtisam Mohamed: I will be very brief. In relation to the news service that is transmitted through normal mainstream channels in relation to BBC Arabia, what are your views? You are the director of Al Arabiya, are you not?
Jamie Angus: I am the chief operating officer.
Abtisam Mohamed: What are your views in terms of how other media channels, in the Middle East in particular, are viewed more positively in relation to the articulation of news, specifically in relation to the Middle East, and how people might tune in to anything that is related to the conflict? The politics of the Middle East will be obtained from a channel that they perhaps might perceive as more trusted, rather than Western media channels. And then they might switch to the BBC World Service for other things that are more global. Do you think that that is a thing—that people would probably perhaps trust Al Jazeera in that region, or Middle East Eye or whichever news channels there are, just because of how the news medium might be received and the politics behind that?
Jamie Angus: I would say two things. First, the Arabic news audience is incredibly sophisticated in terms of media literacy. It is unlike any other region, in that people have a really well-developed sense, even if they don’t quite articulate it, of which provider is bringing which set of assumptions and values. I think you really see that around the coverage of the Gaza situation—the Israel-Gaza/Israel-Lebanon conflict—now: people will pick and choose between providers, and they will kind of know what the source is that they are getting and they will understand the assumptions behind it, but they will graze among multiple different providers, including BBC Arabic. I think there is a sense that when there are hyper-contested issues in the region, BBC Arabic does well because audiences will say, “I am going to go to something that I perceive to be a neutral and disinterested source.”
Secondly—this is relevant to our discussion of radio—the demographics in the Middle East are extraordinary. You have very young populations growing, particularly in these conflict-affected areas, including Palestine, Gaza and other countries in the region. You have a very, very young audience who are probably—certainly—never going to go to radio. They may never actually go to linear television. They're all using smartphones. They're getting almost all their news on social media. As the previous witnesses explained, that is a threat and an opportunity. It’s an opportunity because it reduces to zero your costs of distribution, but it introduces you into this kind of crazy environment where you are just one post in a feed alongside thousands of others on a platform you don’t own and operate. So, the BBC is right to play in that space. When we are talking about digital transformation and reinvestment and so on, it is really important. This is a really good example of the fact that you have to get in there and play in that space in order to reach those younger audiences who may never go to those linear services, which, when we talk about the World Service, is what we are thinking of. We're thinking about BBC World News, World Service radio and those kinds of services. Increasingly, though, particularly in conflict areas, it is digital services, which can be harder to block and are very, very popular with young audiences.
Q48 Claire Hazelgrove: Thank you both for your time. This has been very insightful so far. Mr Angus, you earlier shared with the Committee some interesting thoughts on where you felt that Government funding could be better located from, for example from the Cabinet Office. I wanted to touch on the funding specifically of World Service language services using ODA money. In your previous written evidence, which was really helpful, you referred to the expansion of BBC language services between 2016 and 2022 being funded by largely ODA as being welcome and appropriate. I wondered about your reflections on that in the state of the world that we now see ourselves in, and the range of extra demands now on the ODA budget. Yesterday, as has been mentioned, we had the FCDO’s permanent under-secretary before us. I asked him about the impacts of the ODA cuts on Britain’s soft power, which he felt were present and real. I wondered about your thinking—is there anything there shaping your feeling that perhaps this funding might be better located out of the Cabinet Office? Is that thought linked or is it separate?
Jamie Angus: On the FCDO and the Cabinet Office, I have no material criticism of the FCDO—they were always a supportive and helpful partner and, to be fair to them, have always tried to come up with corners of extra funding to do interesting and significant things. I think my point is rather that when the World Service budget sits in a DEL budget—I have the terminology right?—so in an inner departmental budget, the World Service can only grow at the expense of something else that the Department does. Arminka may come on to the history of how the World Service saving was originally made when it was passed to the BBC. You end up in a zero-sum game in which the Home Office says: “Okay, we can give you £20 million more to protect an emergency radio service but we are going to have to make a £20 million saving in our consular budget.” My point about the Cabinet Office is that it is squarely what runs and administers the national security mission of the UK, and broadly it doesn’t run other DEL budgets. Therefore it might be a more appropriate place for the World Service to sit, alongside the parliamentary body that I have suggested.
On your wider question about ODA, I think I said in my evidence that there is a risk—as with commercial funding, which we will maybe come on to talk about—of putting the ODA cart before the audience horse, which is that the availability of ODA money ends up determining what gets funded and what doesn’t. That doesn’t feel like the right outcome, theoretically. It should be said that even the World Service 2020 funding included a non-ODA element; that non-ODA money funded expansion to BBC Russian, BBC Arabic and the BBC Serbian service, for example.
Chair: And the United States.
Jamie Angus: That is right. It is important that the mission is defined by what the audience need, not by what the ODA rules happen to be. As I said in my evidence, if India becomes wealthy enough that it is not ODA-able any more then suddenly you have a huge hole in the BBC’s ODA budget for the Indian language services. That shows the potential pitfalls of ODA funding.
It is worth reflecting that when we were going into covid, in 2020, we were still thinking that ODA was going to be an endlessly rising tide—that GDP growth would continue. The ODA rules were enshrined in legislation. For the BBC to look for additional funding for the World Service, ODA was always the natural place to look. Eighteen months later, the ODA commitment had been abandoned and now, over the last couple of years, a huge amount of it is being spent on refugee activity in the UK, for example. ODA no longer looks like the safe haven that it used to. I think it is good if there is realism in this Committee, in Government Departments and in the BBC about that; I think that is welcome.
Q49 Claire Hazelgrove: Would you therefore say there is sense in uncoupling, so you have got different sources and different ambitions to some extent? We were looking yesterday at the FDCO’s intended outcomes. Granted, those were formed by the last Government rather than this one, and the work to reshape them is being done at the moment. But there was something in that I thought was quite interesting—the budget burden that ODA was holding for, as you, say the humanitarian crisis, as well as for sustainable development and for World Service language services. It feels incredibly broad. Would you say, as a principle, that there is now sense—in the world we find ourselves in—in moving these objectives and funding streams aside to protect them so far as is possible?
Jamie Angus: Yes. In an ideal world, I think the mission should be funding-stream-agnostic: we should agree what the mission is, and then we should work out the sensible ways of funding it. My only caveat was that if you put the ODA first, you end up with a distorted set of services, perhaps.
Q50 Chair: Baroness Helić, before you go, I wondered whether you wanted to add anything. As we said to the previous panel, if there is anything you feel we have missed or anything additional that you would like to say, please write to us. We are very grateful to you for coming.
Baroness Helić: Thank you for that. I fully second what Jamie has said. The BBC World Service is an amazing tool in our toolbox of things that we can do but don’t have to do. It is enormously important in terms not only of representing the United Kingdom, but of trying to make sense of the very chaotic world we live in. It cannot be done on an ad hoc basis; there cannot be a transfusion when it is in a coma. It has to be constant funding that can enable the BBC to compete with other services around the world.
It is not only about cutting a particular language service; it is about preparing for the next stage of delivering news and delivering information. Jamie has spoken about a young population, not only in the Middle East but in Africa and Asia, and if we want to be able to compete with the others who are investing billions, we have to make sure that the BBC World Service and the BBC in general rely not only on their brand but on a solid basis. Then those who need to prepare the BBC for the next 10 years have that basis and do not have to always think, “What is it that I have to give up in order to catch up with our competitors?”—because that is almost irresponsible, in the era that we live in. Doing it in any way other than a sustained way with a lot of trust and support for the BBC World Service would be damaging to our interests, not only abroad but at home as well. Sorry—I have to leave.
Q51 Chair: I have been so pleased that you have been able to come; thank you.
You have been saying, “We will come on to commercialisation. We will come on to digital platforms”, so I will ask about that. Are there unintended consequences of investing as heavily as the BBC has in digital platforms in North America, and has that come at the expense of other regions—maybe the Arab world and maybe Africa and India? What I am asking is: is the BBC in danger of over-reporting in the US, or is it that we are quite relaxed about that, given how fraught the media environment is, and that perhaps the BBC falls into a middle ground that furthers Britain’s interests?
Jamie Angus: It is a complicated picture. I would start off by saying that Tim and the leadership team in the BBC are doing exactly the right thing in trying to heavily commercialise in North America, both in non-news—things like BritBox—and the emerging services that will become North America’s subscription BBC news product that people pay to access directly. That is a good thing. It is covered in the charter. It is permitted commercial activity. It broadly commercialises what already exists. It is a really welcome way of supporting the licence fee and bringing those additional revenues back—and growing the audience in North America, of course, which I think is one of the BBC’s top two audiences. India and North America tend to leapfrog each other as the largest country audience.
I made a point in written evidence around the law of unintended consequences. In North America, if you make additional investments in editorial posts, in principle you can make enough commercial money back to fund those posts and produce a profit. That is why there is this very welcome investment into additional digital reporting roles in particular in North America—to build out a subscription product that people in the wealthiest news market on the planet will pay for. The unintended consequences are that if that happens alongside a drawing down and a reduction in editorial posts in places like east and west Africa, India and other parts of Asia, you end up with an unbalanced daily report.
You do see this sometimes when you look at the BBC news website or use the BBC news app, which I do pretty heavily: you see a lot of commercially funded North America content. It is good quality and I have no complaints about it, but if you have a series of film reviews and in-depth digital reporting of North American politics, it is either squeezing other content out from the editorial front page or the content just is not there, because the BBC has closed editorial roles in China, for example. You end up with a skewed perception of what is happening in the world, and the international news website front page in the app is an incredibly important snapshot picture of what the BBC thinks is important on any given day. I am trying to make a fairly nuanced criticism—it is good to have those commercially funded posts, but we absolutely need to make sure that we are not withdrawing from China, from reporting climate change, or from reporting on the Middle East or east and west Africa. There has to be a balance there.
Q52 Chair: You also said India. If it is right that the second biggest audience is India, and in India at the moment there is presumably the easier funding stream of ODA funding, what happens if India does not qualify any longer for ODA funding? How is the gap going to be filled?
Jamie Angus: Exactly—it has to be filled by non-ODA Government funding, it seems to me. It is possible to commercialise in India, and the BBC is incredibly popular there; there was an investment in four new Indian language services that were introduced after 2016, which have been enormously successful, and complement BBC Hindi and the four other vernacular languages. That has been a huge success story over the last 10 years, and it is important to entrench that success and continue to build on it.
But we have to be realistic. I do not see commercialisation of the BBC’s services in India as a particularly realistic way of raising money. Not only is commercialisation of news in general a really tough business, but the BBC is in a difficult political position in India right now. It has had to restructure itself after very extensive pressure from the Modi Government in response to unwelcome reporting of Modi himself. The idea that Indian advertisers will flock to support BBC news coverage of India is not going to happen—it is not that kind of market.
Q53 Chair: I don’t know what that means. What do you mean by saying the BBC had to restructure itself because of what was going on with Modi?
Jamie Angus: The Indian Government compelled international broadcasters, including the BBC, to restructure in India and have a locally owned subsidiary that had Indian nationals as directors in order for them to be able to publish digital news in India. That happened, I think, this year—in 2024.
Chair: I didn’t know about that.
Jamie Angus: It has been a difficult and unpleasant experience for the BBC to find a way of constituting itself in India to allow it to continue to function effectively as a digital news publisher. The BBC is shut out of the television news market and the radio news market in India; it cannot do any news radio at all and it is very constrained in television. Then, as a digital news publisher, the Indian Government introduced an onerous series of regulations and launched a tax raid on the BBC bureau, arguably to punish it for its unhelpful coverage of Modi and his Government.
Chair: But nevertheless it is the World Service’s second biggest audience?
Jamie Angus: Yes.
Chair: Well, that is good, isn’t it? Well done.
Q54 Claire Hazelgrove: Just to come in on that point, which was really interesting to hear about, would you say that the World Service in India has been able to retain its independence, despite the fact that it has restructured because of the preferences of the Indian Government?
Jamie Angus: I am sure it has, and I have not seen anything in the coverage that has caused me alarm. The BBC continues to report robustly on India—when you see BBC execs, you can ask them that question, because it post-dates my time there. However, it is concerning, because it reflects the direction India is going in, it seems to me: becoming a less and less tolerant climate for press freedom, even though it is a country with an amazing journalism tradition.
Chair: Very good. We have a few questions about the funding model for the World Service that I want John to ask, given his expertise.
Q55 Sir John Whittingdale: As we have discussed, funding of the World Service has flip-flopped from Government to the licence fee payer and so on, and each has advantages and disadvantages, as the previous witnesses set out. I understand that you have put forward a suggestion that I think Michael Grade first advanced: the idea of splitting the English language services, which might continue to be paid for by the licence fee, and the overseas language services, which would be funded by grant in aid. First, I want to explore how realistic it is to divide them in that way, because I think there is some overlap between the two. Secondly, will you say a bit more about your suggestion, which I suspect may not go down too well at the Treasury, that Parliament, as well as the Government, should have a say over the funding?
Jamie Angus: If I could wave my magic wand, my wish would be for them to continue to be unified and operationally embedded in the BBC, and produced by the BBC, but just with separate funding streams. Splitting off the World Service back to its pre-2010 model, when it was almost a separate organisation from the rest of the BBC—it was certainly a separate organisation from the rest of BBC News—is not a good idea. The benefits overall to the BBC and to the World Service—
Sir John Whittingdale: So we do not recreate Bush House.
Jamie Angus: Well, we might wish to recreate Bush House in some ways, but the separate World Service empire with its own board and a non-integrated structure would not be welcome, just because of the huge progress that has been made in the last 15 years in making the World Service a part of BBC News. I suppose I say that it would continue to be an integrated production model, but the funding mechanisms would be discrete between English, with good reasons for that to be funded by the BBC, and the language services, with equally good reasons why the Government should probably pick up the tab for that.
The question about parliamentary oversight partly reflects that when I was there, I did not really feel that the BBC board had the bandwidth to really scrutinise and assess what the World Service did. If I am completely honest, I think the BBC board is pulled in so many different directions that it does not have the headspace to really scrutinise and think about the strategic future of the World Service in the way that it might and arguably should. A parliamentary structure that involved parliamentarians both in setting and protecting the funding and, alongside the board, in the oversight and scrutiny of things like distribution strategy and the editorial content, would be welcome, because it would co-opt the great love and support that parliamentarians feel for the institution into effective scrutineering work alongside a role in setting and protecting the funding. But I agree with your remarks about the Treasury.
Q56 Sir John Whittingdale: Is there not a slight risk that that might be seen to be politicising the management of the World Service?
Jamie Angus: Possibly. As I said to Mr McDougall, there is no perfect answer to this. There is no structure that prevents anyone who wants to have a pop at the World Service for not being independent enough from doing that anyway. The reason I suggested it is that I felt that in the time I spent talking to parliamentarians about the World Service as director, I was struck by the depth and cross-party nature of the support, and it does not feel like there is a way currently for that to translate into helping to set and protect the budgets. That is not to say that this Committee’s work is not welcome; it is very welcome, but how do you create a structure that allows Parliament to take a greater role, both in the oversight and in setting and protecting the funding? That was my ambition.
Sir John Whittingdale: I think that argument applies across the BBC’s services. People feel very strongly about other things the BBC does—local radio, for instance. If you had asked Parliament, the BBC would not have made any cuts to local radio. Anyway, it is certainly an interesting suggestion, and we will take account of it, so thank you.
Chair: Thank you very much for your time this afternoon. We really appreciate it. As I said to the earlier witnesses, if there is anything that you think we did not ask or you were not given an opportunity to speak about, then please do write to us. We may be in touch in any event to try to clarify some things. The Culture, Media and Sport Committee has also been taking evidence today about the BBC World Service and we hope to be working with them to take evidence from Ministers in December. Thank you very much.