The BBC empire has grown too big

Thompson is not running a modern media corporation but an outpost of the Natural History Museum. As he wanders his mighty domain, he keeps bumping into cobwebbed dinosaurs left by his predecessors, John Birt and Greg Dyke.

He sees managers who manage nothing, producers who produce nothing, skeletons and deputy skeletons attending interminable “meetings” in corporate palaces under constant reconstruction where nothing ever happens.

Round his feet scurry near-extinct species from before the digital deluge, such as trustees, trade unions and management consultants. They have the smell of death about them.

Those of us who love, admire and sometimes work for the BBC know well its hyper-sensitivity. It accepts criticism with all the grace of Wales or the state of Israel. But this week has been ridiculous. Any normal organisation should be able to reduce its establishment by eight per cent without treating it — and reporting it — as the demise of the British empire.

The BBC is handling the consequence of its crazy expansion in the 1990s. Fattened on an above-inflation licence fee (the BBC is funded by a licence fee paid by every household in the UK with a TV), the corporation spawned new channels and websites, and moved into commercial activities such as events, magazines and merchandising, much of it in state-backed competition with the private sector. As recently as this month, it bought out the Lonely Planet guides. BBC bidding sent the price of sports events, entertainers and presenters soaring. Its London property estate was in perpetual turmoil.

The new charter and financial settlement in 2006 were widely derided as a government capitulation to BBC greed, despite the licence fee being capped at below inflation. From that moment, the corporation found itself losing public and political support, just when new technology was challenging the concept of a monolithic media monopoly. Even then, the BBC thought it could postpone the pain of any cuts. How it could ignore a totally foreseeable “GBP2bn black hole” in its budget following the 2006 settlement is a mystery. What are all those managers doing all day?

Thompson rightly perceives that his news and documentary departments have duplicated each other beyond reason and are no longer “purposed for a multi-platformed digital age”. News feature programmes are run like separate magazines, each with their own producers and reporters, and are vulnerable to corruption (such as phone-in scandals and plugging each others’ books). Lavish treatment of inhouse employees is financed by extreme stinginess to contract and freelance staff.

Streamlining this makes sense, as does the plan to sell surplus buildings, rather than kill the new radio and television channels. More radical is the decision to attack the BBC’s core ethic by admitting advertising on to the new BBC.com. If advertisements are tolerable on the web, why not on BBC1 and BBC2 TV channels? Whose ethical fastidiousness are fee-payers expected to subsidise?

Less justifiable is the manner of this reform. When the new BBC Trust was set up a year ago, I predicted that Thompson would eat it for breakfast. So he has, leaving the trustees to let him turn a supposed vision of broadcasting in the 21st century into a pavement punch-up with the trade unions over 1,800 job cuts. Thompson seems to have committed basic management error No 1: if you have to cut jobs, never roll them into a massive total. Keep the vision thing separate. Slice salami-style. Never give the enemy “thousands of job losses” on which to grip — and never communicate through PowerPoint.

Like many big organisations, the BBC regards consultancy as a substitute for charisma.

The corporation will get over this latest of managerial spats. But each one weakens its case for special treatment from a British establishment that has long indulged its extravagance in return for invitations to the flagship political TV show Question Time.

The BBC continues to offer a uniquely impressive spread of news, current affairs, documentaries, arts and entertainment. The argument for such an all-embracing cultural institution was once strong, largely because the BBC was so good at it. For 70 years it has been the nation’s surrogate newspaper, arts council, university, sports club and friend to the lonely. It has immeasurably enriched British public life and is part of Britain’s global image.

New media technology is rendering that status obsolete. The BBC is no longer more than the sum of its parts, and some of them are clearly unjustified. Nobody scanning the dozens of digital channels available can see what distinguishes, for instance, BBC sport and light entertainment from their commercial rivals. Nor can they see why a licence fee (rather than subscription) is needed to support them. When BBC World and Online behave like any other media company, why should the rest of the BBC be different?

The truth of this upheaval is that the BBC has simply grown too big. Big organisations rot. The UK’s state-funded National Health Service (NHS) is rotting. The UK Ministry of Defence is rotting. British Petroleum is, or was, rotting. The distance from hand to brain is too far and ever more resources must go into travelling up and down it. Grow or die becomes the watchword, but the reality is grow and die.

One day Britain will have a public service broadcasting commission, using public money to purchase and distribute a range of news and cultural programmes across a range of platforms, on the strict criterion that they are not supplied in the marketplace. It will have no licence fee, no palaces, no unions, no meetings and certainly no 23,000 employees. The only question is whether that body will be called the BBC. Yesterday offered only the most hesitant of answers.

Copyright: Guardian News & Media 2007