Archives for January 2011

Update, Monday 31 January: Thank you for your comments. I have replied to some of them here.

It's been a painful day for the BBC World Service and its audience of 180 million around the world. This morning I announced a fundamental restructure to the BBC World Service in order to meet the 16% savings target required by the UK government's Spending Review last October.

 

At the moment BBC WS is funded by Grant-in-Aid provided by the government.

BBC WS will be funded by the licence fee from April 2014.

Over the next three years, we will have to make to an annual saving of £46m by April 2014.

In all the changes announced today, the aim has been to protect the WS, its quality and reputation and, where possible, our footprint.

Our choices are based on the needs of our audiences and the limited resources that we now have available.

Under these proposals we expect 480 posts to close over the next year and by the time the BBC World Service moves in to the licence fee we estimate the number of proposed closures to reach up to 650.

Today I announced:

• The closure of five language services; Albanian, Macedonian, Portuguese for Africa and Serbian, as well as the English for the Caribbean regional service.

• The end of radio programmes in seven languages, focusing those services on online and new media content and distribution. These include: Azeri, Mandarin Chinese (note that Cantonese radio programming continues), Russian (some programmes will be distributed online only), Spanish for Cuba, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Ukrainian.

• Reduction of most short-wave and medium-wave distribution.

• In World Service English the schedule will become simpler and some programmes, Europe Today and Politics UK will be decommissioned. There are other changes to the schedule.

The closure of services and programmes is painful. This is not a reflection on their performance. They're all extremely important to their audiences and to the BBC. And I pay tribute to the brilliant journalists who have done a superb job for their audiences and the BBC.

We are making cuts that we would rather not be making.

We estimate that there will be an immediate drop of more than 30 million in our audience figures as a result of these measures. We will need to make investments in new content and services to be able to respond to competitive pressure and audience and technology changes. It's the only way to avoid further reductions in our reach.

In our programming in English, we will invest in some of our highest quality and best known radio programmes. World Have Your Say will have an extra daily edition and From Our Own Correspondent will add short daily programmes to its weekly offer.

Our aim has been to maintain the great quality of the English programming, despite the need to make significant savings. And I believe it is possible to do that.

The strength and quality of radio in English is the cornerstone of the World Service and long may it live.

From April 2014 BBC WS will be funded by the licence fee.

The director general and the BBC Trust have committed to protecting the World Service. The director general, Mark Thompson, said that he intends to restore some of the funding we are losing in the interest of audiences when World Service becomes licence fee-funded in 2014.

After today's announcements a lot will change.

What won't change is the BBC's aim to continue to be the world's best known and most trusted provider of high quality, impartial and editorially independent international news.

We will continue to bring the BBC's expertise, perspectives and content to the largest worldwide audience, which will reflect well on Britain and its people.

Finally, I am immensely proud of all the World Service staff that have, under a period of huge uncertainty, continued to deliver brilliant programmes. My aim is to ensure that, whatever the pain today and over the coming months, we will continue to produce that superb journalism and we remain the most trusted broadcaster in the world.

You can find details of my full speech to staff on the Press Office website.

I would very much like to have comments or questions from BBC audiences around the world, so please post your points here and I will endeavour to answer them.

Update 1130, 31 January: Thank you for your comments.

We have been overwhelmed by the messages of support both from our audiences and public opinion for BBC World Service. Most have expressed their disappointment at some of the decisions taken especially regarding closure of services and stopping short-wave distribution.

Let me clarify first one of the issues that is quite fundamental in the current debate - that of the funding of WS, as expressed in one of the comments here by James Rigby: "Why should the British licence-fee payer fund broadcasts for overseas audiences?".

Currently BBC World Service is funded by Grant-in-Aid from the FCO. The plans, I announced this week, cover the next three years till 2014. For the next three years, BBC WS will be funded by Grant-in-Aid from the FCO. It is this funding that has been cut as part of the government's Comprehensive Spending Review.

Many members of our audience have written to express their willingness to help with the cut to our funding. "I wish that before going to these drastic cuts that the BBC had asked people outside of the UK if they would be willing to pay for the services -I know I would pay!", writes cfgarside. We are grateful for those offers of support. But the charter under which the WS operates does not allow for receiving money from individuals to fund the WS.

BBC World Service Trust - the BBC's international charity - is funded by external grants and voluntary contributions and a small amount of core support from the BBC. It receives donations from the public.

BBC WS Trust works to strengthen the media in developing countries and shares expertise with broadcast partners. Some of the discussion programmes produced are also broadcast on World Service in various languages.

"I am deeply disappointed about the cutting of BBC WS Caribbean Service...Please reconsider us here," writes Frank Power.

BBC Caribbean service has indeed been a one of the oldest and most distinguished services the BBC has provided in English. The Caribbean Islands have important heritage links with the UK and BBC content will continue to be available through a number of outlets including a network of FM relays serving potentially 80% of the population in Antigua, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.

I would be happy to respond to comments or questions from audiences around the world. Please do post them here.

Peter Horrocks is the director of BBC World Service.

Can being banned from drinking alcohol hinder not help your chances of recovery from the effects of alcoholism? It's just one of the questions we're tackling on Newsbeat this week.

Radio 1 will be looking at the issues surrounding drinking - our week investigating this kicked off on Sunday night on The Surgery. Newsbeat reporter Jim Reed talked about the stories he'll be covering.

 

All week, our listeners will have the chance to click on our Booze Calculator. You put in the number and type of drinks you had last night and it works out the number of units against your weekly recommended amount, number of calories, time the alcohol stays in your system, amount you spent in a typical bar, how much you spend a year on booze if you have one night like that every week. It's all set in a bar with the results displayed on the blackboard.

You can automatically post your results to Facebook and Twitter. Radio 1 DJs will have a go at this and talk about it on their shows. Why not try it yourself?

The first person to be stopped from buying alcohol in every pub and bar in England and Wales has told Newsbeat the ban has made her drinking problem worse. Laura Hall, 21-year-old, has had to go back into rehab after a period off booze. She was arrested after drinking again last week. You can see a documentary about her struggle with alcohol on BBC Three.

Clearly, it's an important subject which connects with our core 18-24 audience. We will also explore liver disease - something we usually associate with older people - but new statistics show a record number of under 30s were admitted to hospitals in England with liver problems linked to booze last year.

The figure has gone up 53% in the last 10 years from 230 to 351. The numbers are small but rising significantly: some experts we have spoken to believe it is the tip of a very large iceberg waiting to hole NHS budgets.

Separate figures show there are now 71 under 30s on the waiting list for a liver transplant in the UK, up from 28 in 2000. We have spoken to a 19-year-old admitted to hospital with a liver problem and a 25-year-old with serious health problems linked to booze that she kept hidden from the NHS.

In Dundee we're out with police as they pilot a new scheme to prevent underage drinking in the city. Supermarkets and off licenses are selling bottles and cans with a special code. If they get confiscated from someone under 18, then police know where and when it has been bought. They can go back to the shop, study CCTV and find out if shop broke the law or if someone over 18 bought the alcohol on their behalf - which is obviously also illegal.

The coalition government has announced it was bringing in minimum pricing on alcohol in England and Wales. In Oldham that's already happening after the town was labelled the "binge capital" of the UK two years ago. Then the council cracked down - more policing, strict conditions on bars and so on. They say it's been a success and crime and anti-social behaviour is down. We'll be back there to test those claims.

Of course, there are the tricks of the bar trade, too: for example: evidence shows the louder the music in the bar, the more people drink, if they take away chairs leaving customers standing, you are likely to buy more booze. We'll be talking to some insiders from the world of bar work about the tricks and the techniques they use to get us to get another round in.

Our audience will be giving us their feedback and I would love your ideas and thoughts too.

Rod McKenzie is editor of Newsbeat and 1Xtra News.

Andrew Lansley Week. I think even the health secretary himself would agree that it's not the most obvious crowd-pleaser, but that's what we on PM are about to embark on.

 

We've invited the health secretary for England to join us live every day this week on PM to discuss his proposed changes to the NHS in England. The scale of the changes being proposed is disputed - the government stresses evolution, others see revolution - but let's take our cue from the prime minister, who told the Today programme that it was "quite a fundamental change". 80% of the NHS budget will be controlled by GPs. Every hospital to become a foundation trust. No more Primary Care Trusts or Strategic Health Authorities. All patients to have the choice of "any willing provider". And those are just the headlines.

The more I thought about all this, the more it became apparent to me that this subject couldn't be covered in any depth with a typical six-minute interview, or even a 10-minute one. And so I came up with the idea of a series of interviews, stripped across the week, each one tackling a different aspect of the reform, and Mr Lansley agreed.

On Monday, it was the role of GPs. Tuesday, it's patient experience. Wednesday, cost and the role of competition. Thursday, holding the NHS to account. Each one will be preceded by a short explainer piece from our health correspondent, Jane Dreaper. And on Friday, we'll put questions raised by the PM audience to Mr Lansley.

Some might say it's too much time to give to one politician of one party. But this interview series will mark the publication of the bill. Doubtless the debate will evolve, and we will return to it in other ways later in its Parliamentary passage.

We will represent other perspectives during the interview series, but I make no apologies for keeping the focus on Eddie's interviews with the man responsible for the reforms. And judging from the size of the postbag already, there's plenty of substance for 5 serious interviews.

Perhaps this could launch a whole new genre of interview... Ed Balls Month? Sarah Teather Summer? The Year of Oliver Letwin?

Joanna Carr is editor, PM, iPM and Broadcasting House.

On the BBC's Business website we've devoted quite a bit of coverage over recent months to the electric motor industry.

There's no doubt it's growing in importance as evidenced by an increasing number of makes and models and changing consumer attitudes. That was the reason behind our idea to set our correspondent Brian Milligan a challenge this week - to drive an electric car from London to Scotland using only public charging points.

I'm delighted to say it's already drawing quite a following on our website as well as on our Facebook page and Twitter feed and a lot of you are engaging with our little adventure. We've even had a class from Preston School in Eaglescliffe, Stockton-on-Tees, coming along to see the car and find out about the environmental issues of electric motoring.

Of course, as Brian acknowledged in his opening piece, the challenge could be a seen as a little unfair. Many electric cars are designed more for short commuter runs than a journey of the sort we're attempting but we're not making any great scientific claims for this, rather we're hoping to bring the issues about electric cars and their infrastructure to the widest possible audience and we seem to be doing that.

However, I hear that our project has a challenger and a rival electric sports car has now set off from London in pursuit! For those of who haven't yet seen the coverage please do feel free to follow our progress here.

Kosovo has been back on the front pages in recent weeks with lurid allegations against its prime minister and dominant politician, Hashim Thaci, accusing him of involvement in organised crime and even harvesting human organs for sale for profit. Mr Thaci has denied the allegations.

The prime minister has also been in the news as his party was accused of vote rigging in last month's parliamentary elections which were the first organised by the Kosovo government. This week, the vote had to be rerun in some of Mr Thaci's strongholds and a new government should be formed in the next few weeks.

Why is this interesting to people who don't follow affairs in south east Europe closely?

This is a question I have been asked given The World Tonight has followed the Kosovo story more consistently than many other news outlets.

The answer I give is that Kosovo is unfinished business which has implications that range far wider than this small territory in the former Yugoslavia.

The European Union has its largest ever civilian mission in Kosovo. Known as Eulex, it is a police and justice mission designed to help build the rule of law there as Kosovo is blighted by corruption and organised crime and a major source of trafficking in drugs, people and arms into the EU. EU officials will tell you off the record that the mission is needed so the drugs gangs can be tackled on the streets of Kosovo, rather than the streets of Paris, London or Berlin.

In addition to paying for this mission, European taxpayers have also funded a huge aid programme totalling several billion euros over the past decade aimed at reconstructing Kosovo after the conflict between Serbian Security Forces and the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army in the late 90s and Nato's intervention in 1999.

Another reason Kosovo matters is that its declaration of independence from Serbia three years ago - encouraged by the United States, Britain, France and Germany - highlighted the tension between self-determination and territorial integrity in world affairs that is at the root of several conflicts around the world. In addition to the Kosovo conflict, these competing ideas helped cause the short war between Russia and Georgia in 2008 and the long running civil war in Sudan which this week's referendum there is aimed at settling peacefully.

Kosovo is also important precisely because it is unfinished business. The EU is attempting to supervise the development of a functioning state along European lines, but despite the support of the US and leading EU countries, Kosovo as an independent state has struggled to achieve international acceptance. To date 73 countries have recognised Kosovo, but the rest of the world's 192 UN members still regard Kosovo as part of Serbia, including the world's major emerging countries from China to Brazil to South Africa.

The luridness of the allegations against Mr Thaci provoked a renewed focus on Kosovo in the media and a slew of articles have appeared in Britain and the US in recent weeks questioning Nato's intervention in 1999 and the wisdom of the supporting Kosovo independence and Mr Thaci, as one of the leaders of the independence movement, in particular.

The offensive against Serbia in 1999 was presented by western leaders as a humanitarian act to prevent widespread ethnic cleansing of Kosovo's Albanian population by Slobodan Milosevic's forces. This was widely accepted by western commentators at the time and since then reporting of the conflict in western media has been largely been framed as a story of Albanian victims and Serb aggressors. But some of the recent commentary (you can read examples here and here) has challenged this account and questioned whether the intervention and support for independence were misguided.

Like most conflicts, Kosovo has never been black and white. Albanians and Serbs have been involved in a struggle for control of Kosovo on and off for well over a century and there have been times when one side or the other had the upper hand and sought to drive the other out of the territory. So when NATO intervened to stop ethnic cleansing in 1999, it was also siding with the Albanians and this culminated in the declaration of independence in 2008 with American and European encouragement (although five out of 27 EU states did not back the move).

On The World Tonight we talked to the former senior UN official Jerry Gallucci, who now writes an informative blog, about whether this unwelcome publicity will damage Kosovo's prospects of achieving full international recognition. His take is that having the criminal allegations and the electoral fraud in the headlines casts Kosovo in a negative light and will probably keep the process of international recognition bogged down and that means the fate of Kosovo remaining unresolved and, for us, newsworthy.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.