The majority of the BBC’s £1 billion annual savings are set to come from content cuts this year, a five-fold increase since 2016/2017, Deadline reported. The National Audit Office’s latest BBC report found £402 million are projected to be saved on “cuts to content and services” for the current financial year, and a further £103 million on “changes to scheduling mix,” meaning 52% of the organization’s near £1 billion savings target will come via content.
The company has had to cut more and more of its program spend in order to meet hefty targets imposed during the last license fee settlement in 2016/2017. Rather than content, 70% of its annual savings used to come from “productivity” and by reducing staff numbers. According to the report, now the BBC is largely on track to achieve its current savings targets.
“In the early years of its current savings programme, the BBC successfully protected audience-facing services, but it has found this increasingly challenging to maintain. The BBC has reduced spending on its content while its audience numbers have fallen and it is not yet clear what the longer-term impact of this will be,” the report warned.
The decline in content spend has partly been made up by international co-production investment from the likes of Netflix and Amazon almost doubling to £385 million over the same period. However, the report said that “this could only worsen concerns that the BBC is losing its distinctive ‘Britishness’ and poses a risk to the long-term value for money that it can realize from its intellectual property”.
“We will continue to focus on modernizing, improving efficiency and prioritizing spending on a range of high-quality content to ensure value for money for all license fee payers,” a BBC spokesperson told Deadline.
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