Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-119)
MR NIGEL
CHAPMAN AND
MS ALISON
WOODHAMS
9 NOVEMBER 2005
Q100 Ms Stuart: Let me slightly rephrase
the question then if you do not want to give recommendations.
When you gave evidence to Patrick Carter what were the three key
points in the evidence session which you hoped he really got and
understood as a result of your evidence?
Mr Chapman: I hope he got that
the World Service is the world's pre-eminent international broadcaster,
that it is a great asset to Britain because it reflects well on
Britain because it is about the values it evinces in the way it
covers journalism and therefore it is very important that it remains
a strong force, and that the strength of that force comes from
its editorial independence. Nothing must be allowed to happen
in any public diplomacy strategy or anything of that kind which
undermines the editorial independence of the World Service. Also
that it is an efficient place, that it is thinking very hard about
its priorities, that it will need new funds frankly to do some
of the things it would like to do up to 2010, and I would hope
that he would broadly take those messages on board.
Q101 Ms Stuart: Was there any indication
of areas where you thought the Carter review was going or some
hints you got of the approaches they were taking which you thought
were misguided and therefore were there any points which you hoped
you dissuaded him from?
Mr Chapman: There were one or
two areas where we had robust conversations. One of those areas
was the value of services in a language like Hindi to the rural
poor of India, where I spoke very passionately about that because
I think there is a risk with the World Service that you only see
it as targeting opinion formers and decision makers. There are
many parts of the world where while you could argue in terms of
geo-political importance to Britain these are not the highest
priority countries, the World Service has a unique role there,
in parts of Africa and parts of Asia, and it is really important
that we continue to be there. If you judge the World Service only
about targeting opinion-formers and decision-makers, then you
would find it hard to justify that, and I do not think we should
have to justify it because I think it is important that people
have access to a free and independent media wherever they live
whether they live in Rwanda or they live in Russia or they live
in China or they live in richer parts of the world too, we should
do our best to enable that to happen where appropriate. I think
we had a good discussion about that and I think he understood
what I was saying.
Q102 Ms Stuart: When do you expect the
Carter review to see the light of day?
Mr Chapman: I think that is again
a matter for him not for me. I would expect but could not be sure
about this that it would be published in the next couple of weeks.
Chairman: We were expecting it around
the start of October so we will wait and see but that may be not
to do with the World Service, it may be to do with other factors.
John Maples wanted to come back briefly.
Q103 Mr Maples: It is pretty obvious
to all of us why the Government has decided it wants to fund an
Arabic television service with the political issues that are at
stake in that region. But of course Arabic is the language of
less than half the people, if you consider Pakistan and Iran and
to a lesser extent Afghanistan as important Muslim countries,
where some sort of exposure to independent media and perhaps a
slightly British take on things would be useful, too. Can you
just tell us what you are doing particularly in Pakistan and Iran?
Mr Chapman: At the moment in terms
of Iran we have a radio service in Persian which is pretty well
broadcasting around the clock now, available on short wave and
medium wave and having a significant audience of over two million
listeners. We also have a substantial on-line presence BBCPersian.com,
which has got one of the highest levels of traffic for any of
our language sites. It is growing very fast and most of that traffic
is coming from within Iran, so we are reaching the target audience
we want to reach. In terms of Pakistan, we have the Urdu service.
The Urdu services broadcasts for a number of hours a day. It is
not as extensive as the Persian service. It is well liked and
respected but there are issues of distribution to cope with. I
think the market is getting more competitive in Pakistan. We have
been talking to the authorities there about improving distribution
and getting the right sort of radio partnerships with commercial
partners who will retransmit the World Service Urdu programmes.
At the moment we have a partner there but there are regulatory
issues about his being allowed to do that and we are continuing
to have those discussions with him and there is a legal case pending
which has been before the Supreme Court for a number of months
now which will try to clarify whether he has the right to rebroadcast
the World Service or not. We would like him to do so, we think
he is a suitable partner, and he has done so in the past. I think
that is a quite an important test case in Pakistan because if
we do not get on FM through a partnership (because the chances
of getting on FM through our own relays is low) then we will have
a battle to maintain a reasonable audience for our Urdu services
in Pakistan.
Q104 Mr Maples: For FM do you need a
local partner or can you do it from satellite transponders?
Mr Chapman: We either need a government
to give us a frequency in say a capital city and let us set up
our own transmitter there on that frequency, or we need a partner
to be allowed, if you like . . . .
Q105 Mr Maples: But the Arabic television
service are not asking for anybody's permission?
Mr Chapman: No; that is one of
the extra values of the Arabic television service, because provided
you have got a satellite dish it is a free-to-air service, providing
you are pointing it in the right direction.
Q106 Mr Maples: But you cannot do that
with a radio signal?
Mr Chapman: No. I have got to
get a partner who will retransmit, live—the programmes are
live, they are not delayed or anything—who will take the
programmes live and put them out. In Pakistan the regulation is
opaque about this and the partner is trying to get in to sort
out exactly what he can do, and we are supporting him in that
and we have had conversations with the regulators there who are
also, I think, feeling their way round this particular complexity
because they have never done it before.
Q107 Chairman: Is this a political issue
between the British and Pakistani governments or is it just a
technical question?
Mr Chapman: I do not think it
is either, Chairman. I think it is a regulatory question actually.
I think the regulation is unclear in Pakistan about the rights
of a station to do this. They have never been tested in the courts,
there is not a sort of charter or a rubric that everybody can
turn to and say, "Right, well, that is quite clear. You can
do this and you cannot do that", and so the company, which
is called "Mast FM", which has a number of radio stations
in all the large cities, is going to effectively test the water,
if you like, in a legal case about it, and obviously we want them
to win that legal case because it will enable the World Service
to be heard on FM quality sound in the major cities in Pakistan.
Q108 Sir John Stanley: Can I come to
the BBC Monitoring Service, not a very well-known feature of the
BBC but the most certainly very highly valued by its users. Could
you tell us whether the World Service is going to be adversely
affected by the change in funding of the BBC Monitoring Service
and the change in sponsorship from the FCO to the Cabinet Office
and by what we understand are going to be quite a considerable
number of redundancies at the monitoring service. If you are going
to be adversely affected, could you spell out in what way?
Mr Chapman: I think the impact
on the World Service's news-gathering capacity and understanding
of what is going on in those society's will be marginal—it
will not be nothing—because, obviously, if you are going
to reduce the monitoring staff by 50 to 60 posts out of a staff
of 500, then that is a significant proportion of the staff by
2007. Therefore there will be material information, if you like,
analysis and understanding, which will not be as freely available
as it would have been in the past. In terms of the lead sponsor,
I do not see any issues around the fact that the Cabinet Office
is going to take on this role. I think the Cabinet Office will
do it well, I think they instigated a very thorough review of
BBC Monitoring made by Sir Quentin Thomas last year, which was
a very big job, and actually, for the first time, put BBC Monitoring
on a stable footing in relation to its financial position, because
it guaranteed BBC Monitoring's funding until the year 2010-11.
BBC Monitoring is a service that has been reviewed to death, in
my view. It needed to be put on a stable footing and it has been
put on a stable footing now, and I think under its management
it can, if you like, now start to run its business and can change
and adapt to the needs of its customers, which will include the
World Service. We will still be putting between six and seven
million pounds of investment every year into BBC Monitoring, along
with contributions from the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Defence
and the Foreign Office.
Q109 Sir John Stanley: What form does
that expenditure take, that six to seven million a year?
Mr Chapman: It is an annual Revenue
contribution.
Q110 Sir John Stanley: It is a Revenue
contribution?
Mr Chapman: Yes, a Revenue contribution.
The way the new funding arrangements will work is that all the
stakeholders' contributions will effectively be ring-fenced now
into a central pot which will guarantee Monitoring financial stability
up until 2010-11. It does not mean that Monitoring has not got
challenges ahead; it definitely has in terms of the scale and
scope of it services, dealing with this issue about potentially
50 to 60 redundancies by 2007. The settlement it got put it on
a stable footing. It wanted more money than it got, but it managed
to recover and claw back from a position which would have been
very difficult for it, I think, if it had been the situation where
we were a year ago. In that sense the last year has been a good
year for Monitoring, and I think the stakeholders have also realised
the value to Britain of its services, and that allowing it to
wither on the vine, which was a fear many of us had, would have
been a very bad thing to have allowed to happen, and it is not
now going to happen.
Sir John Stanley: It was a fear that
was shared by this Committee about a year ago. Thank you.
Q111 Mr Horam: Coming to your purely
television output, what sort of viewership does the World Service
television put out now?
Mr Chapman: You are referring
to BBC World television in English?
Q112 Mr Horam: Yes?
Mr Chapman: It has an audience
of around 60 million viewers per week across the world.
Q113 Mr Horam: That is outside the UK,
is it?
Mr Chapman: That is outside the
UK. It is available in 270 million households. In half of those
it is available, I think, for more than 12 hours, from memory,
but again this not an area of my direct responsibility.
Q114 Mr Horam: Is it not?
Mr Chapman: No. While I am a member
of the Global News team and understand the broad picture of BBC
World, it is not a specialist area for me, but if the Committee
would like more information on BBC World, its viewership—where
it is doing well, what its challenges are—I am sure we would
be happy to provide it[2]
Q115 Mr Horam: We do. That would be useful.
Could I ask you how it fits in. You say this is not your direct
responsibility. What relationship do you have to this side of
things?
Mr Chapman: It is a commercial
channel, so it is not funded by grant-in-aid, but where it is
really important, I think, is that you increasingly have to see
the BBC's offer as a tri-media offer (ie a television offer, a
radio offer and a new media offer in some markets). Clearly there
are some parts of the world where BBC World will have to do more
of a job as time goes on, and radio and perhaps new media.
Q116 Mr Horam: You were saying that the
future lies with free-to-air satellite television?
Mr Chapman: Yes, it does in many
markets. One of the factors we took into account when we came
to a judgment about the validity of closing the central European
services, which we talked about earlier, was the extent to which
BBC World was now being viewed in those societies, so I see that
you have to see our performance, if you like, in the round. It
is not just about our performance.
Q117 Mr Horam: When you say "our
performance"?
Mr Chapman: The BBC's performance
in the round. It is not right just to look at it from a radio
perspective, or a new media perspective, or a television perspective,
you have to look at what is the sum total of the impact the BBC
is making. In some societies BBC World is making an increasing
impact. It is, if you like, taking up the slack left by the fact
that radio is making less impact and, therefore, the BBC is still
retaining a very strong position. That is why BBC World is so
important in the mix of services that the BBC offers, in my view.
It is really the central pillar of a multi-media strategy in this
century. Without BBC World the BBC and Britain would be fighting
for influence and impact in societies without the right weapons,
if you like, because the BBC World is so important in that mix.
Q118 Mr Horam: Your responsibilities
are purely for the vernacular services, like the proposed Arabic
service?
Mr Chapman: Also for the English
language services in radio.
Q119 Mr Horam: Yes, but I am talking
about television now?
Mr Chapman: Yes; indeed.
2 Please refer to the supplementary note provided
by the BBC World Service, Ev 70 Back
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