Select Committee on Foreign Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-167)

MR NIGEL CHAPMAN AND MS ALISON WOODHAMS

9 NOVEMBER 2005

  Q160 Mr Hamilton: Is there any other form of income that you receive? You do not get any advertising?

  Ms Woodhams: No. We get a small amount of external income. Some of our rebroadcasters actually pay us for our programmes, but that is in the minority. We get about three-quarters of a million pounds a year from rebroadcasters. With the majority of rebroadcasters we have to pay them to take our programmes, or there is some kind of bartering arrangement sometimes, but, aside of that, we do not have any substantial external income.

  Q161 Chairman: We have talked about the Pakistan's Urdu service and you have talked about various other services. Can you tell us what you are doing in Russia and what you are doing to increase your audience share there? I understand from what you have told us that you only reach 0.8% of the Russian adult population at the moment, which is very low.

  Mr Chapman: It is low, and it is a cause of concern to me. One of the reasons why it has been low is because Russia is now a very competitive market place in terms of radio. There are plenty of FM stations established there now and the World Service has struggled to get distribution on FM in any of the major cities in Russia, most notably St Petersburg and Moscow. Since last year we have made progress. We are finding suitable partners in St Petersburg, and to some extent in Moscow, which will enable us to be heard on FM for the first time in those two cities. Obviously we will measure our audience performance in the next six months and I will get a better idea of whether that strategy is working. We are also trying to strengthen our medium wave distribution, but that figure of 0.8% is not that dissimilar from the performance of other international radio services in Russia. It seems to me that one of the issues here is that the Russian audience is not at this moment demonstrating a great appetite for international radio from external sources. My feeling, having been there and talked to people, is that it is a society that in a way in media terms is turning in on itself to some extent. It has got more national television and radio services than it used to have, it is consuming them in a greater way and its appetite for services like the BBC is not as great as it used to be when you compare with the Cold War years and a very different sort of political climate. I think one of the ironies about this you could argue now about the way media has been restricted in Russia increasingly under Putin is that the case for having the BBC there is greater than it was perhaps five years ago and, therefore, we do want to make sure that we get an audience for our services.

  Q162 Chairman: You are not going to use the same argument as you have done in Poland and the Czech services and elsewhere, "The audience so is small that therefore we might as well close it down and concentrate on somewhere else"?

  Mr Chapman: I do not think they are comparable cases, Chairman. I think one of the issues that does arise is what is the appropriate medium to reach out to people in Russia? If at the end of the day you persevere with radio but you do not get an audience for radio, would you be better off having another sort of service? That gets us into a whole new territory, but I see a distinction between the case of closing a Polish service or a Hungarian service on the one hand and a very strong case to maintain a strong BBC presence in Russia, and I just think they are not comparable situations.

  Q163 Ms Stuart: What are you doing in Belarus?

  Mr Chapman: We do not have any specific special services for Belarus. The Russian service is audible in Belarus through short wave. There is no means of distribution inside Belarus other than through old short wave.

  Q164 Ms Stuart: Do you have any idea whether that has been picked up at all? I tell you why I am asking. I have just come back from a security conference in Moscow and I was struck by the Russian colleagues telling us that Belarus is not as bad as you think it is. It has got higher GDP than the Ukraine. I thought, "Hold on, what is going on here?"

  Mr Chapman: In broadcasting terms one of the difficulties we would have (and we have considered whether we should do special services for Belarus) is that the only way we could get those services into Belarus would be on short wave, and what people are telling us about the radio market in Belarus is that, because of the economic indicators you have just talked about, that is not the right way to deliver a radio service to Belarus. You would have to be able to he heard on FM, and, there is no way the authorities there are going to give the World Service access to an FM frequency or partnership in a country like Belarus at the moment. In a way we would be wasting our money, if you think about it, by putting out a service that nobody can actually hear.

  Q165 Chairman: One final question. Could you give us an update on your plan to join BBC news and radio at Broadcasting House? When is that going to happen and what does it mean for your staff? Are you going to lose jobs as a result and how much is it going to cost?

  Ms Woodhams: It is three questions really. The current plan is to move there by the end of 2010, which is slightly later than we had previously said because of some slight delays on the project and the building of what is called "phase one", which is the rebuilding of Egdon House and the refurbishment of the old grade one listed part of Broadcasting House. We should be in by the end of 2010. The only honest answer is we do not know how much it is going to cost at the moment. It is still five years until we go. We do not know what kind of technology we are going to put in there, and that is one of the big debates at the moment. We do not know how much floor space we are going to occupy. We are looking at plans to see how much floor space we would need and how that would affect our costs. I think it would be fair to say it will cost us more than what we are currently having to pay in Bush, but you have to bear in mind that if we stayed in Bush House we would have to pay more, because Bush House, if we stayed there, would be in need of some serious refurbishment, and you have to take that as a comparator. We are obviously working on the cost, and that will be part of our discussion in the 2007 Spending Review, because we will start to incur costs towards the end of that spending review period. In terms of people, we are expecting to give them a better working environment, more flexible, more designed for the kind of multi-media environment that we are working in now, but we are not expecting to say we are going to move less people there. Our current plans are to move everybody who will be in Bush House over to Broadcasting House.

  Chairman: Thank you very much. Mr Hamilton wants to come in very briefly.

  Q166 Mr Hamilton: Do you do any digital audio broadcasting (DAB) outside the UK?

  Mr Chapman: We do digital radio Mondial (ie digital short wave) to parts of Europe at the moment as an experiment. That is the equivalent of DAB. We do not have the equivalent of DAB; we have DRM. The issue there will be, rather like it was here until recently, to what extent are people going to buy sets that have access to those sorts of frequencies? At the moment they are expensive, they are not widespread. We would need to have a break-through in terms of customer take-up, audience take-up, to make it worthwhile investing any more funds in that. We have got our bets on various horses here. DRM is one of them, but the bet is modest, and we have to wait and see what happens.

  Q167 Chairman: Mr Chapman, Ms Woodhams, thank you very much for coming. We look forward to seeing you at Bush House at least for the next five years or wherever else in future. I think we have covered a very wide area. We may have to write to you on a couple of areas to get further information. We are very grateful to you.

  Mr Chapman: You are always welcome to come for a visit to Bush House. We will be happy to entertain you.





 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2006
Prepared 7 April 2006