APPENDIX I
VALUE OF INTERNATIONAL BROADCASTING SURVEY
For more than 75 years, the UK Government has
required the BBC to provide news services for audiences overseas.
Today, the BBC offers:
— radio news broadcasts in 32 languages
through the BBC World Service;
— two rolling news channels (BBC World
News in English and BBC Arabic), with BBC Persian soon to launch;
and
— fully multimedia online news websites
in 9 key languages, with more limited online offers in all others;
audio available live online in all languages.
The English World Service radio broadcasts and
all of the BBC's non-English language services are paid for by
Grant-in-Aid from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. The BBC
World News television channel and the English language international
news website (bbc.com/news) are both funded by advertising.
233 million people around the world use at least
one of these services each week, making the BBC comfortably the
biggest global provider of international news. For some audiences
the BBC provides an alternative to domestic providers of news;
for others in the most troubled parts of the world, the BBC is
the only reliable, authoritative and impartial source of news
and information.
Although these services are mainly used by people
outside the UK, the BBC set out to test whether the British public
(who provide most of the funding) consider these overseas news
services to be of measurable value to the UK at large. Economists
refer to this idea of value as an externality. Recently, the term
"public value" has been used to refer to the broader
value to society of public services, whether people actually use
these public services or not. The notion of public value, and
its measurement in particular, is a major theme at present in
evaluating public sector effectiveness.
Six workshops were carried out by Human Capital
with a representative cross-section of the UK population in spring
2008 on behalf of the BBC. They sought to explore UK citizens'
perceptions of the benefits of these overseas news services, and
to estimate the scale of the public value delivered.
WAYS OF
THE UK ENGAGING
WITH THE
WORLD
Respondents were briefed on why the UK engages
with the world through a variety of trade promotion and development
agencies, as well as through "public diplomacy" like
international broadcasting. Members of the public participating
in the research broadly agreed that institutions which attempt
to shape and enhance the UK's relationship with the world were
important, with international news broadcasting considered to
be the most essential to fund from a range of alternatives provided
to participants. Support for all of these forms of engagement
generally fell into two main streams. Some people saw direct national
interest for the UK in positive international engagement (more
direct revenue for the UK though trade and tourism, maintaining
a high international profile for Britain). Others had a more altruistic
view and thought it was right that the UK spent money to help
address under-development and generally to make the world a better
place. International news broadcasting scored highly in the research
because it was seen to further both sets of interests.
Respondents were then briefed on the international
news services which the BBC provides. A large majority had a positive
perception of all the BBC services. This was particularly true
for the BBC World Service, for which 96% of respondents had a
very favourable or favourable impression (88% and 71% for BBC
World News and bbc.com/news respectively).
Respondents broadly felt that it was important
for the UK to provide each of the three services to the world.
The World Service was seen as particularly important—this
was driven by two main factors:
— Radios remain more readily available
and cheaper to acquire in developing countries than television
or the internet.
— Countries in which the World Service
had greatest impact were seen to be the ones that really matter
(due to lack of free media, poverty, potential sources of terrorist
activity or historical links with Britain).
BBC World News was considered to be important
too, but for slightly different reasons:
— The belief that a television service
was essential in the 21st century as the media outlet which is
likely to continue to have the greatest impact and reach around
the world.
— The role of BBC World News as an
effective competitor to (largely American) rolling news channels
around the world, and in the US itself. Many people referred to
the particular impact the US has on the world, and saw BBC World
News as a good way of reaching and influencing viewers in the
US, particularly opinion-formers.
High levels of support for bbc.com/news were
largely driven by three factors:
— A view that news online would be
increasingly important in the future as more and more people had
internet access
— bbc.com/news was seen to be more
impartial than its online competitors overall
— Many respondents had used the UK
service (bbc.co.uk/news) and typically thought highly of it and
used it regularly
VALUE TO
THE UK OF
THESE BBC OVERSEAS
SERVICES
Respondents were then asked how much they thought
it would be worth paying to keep these services open, even though
most of them don't actually have access to them.
The BBC World Service received the largest valuation,
with a total annual value of £379 million (the equivalent
of 75p per household per month).
The reported valuation of the World Service
implies public support (in this research study) for funding at
a level more than 50% above the World Service's current £240m
annual grant-in-aid. Public value figures reported for BBC World
News and bbc.com/news were £221m and £140m respectively.
These are significant results given that neither of these services
receives any public funding.
SUMMARY
The research provided evidence of a great deal
of support for the basic objectives of international news broadcasting
and respondents broadly thought that the BBC Global News services
were effective ways to deliver these objectives.
People were particularly supportive of the World
Service, which was deemed to be executed well and well placed
to deliver the core objectives because of its geographic reach
profile. In value terms, respondents' results indicated a total
of nearly £750m of public value to the UK each year across
the three services.
This is a rapidly developing area of research
and was the first time that public value estimates were calculated
for services for which the consumers are generally not those who
pay for the services to be provided. The methodology could have
broader application to a range of public services which have similar
funding characteristics as a means of evaluating the effectiveness
of these services in achieving stated social benefits.
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