Summary
BBC Monitoring is a service which gathers open source information—sometimes referred to as open source intelligence—from foreign media and freely available social media from countries around the world. It was set up during the Second World War to monitor foreign broadcasts. Today, it translates and analyses articles and posts from 150 countries in 100 languages. Its product is used by the BBC to set context for its own news reporting but, much more importantly, it is an indispensable source of information for Government departments and agencies.
The Government uses open source information for indicators and warnings of areas of instability and potential threats to UK security. BBC Monitoring is one of the few open source information-gathering agencies which has a global reach through its partnership with its US counterpart, Open Source Enterprise (OSE). Currently, BBC Monitoring covers 25% of the globe and OSE the remaining 75%. The complementarity of this arrangement for sharing open source information represents a huge return for the United Kingdom on the modest costs of the operation (which are around £25 million per annum). Such global coverage is vital to the understanding not only of Government departments, including the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and the Intelligence Services but also NGOs and private organisations. This information is not currently available from any other provider.
For decades, BBC Monitoring was funded by departmental grants and then a ring-fenced sum from its principal client, the Government. However, a 2010 agreement between the Coalition Government and the BBC transferred funding responsibility to the licence-payer. That decision, which took effect in 2013, removed the security and certainty of funding for BBC Monitoring, and—entirely predictably—laid it open to successive cuts as a result of general economies in BBC budgets. In addition to further severe budget cuts, BBC Monitoring is currently facing the loss of its Caversham Park headquarters (formerly owned by the Government) and many of its specialists who have no wish to relocate. The proposed restructuring will result in almost 100 job losses (about 50% of BBC Monitoring staff work overseas) and those who remain will have to take on significantly broader duties. In particular, the specialist Video Unit will be shut down, principally, we were told, because nearly all its work served a single customer—the Ministry of Defence.
Proposals for the relocation of BBC Monitoring will see the remaining staff moved from their current dedicated base near Reading (which also houses the OSE) to a central London BBC location—probably New Broadcasting House. This will loosen and weaken the relationship with OSE and undermine the working conditions and scale of operations of the BBC Monitoring staff. The benefits of such a move remain completely obscure, not least because of the absence of any concrete plan for future dedicated premises and the uncertainty over whether the BBC or the Government would gain financially from any subsequent sale of Caversham Park.
We are convinced and gravely concerned that the proposed changes to BBC Monitoring will lead to a degradation of the service provided—a service which the Government cannot afford to lose. We believe that these changes are unwise as they put at risk the vital future provision of open source information. We have seen strong indications that elements within the hierarchy of the BBC are unhappy with licence-payers’ money being used to fund BBC employees to provide a service to Government departments. We understand this concern and we take the view that such work should be specifically and separately funded by Government in the future, as it always was in the past.
We therefore conclude that the Government must reinstate funding of the service in order to protect its skilled staff and specialist infrastructure. If the BBC is not willing to co-operate, then the Government should recognise the folly of the 2010 decision; take back ownership of Caversham Park; restore the modest central funding required and reconstitute the Monitoring Service as a state-owned Open Source Information Agency, in order to guarantee its future, once and for all.
16 December 2016