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Regulatory framework.

The Charter and Agreement require the BBC and the Trust to publish documents explaining the BBC's purposes, setting out its policies and priorities, and describing the remits of its services.

Trust's service review of bbc.co.uk

In this page

The BBC Trust has completed a service review of bbc.co.uk. This is the first service review undertaken by the Trust as part of its ongoing programme of reviews of all BBC services under the terms of the new Charter and Agreement. The review's findings will inform the service's development over the next few years.

Findings

The review considered how bbc.co.uk performed against its service licence, the service's governance and accountability and whether its Service Licence needed to be developed in order to reflect changes in the market and users' needs.

For full details on the review's findings please see:

Next steps

The review set out a number of actions for BBC management and for the Trust. These include:

Evidence base

You can find links to information gathered during the public consultation as well as research we used in reaching our conclusions on the supporting evidence page.

Terms of reference

The terms of reference for the review are available below.

Equality impact assessment

In fulfilling its equality duties the BBC must make arrangements to assess proposed policies for any effects they might have on the promotion of equality. A retrospective equality impact assessment has been conducted on the bbc.co.uk service review consultation, a summary of which can be found below.

Update on external search


29 January 2009

One of the areas the review considered was what role the BBC should have in providing external websearch. We asked BBC management to take a decision on the future of the search function following the review. (See action 2 on page 16 of the report and pages 53-54 for more detail on the Trust's view on this matter). We stated that we would report publicly on any decision taken.

In December 2008, BBC management informed the Trust that after consideration it intended to remove the external search engine on BBC Online. The Trust noted that this was in line with its own assessment and that the external websearch would cease on January 29 2009.

Approval of new investment


20 March 2009

Following the approval of the new management controls for bbc.co.uk, the BBC Executive applied to the Trust for permission to increase BBC Online’s budget by £52.7m over the next three years. After consideration of the Executive’s plans, by the Trust has agreed an increase in BBC Online's budget of £30.7m over three years. This increase will be subject to the conditions set out in the letter below from the Chairman to the Director-General.