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Annual Report and Accounts
2003/2004
Purpose, vision and values
Purpose
Our purpose is to enrich people’s lives with programmes and services that inform, educate and entertain
Vision
Our vision is to be the most creative organisation in the world
Values
Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest
Audiences are at the heart of everything we do
We take pride in delivering quality and value for money
Creativity is the lifeblood of our organisation
We respect each other and celebrate our diversity so that everyone can give their best
We are one BBC: great things happen when we work together
Contents
2 Chairman’s statement
4 The Hutton Inquiry
6 How the BBC is run
8 Board of Governors
10 Executive Committee
12 Governors’ review of objectives
Governors’ review of services
24 Television
32 Radio
40 New media
42 News
46 Learning
48 Nations & Regions
54 BBC World Service & Global News
58 Performance against Statements of Programme Policy commitments 2003/2004
Governors’ review of commercial activities
68 BBC Worldwide Limited
70 BBC Ventures Group Limited
72 BBC people and talent
74 Being accountable and responsible
82 Compliance
97 Financial review
99 Financial statements
136 Broadcasting facts and figures
147 Getting in touch with the BBC
148 Other information
BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2003/2004
Chairman’s statement
This is a transitional document.
Traditionally the Annual Report and Accounts has been as much about marketing the BBC as holding it to account – and as much about management’s view of its own performance as about the Governors’ view of management’s performance.
This Annual Report is different. It is the first step in turning the BBC’s Annual Report into a document owned by the Governors, which evaluates the performance of BBC management against publicly stated objectives and commitments. We intend to take this process further in future years.
The reforms to the BBC’s system of governance outlined in our Building Public Value document make clear that we mean to move rapidly to strengthen the Governors’ clear independence from management. Governors will provide themselves with the resources to commission independent advice to enable us to carry out close and rigorous scrutiny of BBC programmes and services. Annual Reports will be explicitly Governors’ reports and primarily concerned with assessing performance and holding management to account.
This Annual Report is different in another way too. There is no Director-General’s report, because the new Director-General, Mark Thompson, did not work for the BBC in the period under review.
Neither, of course, did I. I watched the Hutton Inquiry and its aftermath unfold as just another licence payer. And well before I was appointed, the BBC had begun to learn the lessons and – as the
section on Hutton in this report makes clear – to make changes to some of the BBC’s editorial processes and to the way it handles complaints. I am confident that the implementation of these changes will allow us to draw a line.
But I do want to make one thing clear. The BBC is not worth having if it is not editorially independent. I and the other Governors will defend the BBC’s right to do difficult and courageous journalism about powerful people and powerful institutions. That kind of journalism – set within a strengthened editorial framework – must remain one of the hallmarks of the BBC.
The Hutton Inquiry made people reflect on the enduring value of a strong and independent BBC to Britain. When the BBC lost both its Chairman and Director-General in the space of 24 hours it did feel like a watershed. At that moment it is not surprising that some people began to contemplate the prospect of Britain without the BBC.
And the truth is that the BBC is not inevitable. It exists because it earns its place in the affections of our audiences by enriching lives through information, education and entertainment. The BBC has constantly to renew and refresh the bonds that link us to those audiences. We have to listen, learn and respond – and then go back and do it again. As Governors, effective engagement with the British public and responsiveness to their concerns must lie at the heart of our role as trustees of the public interest.
It is sometimes claimed that the BBC is unaccountable and largely self-regulating. But one of the surprising things I’ve discovered since I started as Chairman is the large number of regulations against which the BBC is already measured. Until recently the BBC had to deal with just three externally imposed quotas. As a result of the 2003 Communications Act we now have another 52 to deal with. And there are more to come next year.
It is right that we justify our privileged position. But it is important that we have the appropriate targets in place to ensure the BBC’s programmes and services reflect what really matters – the needs and interests of our funders, the licence payers.
In future, the Governors will assess performance against four key targets: reach, impact, value for money and quality. In judging the outcomes we will take an overall perspective.
The BBC delivers value well beyond its programmes and services. The case we are making in the Charter Review process is that the BBC is worth keeping because of the immense amount of public value it delivers. Public value means not just the BBC’s value to people as individuals, but also its value to people as citizens, and beyond that, its value to the broadcasting and creative industries as a whole.
For the individual, the BBC’s value is the information, education and entertainment it provides. For the citizen, the BBC’s value is its contribution to the wider social, democratic and cultural health of the UK. And for the broadcasting and creative industries, the BBC’s value lies in its investment in training and creative production.
BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2003/2004
The aims of the BBC are to underpin citizenship, enrich cultural life, contribute to education for all, make the UK a more inclusive society, and to support the UK’s role in the world.
This is the case we will be making over the coming months as the debate over the renewal of the BBC’s Charter gathers pace.
The strength of the BBC is its people. And there are some people I want to pay tribute to here.
The first is my predecessor as Chairman, Gavyn Davies, who gave so much to support the ideals of the BBC and who showed great courage and dignity in the manner of his departure. It is one of the ironies of BBC history that a Chairman resigned having defended the independence of the BBC.
The next is Greg Dyke. As Director-General, Greg did a huge amount to restore and build staff morale. And his championship of Freeview was the crucial decision that has made the switch-over to a fully digital Britain a realistic prospect. Freeview showed Greg’s vision and leadership and the Governors were right to support him in this initiative.
On behalf of the Governors I would also like to thank Richard Ryder for stepping in as Acting Chairman at a particularly demanding moment. On behalf of the Governors, too, I want to put on record our thanks to Mark Byford. As Acting Director-General he played a key role
in steering the BBC through one of the most difficult periods in its history.
One final tribute – to Alistair Cooke who died earlier this year aged 95, only a few weeks after delivering his final Letter from America on BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service. Cooke was a great reporter and a wonderful broadcaster – shrewd, thoughtful and humane. He wrote like an angel and he could write with equal insight and vibrant detail about an extraordinary range of topics: politics, history, space travel, jazz, golf. He respected his listeners, and his listeners loved him. The result was the world’s longest running speech radio programme. The BBC can learn from that.
Michael Grade
Chairman 17 June 2004
BBC Annual Report and Accounts 2003/2004 3