BBC White Paper

Mark Thompson's email to staff 14 March 2006

I know that white papers and draft charters can feel incredibly remote from the day-to-day work of most people in the BBC. Some of you probably also feel you’ve heard as much as you ever wanted to about the BBC’s future in Building Public Value and the Green Paper.

But today is still a real milestone for the BBC and will mean real change for everyone who works for it. So I hope you’ll feel it’s worth spending a few minutes studying the headlines.

The most important thing to say is that today’s White Paper is a massive vote of confidence in the BBC – not just because of the services we provide to audiences today but because of our vital role in Britain’s digital future. It’s a blueprint for a strong and independent BBC, a leader in technology and new services, with a challenge to ensure we’re just as relevant in ten years time as we are today. It will mean some significant changes.

The BBC’s purposes are made clearer in the White Paper than ever before – we exist to promote informed and engaged citizenship (above all through high quality news and current affairs), education and learning, creativity and culture, to connect the UK’s nations, regions and communities, to bring the UK to the world and the world to the UK.
The White Paper confirms a new purpose for the BBC which is to build digital Britain.
It also emphasises that distinctive, original entertainment is an essential part of our service to the public.
The Board of Governors will be replaced by a BBC Trust which will be directly accountable to licence-payers in overseeing the BBC, and more separate from the organisation and its day-to-day workings.
For the first time there is also a formal role for the Executive Board which will run the BBC’s operations, and which will include some non-executive directors. Michael Grade has confirmed that he would like me to serve as its first Chairman. The roles and responsibilities of both boards will be laid out with much more clarity than before.
Each of our services will have a service licence from the Trust, setting out their key characteristics, and new service proposals will be tested rigorously by the Trust to ensure that they deliver real value to our audiences.
Our own proposals to open up content supply to independent producers through a window of creative competition (the WoCC) are endorsed.
The White Paper also backs our plans to shift more broadcasting and production out of London.

Today’s publication is the start of the last phase of charter renewal. Within a few months the future level of the licence fee will be established. As everyone in the BBC knows, we’re right in the middle of a very challenging value for money and efficiency programme. But while it’s right that we should look hard at ways of funding our own future, we also believe that to deliver the vision of the future laid out in the White Paper, the BBC will need a licence fee which grows in real terms.

But money is only one part of the story. A really clear creative vision of the future – taking the fine words of Building Public Value and the White Paper and working out what they mean in practice, for our drama programmes or our news or our local radio or our web site – is vital. Hundreds of people across the BBC have contributed to Creative Future which is an attempt to do just that. We’ll be sharing the headlines from Creative Future with the whole BBC in just over a month’s time, on 25th April.

Creative Future will mean change – some of it pretty radical – for our programmes and services. And we know that the BBC will have to change in other ways too if it is to succeed in the world set out in the White Paper. As well as the best, most original creative content and fantastic new digital services it needs to become far more open to audiences and ideas and, in a complicated world, as simple as it can be in organisation and culture. The BBC values are vital too – and more relevant than ever in the world we’re heading into.

I’m keen to hear what you have to say about the White Paper and to answer your questions. So please find the time to discuss it in your teams and feed back comments and questions to charter.review@bbc.co.uk. I will try to answer as many questions as I can, but every question sent in will get a response and be posted on Gateway as quickly as possible.

All the best

Mark

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