I’m sorry to say that I was a Salford refusenik. When the BBC first got the itch, almost 20 years ago, to send its London-based staff to new locations around the country, as a senior executive at the time I thought the idea was a grisly one. That’s not because I don’t like the north of England: I come from Bradford. But as director of sport I was being asked to put my staff and their families onto buses making a one-way trip to the Greater Manchester docklands – leaving behind the power centres of the BBC and the lifestyle of a capital city. I wrote grumpy emails to the director-general, Mark Thompson, contrasting his plans for Salford in 2011 with our plans for London 2012. After away days to inspect the building site, colleagues were enthused only by the glass of chilled white on the train back home.
We were wrong. MediaCityUK has turned out to be a splendid project, housing not just the BBC but ITV and the set for Coronation Street. People generally love working there. There are wine bars, just like in Fitzrovia. But it hasn’t delivered one of the great aims of the original scheme, which was to transform the metropolitan mindset of the BBC and to concentrate decision-making outside the capital.
Ten years after the first removal vans set off up the M6, the incoming director-general Tim Davie still had to say that it was a top priority for the BBC to reconnect with a broader audience by shedding its London-metropolitan bias and its politically correct culture.
W1A did not compute Blyth Valley
There was plenty of evidence to back him up. The BBC was shaky during the 2016 referendum, with few of its programmes or correspondents getting to grips with the strength of pro-Brexit opinion outside the M25. It compounded this with insipid coverage of the 2019 general election campaign, which was portrayed as a close race between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn with little comprehension of what was happening in the ‘red wall’ seats. W1A did not compute Blyth Valley.
Davie, unlike many of his senior colleagues, gets the problem. That is why he has announced plans to move even more staff out of London in what is, at first sight, an impressive list. ‘Entire departments and news divisions will be moved to Birmingham, Cardiff, Leeds, Glasgow and Salford,’ said a breathless piece on the BBC’s website, claiming it was ‘the biggest transformation in decades’.
Radio 3 will be ‘rooted’ in Salford. The whole of Radio 1’s Newsbeat team will be dispatched to Birmingham. There will be a new soap opera based in the north of England, presumably called Coronation Farm or Emmerdale Street; and the proposals will mean that the BBC cumulatively will spend at least an extra £700million outside London by 2027-28.
Look at the detail, though, and doubts multiply. For a start, not a single member of the executive board will be moving; and nor will anyone from the BBC News board. In exchanges with staff, both Davie and his director of News Fran Unsworth have been challenged about why they are not packing their bags – but more bothering is that none of their senior colleagues are either. This is a familiar pattern. In 2005, it was announced that a number of board executives and their divisions were to be located in Salford. Almost all the bosses came up with an alternative plan. A number of the senior managers herded into Salford never actually moved to the north, and commuted weekly from the Home Counties.
As for the teams being relocated: it’s another example of the ‘last child to be picked for a sports team’ syndrome. The programmes with the least political clout are the ones who end up being sent out of London. Therefore it is Newsbeat heading to the Midlands, not Newsnight. I was on the BBC Journalism board ten years ago when we were given an order to send a significant number of people to Salford, and we quailed at the thought of telling Jeremy Paxman and his Westminster-savvy team that they should move – and alighted upon the more amenable Breakfast television crew instead. It doesn’t go far enough to proclaim now that the Today programme and Newsnight will be presented on location more often. This is journalism via an overnight stay in the Travelodge, not a deep-rooted commitment to a region in which you live and work and educate the kids.
There is a feeling of randomness, and of ‘twiddling round the edges’ as the broadcaster Jane Garvey put it in the Media Podcast. In the news division, we’re told, the climate and science team will move to Cardiff, while the technology team will shift to Glasgow and the learning and identity news team will go to Leeds. But they still answer to the heads of news content and news output in London who have been given more power in the latest restructure.
The cities receiving the influx should keep a watchful eye on the durability of the commitment. The BBC used to have a centre at Pebble Mill on the outskirts of Birmingham, and at considerable expense it moved the staff to the funkier Mailbox in the centre of the city. However, the production base was never stable. I once had a phone call from a senior executive urging me to locate Sports Personality of the Year in Birmingham because ‘we’ve not got enough there’. Executives were told off by the BBC Trust because of the empty spaces in the Mailbox, and we had to point to a decision a couple of years previously when they had endorsed the shift of a swathe of factual programmes from Birmingham to Bristol.
So it would be unwise to conclude that ‘the biggest transformation in decades’ will be transformative. There is no guarantee that the voices of older, more conservative licence-payers are going to be any better represented; and I still hear worrying reports of disdain among some producers for the BBC’s own research, which suggests too many people feel unheard.
Davie sees the test for his director-generalship as being that all audiences can answer the question ‘is the BBC for me?’ with a confident ‘yes’. The corporation is going to need to be more radical to avoid a rise in the number who are saying ‘no’.
Roger Mosey is Master of Selwyn College, Cambridge and the former Head of BBC News
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