THE BBC’s much-vaunted “biggest transformation in decades” will not work unless “real power” is moved out of London, one of its former senior Scottish executives has said.
Jeff Zycinski, who was head of radio at BBC Scotland from 2005 to 2018, said that power lies with programme commissioners in London, and the statement from BBC director general Tim Davie was “a bit ambiguous” about it.
Around 400 jobs – half of those in BBC News – are to be relocated outside London. The BBC’s technology team will be shifted to Glasgow and other departments will be moved to Cardiff, Birmingham and Salford.
READ MORE: BBC to relocate thousands of staff in bid to 'better reflect' all of UK
Current affairs programmes such as Newsnight will be broadcast from across the UK, and Radio 4’s Today will be co-presented from outside London for 100 episodes a year.
However, Zycinski, who spent 25 years at the BBC, said that although they were good, such ideas were not new.
He told The National: “Jim Naughtie moved back to Scotland to co-present Good Morning Scotland during the referendum. These ideas are not new and you hope they have a short-term impact in that the co-presenter is able to make reference to things outside London, and point out the political or legal situation is different.
“They’re very good for the BBC to stop it sounding so London-centric.
“I think for instance Radio Four news has got a lot better at that kind of thing whereas programmes like Woman’s Hour never got the memo and constantly talk about half-term holidays and the position of the Church of England.”
Zycinski said when he saw Davie’s statement, he wondered if real power would be devolved out of London.
“My point has always been you should have a real federal structure whereby you really give a walloping amount of money to Scotland, Wales, wherever you want, and the people there make the decisions and the programmes they think will play well for their audiences. Then the schedulers in London cherry-pick what they want from that.
“But if you’ve got a BBC Scotland channel you could play them first on that and then if it’s felt there’s a UK-wide audience they can be scheduled appropriately by the commissioner in London.
“At the moment what you’ve got is a poorly funded BBC Scotland and occasionally if you took a programme like Shetland for instance, it began being co-funded by BBC Scotland and London which is fine but it means that money that’s gone for a network commission they wanted anyway isn’t going to programmes just for Scotland.”
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Zycinski said he had questions for Davie: “When I saw they were bringing back BBC Three as a linear channel, I thought ‘where is that going to sit on Freeview, is that the BBC Scotland channel slot?’ “If I’d a chance to have a chat with Tim Davie I’d ask him if I could have a breakdown of the money, what is the future for the BBC Scotland channel, is the commissioning power really going to be put outside London – real commissioning power, not having a local commissioner who has to report to a senior commissioner in London.
“I read his statement and it’s a wee bit kind of ambiguous. It says decision making will be moved out as well, so fingers crossed let’s hope this time they mean it.”
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