BBC has to save £125million your suggestions please

[billysboy]

So the Beeb has to save a bit of cash any suggestions

mine are as follows

Stop sending out news reporters and their crew everywhere to report from ie the coast when there is a gale or outside a hospital when someone important is being treated

Sack Steve Wright who earns £500k a year and his sycophants

Dont broadcast all night stop at 1 am and restart at 530 am

The freelance /ltd company thing may save the BBC money but it takes it away from the treasury and NHS etc
HMRC and government has repeatedly failed to address this properly.
Instead they have made it more complex like the utter twats they are.
Why can't we a clear definition of self employment that also includes rights? Other countries manage it fine.
It's almost as if HMRC wants things to be complicated so they twat about more.

Sack Ben Hunte. He’s appalling and not a journalist.

Why can't we a clear definition of self employment that also includes rights?

It's not just that, but that different types of "self employment" produce different tax/nic results, i.e. sole trader is very different to limited company. That's non sensical!

Professional, trade and accountancy bodies have been lobbying for years for a "see through" test for self employed, so that whatever your trading "vehicle", i.e. sole trader, partnership or limited company, you pay the same tax/NIC.

HMRC/Treasury simply won't engage with the idea at all, despite it being the clear answer.

It still wouldn't clear up the grey area between self employment and employment, but it would take away, at a stroke, all the stupidity where Fred pays different tax/NIC if he trades as a sole trader compared with him doing exactly the same as a limited company.

Gordon Brown started all this stupidity when he changed the dividend rules back in the late 90s, and added to the stupidity, firstly with IR35 which he botched, and then with his "small business" incentives such as firstly the 0% small business tax rate, then the lower 10% small business tax rate, beneficial capital allowances for limited companies etc - he basically spent his first few years giving tax breaks to small limited companies and nothing to those s/e as sole traders - he was a prize pillock who is mostly to blame for the limited company tax/nic saving situation!

So many answers here reflect the lack of knowledge the general public has of what the bbc spends its money on and the audience for its content. I highly recommend a read through this document
downloads.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/annualreport/2018-19.pdf

Whilst I’m not a fan of soaps, reality tv or tennis, I recognise there is a huge audience for all 3. I also agree with many pps that sone of the stars don’t represent vfm eg Gary Linekar on £1.7 million. However I question some of the more niche interest expenditure of the bbc. I think these sacred cows are where savings could be made either by cuts or removal of whole services.
Some examples:

Did you know the Bbc funds FIVE professional orchestras and THREE classical choirs at a cost of £29 million? That’s the cost of CBeebies channel.

The Proms costs the BBC £5 million each year to put on.

The bbc also spends £13 million in output in Scottish Gaelic for the estimated 80,000 speakers. And an additional £25 million is spent on radio Scotland.

Radio Wales costs £15m with an additional £14 million on a welsh language radio station. Are both stations really necessary?

There are two Northern Ireland radio stations at a cost of £18 million. For a population of 1.8 million.

Plus local radio in England (39 stations) costs £124 million.

The Asian network radio station costs £8 million a year and broadcasts almost entirely in English.

Not sure on costs but does the BBC really need to pay for a permanent studio in Warsaw, Miami, Mexico City, to name just a few? (There are many more.)

And the really big one - BBC world service costs £327 million per year - how many licence payers use these services? How often?

Never ever needed a TV licence ever to listen to any BBC radio channel
I'm aware of the different channels eg Welsh, Gaelic etc

The BBC also sells its content to other countries & I've seen its programs & channels abroad, especially BBC news 24
So they make revenue doing this

BBC Parliament & news for public broadcasting

BBC news 24 - probably BBC World Service

So the BBC should only broadast stuff relevant to England because they have more people?

So the BBC should only broadast stuff relevant to England because they have more people?
@Theeighthelephant no...but they may wish to consider how much money is spent on niche broadcasting. For example, if Radio Scotland (cost £25 million) is supposed to cater for Scottish people, why can’t it broadcast some Gaelic output, rather than the BBC funding a Gaelic radio station at a cost of an additional £13 million.
And you may not have noticed but most of the orchestras and choirs I mention are based in England.

But on the other hand I do believe the BBC should cater for its licence payers - not overseas audiences - unless on a commercial basis - which is why I think the huge level of funding for World Service is a piss take.

Who Wants to be a millionaire, I believe this was sold to other countries, to make their own version (think ITV)

Master chef Australia etc

BBC wildlife programs sold to be shown in other countries

You can Google which TV programmes are most watched in other countries

The programs & format are sold to create revenue

Before they do anything, greater clarity on their purpose would be a good first step.

They have such a confused remit. No wonder no one can decide what they should or should be doing.

This remit also needs to be considered in relation to Channel 4’s remit, which also gets significant public money (but flies under the radar).

Who Wants to be a millionaire, I believe this was sold to other countries, to make their own version

But did the BBC have the production rights or was it an independent production company.

Scrap the license fee. That'll really give them something to think about. Fucking BBC is a completely self-satisfying shit show run by narcissists served by sycophants. I've been on the inside. Eye-boggling waste of money.

With regard to TV presenters on massive wages, I realise it's a stressful and high-profile job - nothing at all like an essential key worker, but inasmuch as they are responsible for entertaining millions of people all at once and I'm not proposing that they should pay minimum wage; however, it's a very desirable and privileged job.

How many ordinary people would love to be on TV? Most of them wouldn't be suited to the demands of the job and have the necessary skills, but plenty would. Surely, part of the payback of having such a high-profile job should be in the fact that it's a privilege to do the role. That's the argument given for the royal family supposedly paying very moderate wages for the level of responsibility - because it's considered a massive privilege to work for them - and most members of the public wouldn't ever recognise you or know what you do unless you meet and specifically tell them, unlike somebody on prime-time TV.

Even if they weren't paid a penny, most of them could capitalise on their fame and make a fortune from spin-offs and merchandise.

Who Wants to be a millionaire, I believe this was sold to other countries, to make their own version

It was made for ITV not BBC!

Go to having ads. Abolish the tv licence

I may be wrong, but I think The Weakest Link was the first BBC gameshow to offer potentially thousands in prize money. Before that, you would usually win a couple of hundred or a trophy and it was left to ITV to give away the vast sums as a trade-off of how much they could charge advertisers for the vast amount of viewers directly watching because of the jeopardy in the huge prizes on offer. WWTBAM was immensely popular (still is reasonably so), but how many viewers would have stuck with it and got the buzz if it had been 'Who Wants To Win A Grand' ?

I remember clearly from the time when The Weakest Link first began and Anne introduced every episode with "Somebody here will leave today with up to £10,000" (with some prime-time episodes offering £20k or even £50K) - I was open-mouthed, just thinking "But that's licence-payer money. It's meant to be used to run the whole organisation and make programmes - it's not theirs to just give away like that, that was never what it was paid for".

Much as I enjoyed the format, for the first few episodes, I found myself just mentally adding up how many households' licence fees had just been handed straight over to somebody for answering a few questions (and for being averagely good enough at quizzes not to get voted off for being rubbish or considered a threat) instead of being used for their proper purpose. It almost seemed tantamount to fraud, I thought.

Of course, now, nobody even thinks for a moment when the BBC hands out big gameshow prizes as we've just become so inured to it.

I still vote for them to go subscription. If the BBC go subscription you'll have a choice:
Netflix - £8 pm
Disney - £6 pm
Amazon prime - £8 pm (plus speedy delivery from Amazon)
BBC - £13 pm (which is roughly what the license is right now)

I know which ones I'd rather have as I don't consume any BBC content or broadcast TV. But for those that enjoy the BBC they can support it.

Send the directors on training courses at Netflix.

Stop sending 30 people to a job when 3 will do.

Stop trading on a rep that died years ago.

It will be interesting to see how well BritBox does. We've just signed up for the free trial and there is quite a bit of good stuff on there, but I understand it's already been a big hit in North America, where the cachet is of course that it's highly-respected British telly rather than just old telly to us.

If that takes off, that will be the equivalent of half the licence fee again being paid every year by each household. I know it's a collaboration between all of the main UK broadcasters, so they'll share the profits between them (and of course, there are running and server costs involved), but it looks quite BBC-heavy to me, so if they get pro-rata royalties, it could bring in a very tidy sum for them especially, considering that they don't have to make a single minute of new programming for it.

There is no need for BBC3. Stick to:

• BBC1
• BBC2
• BBC World Service
• CBBC
• CBeebies
• BBC News website
• BBC Weather website
• Radio 4

On the basis that they are so rubbish, I wouldn’t suggest anything even if I had the professional knowledge to give them proper advice. If I found £125 million on on the street, nobody claimed it and nobody else in the world had any use for it, I’d rather burn it than give it to the BBC.
They need to grow up and take responsibilities.
For how good their international service, documentaries and some radio services are, they should be able to stop and try infantilising the nation with all the shit they are showing. They’ve got enough talent so they should be able to make use of it.

If the BBC go subscription you'll have a choice:
Netflix - £8 pm
Disney - £6 pm
Amazon prime - £8 pm (plus speedy delivery from Amazon)
BBC - £13 pm (which is roughly what the license[sic] is right now)
Except it won't be £13 - that is based on the universal nature of the licence.

[sic]

Lol. Love the effort taken to pop that in there... You should have checked your bolding instead of my AutoCorrect though. 😝

They could just put the licence fee up by a couple of pounds?

They already want to make the license fee part of people's broadband bill. So you'd have to pay it even if you don't need one.