BBC World Service: Sustainability

Lord Birt Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend. Her support for the World Service is long-standing and well known, and quite right too. The longer-term funding proposition for the World Service will need to be considered as part of the charter review. To be absolutely clear, the £137 million funding uplift that I referred to in my initial Answer is for this financial year. I think my noble friend may have misheard what I said. The allocations for next year will be made very shortly.

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, in a few years, we will be celebrating the centenary of one of the UK’s many great inventions, the BBC World Service, which now reaches a remarkable 400 million people each week. It is the most trusted news service on the planet and a significant contributor to promoting British values across the globe. Can the Minister articulate any argument whatever—I cannot see one—for why the BBC World Service should be majority funded by the licence fee payer rather than fully funded by the taxpayer, which, for the overwhelming majority of its history, it was?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

As the noble Lord will know, this is not a situation of our making but one that we inherited, and we are where we are. Our task, together with the BBC, is to make sure that the World Service is funded in a way that means it can continue to do the incredible work that it leads around the world, because, as the noble Lord says, it is the world’s most trusted source of news.