BBC World Service: Sustainability

Lord Callanan Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

BBC Monitoring provides an exceptionally important service. If noble Lords have not had the chance to look into what it does, I would highly recommend it, particularly for situations such as that in Ukraine, where it is probably the most reliable source of information on the Russian war dead. Its work on misinformation and disinformation is highly significant to our ability to bring everything we can in support of Ukraine.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My Lords, as Russia and China spend about £8 billion a year on international state broadcasters, the BBC World Service is broadcasting trusted and generally balanced reporting in over 40 languages to 300 million people a week. However, that trust is undermined when BBC Arabic journalists are reported to have celebrated attacks against Israel. What work have Ministers done with the BBC to ensure that our taxpayer-funded broadcaster is maintaining impartiality, both here and internationally?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

It is important that the BBC has editorial independence, but there is no doubt that there were issues that needed to be responded to following the Prescott revelations. I was pleased to see the way that the BBC reacted to that; it owned the problem and it has put in place measures to deal with it. The noble Lord started his comments by saying that we are being outspent by other nations, and that is undoubtedly true—welcome to the enlightened side of this debate.