Saving Culture at the Beeb

BBC news and current affairs makes up just a fraction of its budget, but dominates debates about the organisation’s future — sidelining its mission to create art and entertainment for the public good.

The Windmill Girls are filmed as part of tests made before the resumption of regular television after the war. (Credit: Hulton-Deutsch Collection, CORBIS/ Corbis via Getty Images.)

The BBC is a key employer and a major creator of arts and entertainment, but neither role appears to matter yet in the ongoing review of its charter. That charter — the constitutional basis for the corporation, setting out its public purpose and governance — is now under review, with the government’s Green Paper published last year and a White Paper due in 2026.

At Equity, the largest creative industries trade union in the UK, we were struck by the fact that of the 30 references to ‘culture’ in the Green Paper, 20 were subsumed within the term ‘workplace culture’. This reveals two major blind spots in the government’s view of the BBC.

The first is a failure to recognise the importance of the trade unions with which the corporation holds collective agreements. Framing the problems that have blighted the lives of many BBC workers as ‘organisational culture’ is a shrewd sleight of hand. It depoliticises and individualises what are, in reality, structural issues. We need to stop talking about bad apples and start talking about material conditions: the pay gap between the lowest-paid freelancers and the highest-paid talent or executives; the absence of workforce representation at board level; the erosion of terms and conditions through years of privatisation; and the BBC’s chronic underinvestment in parts of the UK, especially the Midlands.

The second blind spot is equally fundamental. Where in the Green Paper is culture itself addressed? One of the BBC’s five public purposes is to reflect the United Kingdom, its culture and values to the world, and one of its three overarching missions is to entertain. Yet, conspicuously absent from the Green Paper, and indeed from much of the wider debate about the BBC, is any acknowledgement of one of its core functions: to create art and entertainment.

What counts as culture, and whose culture is valued, is always contested. But that is no excuse for its absence from debates about a keystone of the UK’s creative industries. Instead, most pundits and politicians fixate on the BBC’s news output. Yet in 2024–25, just 10 percent of its £3.1 billion content spend, or £324 million, went to news and current affairs. This small share of output — the ‘inform’ branch of the BBC’s overarching mission — dominates debates about the corporation’s legitimacy and future. It also appears to underlie the BBC’s hairshirt approach to public relations, in which it continually asks forgiveness for its sins, both real and imagined.

In a discussion about waning public trust in the corporation, I even heard a BBC official declare: ‘We don’t believe we have the right to exist.’ This is not to trivialise the importance of debates about impartiality or the work of our comrades in the National Union of Journalists. But the unrelenting sidelining of a full third of the BBC’s overarching mission — ‘to entertain’ — needs to stop.

The BBC is an essential public institution. Its success as a trainer and employer of creative talent is undeniable. The ongoing review of its Royal Charter is an opportunity to refound the BBC as an arm of the welfare state, in which arts and culture are treated as essential public services alongside health, education, housing and social security.

We have shared Equity’s proposals to reform the BBC with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport: democratisation — meaning workforce representation in governance and operations; regionalisation — meaning a fair distribution of investment across the UK; and co-operativisation — a reconfiguration of the corporation under a new structure in which it is owned and run by licence fee payers and its workforce, both those permanently employed and the thousands of freelancers it relies on.

From the next Charter, which will take effect on 1 January 2028, the BBC should embrace its role as a creator of art and entertainment. That means expanding the production of continuing dramas, or soaps, which are vital incubators of working-class talent and an effective way to sustain production in under-represented parts of the UK. It also means guaranteeing substantial investment in audio drama, which remains crucial for developing new writing and acting talent.

Finally, the BBC should return to its roots in making television that matters, as Play for Today did between 1970 and 1984. The autumn 2026 revival of this challenging series — notable for works by Mike Leigh, Dennis Potter and Ken Loach — is welcome. But its reappearance on Channel 5, rather than the BBC, was a missed opportunity. So too were Netflix’s commissioning of Adolescence and ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office. This is the kind of output that should be the BBC’s bread and butter: work that sparks conversations about issues of national importance across the UK.

There should be no doubt about the BBC’s right to exist. It is a vital civic institution, funded by and accountable to the public. Sustained by the labour of thousands, it remains a central force in the creation of art and entertainment. Their workplace is culture.