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The BBC and the Foreign Office are on a collision course over the World Service, with the broadcaster seeking a sharp rise in state funding while the government makes large cuts to its international aid budget.
BBC executives want annual government funding for the World Service to rise to close to £200mn next year, up from about £137mn, as part of an ambitious three-year settlement designed to help counter Russian and Chinese propaganda, according to people close to the talks.
Longer term, they are asking for the government to take on almost all of the World Service’s £400mn annual budget after 2027, to coincide with the BBC’s 10-year Royal Charter review setting out the broadcaster’s governance and funding.
The majority of the World Service’s funding comes from the BBC licence fee, with the rest from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s aid budget. But the FCDO is currently managing the biggest reduction to the aid budget in decades after Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer redirected funds towards military spending.
As part of this week’s government spending review, the FCDO had asked the BBC to model a World Service budget that would be “flat cash” over the next three years — shielding it from the worst of the cuts but implying a real terms reduction in funding, according to people familiar with the matter.
While a final decision on funding for the World Service is unlikely to be reached before the autumn, according to government officials, the gap between the BBC and the FCDO remains wide.
Jonathan Munro, global director of BBC News, declined to comment on the exact level of additional state funding requested by the BBC for the World Service in the spending review negotiations, but confirmed the broadcaster has asked the government to shoulder more of the costs from 2027.
He told the Financial Times: “The history of the World Service is that it was funded by the taxpayer for almost all of its life. It performs a role for the whole of the UK overseas . . . the biggest and most important UK cultural export by a mile, and encourages trade into the UK.”
He said the UK benefited from its influence in helping “the security and stability of the world, and that’s not a licence fee payer responsibility”.
Until 2014, the government covered the full cost of the World Service.
Government officials pointed out that the FCDO had already increased the World Service’s state funding by 31 per cent to £137mn for 2025-26, but added that the government was “open-minded” on how the World Service would be funded in the longer term as part of the upcoming BBC charter review.
Baroness Chapman, the FCDO minister who oversees the international aid budget, said in March that while the government “highly values” the BBC World Service, delivering the planned cuts to the aid budget would “require hard choices”.
An FCDO spokesperson said it would “not get ahead of the allocations process” but its “track record of staunch support for the BBC World Service is clear . . . despite a tough fiscal situation, we continue to back them”.
MPs and officials are concerned that a real-terms drop in funding would mean the influence of the service around the world and the UK’s “soft power” will be eroded.
Last week, Caroline Dinenage, chair of the committee of MPs that scrutinises the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, wrote to ministers about the impact of any cut to the FCDO’s contribution.
Dinenage said British national security was “not enhanced by making it easier for Russian or Chinese state-backed media, with a combined budget of around £8bn, to become the dominant voice around the world”.
The World Service reaches more than 400mn people each week in 42 languages. Munro pointed to a forthcoming report that showed that almost three-quarters of the reach of BBC news was in countries in the bottom quarter of press freedom.
