BBC to move more staff and services out of London

The BBC is planning to reduce its presence in London and move more staff and services to other parts of the UK.

The public broadcaster employs a total of 19,231 staff – not including just over 2,700 at commercial arm BBC Studios – of which 52% are based outside the M25, which rings London.

Tony Hall, the BBC director general, said while the corporation had made “enormous strides” in reducing its focus on the capital in recent years more needed to be done.

“I want the BBC to be the organisation that is fully embedded and distributed around the UK,” Hall is expected to tell the Royal Television Society convention in Cambridge.

“We’ve made enormous strides. A decade ago, a third of the BBC was based outside London and two-thirds was in London. Today, that balance is 50/50. We’ve moved from less than 10% of our network TV programmes produced in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to 20%.

“But I want us to think bigger. Imagine a world in which the BBC moved still more out of London. It would take time. But what an enormous creative and operational opportunity.”

Hall has not disclosed how many employees, or which services, might be moved outside the capital or on what timeline. Currently, 34% of staff employed by the licence fee-funded BBC are based in England, excluding London, with 4% in Northern Ireland; Scotland and Wales host 7% each.

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The corporation’s biggest hub outside London is in Salford, Manchester, where its BBC North headquarters at MediaCityUK were opened in 2011. London-based departments including parts of Radio 5 Live, BBC Sport, Children’s, Learning and BBC Breakfast moved to the facility.

The broadcaster also has large operational hubs in Glasgow and Belfast and significant production centres in Cardiff, Bristol and Birmingham.

Moving London-based staff out of the capital has proved to be a hard sell. Channel 4, which is moving about 300 of its 800 staff out of London to locations including Leeds, has led up to 90% of employees in some departments to seek redundancy payments in preference to leaving the capital.

The BBC received a similar proportion of refusals to move to MediaCityUK, while just 31 of 144 agreed to relocate to operations in Birmingham, which is home to services including half of the BBC Three operation and a youth team for BBC News.

Relocating is also expensive and the BBC estimates the lifetime cost of the move to Salford, including operating costs for the site up to 2030, to be £942m.

The National Audit Office criticised the BBC for overly generous relocation packages totalling £24m to entice London staff to move to Salford.

Channel 4 has estimated that its move out of London will ultimately cost about £50m.