Background to the report

The BBC World Service (the Service) is an international broadcasting service run by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and covered by the BBC’s Royal Charter. The Service is primarily aimed at audiences outside the United Kingdom, to provide accurate, impartial and independent news and programming in English and other languages. It currently provides these services in 42 other languages.

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In 2024-25, the Service had a weekly global audience of 313 million and, as of July 2025, employed around 1,657 people. As set out in its licence, the Service supports the BBC’s mission and public purposes but primarily contributes to the BBC’s fifth public purpose to reflect the United Kingdom, its culture and values to the world.

The Service is part of the BBC’s News division and funded by a combination of the BBC licence fee and grant funding from the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). In 2025-26, FCDO provided £137 million to the Service, with £221 million coming from the licence fee. However, the Service’s total budget has fallen 21% in real terms between 2021-22 and 2025-26, mainly due to reductions in contributions from the licence fee as part of the BBC’s management of an overall reduction in licence fee income.

As part of wider BBC savings, the Service has implemented its savings programmes in three phases to reduce its expenditure in line with reductions to its budget. Commencing in 2022, the savings programmes have seen the Service aim to reduce expenditure cumulatively by £54.2 million through workforce reductions, closures of traditional TV and radio broadcasts and other savings such as reducing the size of its business support function.

Scope of the report

This report assesses the Service’s progress with implementing its savings programmes and the consequent impact on its performance. It does not provide an assessment of the value for money of the World Service overall. We have drawn recommendations from our findings that we intend will support the Service, and the BBC more widely, when implementing future business change programmes, including savings programmes. The report covers:

  • why the Service needed to make savings and progress to date
  • the Service’s approach to making savings
  • the impact of the Service’s savings programmes

Video summary

Simon Bittlestone, the report’s director, summarises our findings.

Conclusions

The BBC World Service plays a vital role across the globe at a time where there is an increasing amount of misinformation and curtailment to press freedoms in many countries. Its most recent survey showed that it continued to hold a reputation for independence and trustworthiness. Wider funding pressures have necessitated spending reductions and while it has achieved most of these, primarily through output closures, its later phases of savings are behind schedule.

Clear gaps in its approach to the savings programmes are likely to have contributed to these delays but also mean it may have missed opportunities to make savings in a way that resulted in better outcomes, such as greater migration of audiences to its digital platforms.

The Service has not tracked costs and savings in a way that enables it to demonstrate how the savings have affected outputs and audience outcomes. This makes it harder for the Service to draw lessons to feed into its latest restructuring as part of the wider changes to the BBC’s global news operation.

It will be vital for the Service to learn from its experiences implementing savings to consider where taking a more structured approach could enable it to reduce expenditure in a way that ensures it maximises value for money.

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Publication details

Press release

View press release (19 Nov 2025)

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