Our national broadcaster paints a compelling picture of its value through opportunity, but who is getting those chances
Growth for whom? The question the BBC's economic case never asks
Jaldeep Katwala, Director of the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity.
The BBC has published a powerful economic self-portrait. BBC & Creative Industries Growth, prepared in-house with support from EY and released during Charter Review, sets out the corporation’s contribution: £6.7 billion in gross value added (GVA) in 2024/25, 79,000 jobs supported, a £3 billion economic footprint outside London, and an estimate that funding instability between 2012 and 2023 cost the UK economy £62 billion in lost GVA.
The Centre welcomes this. The economic argument for the BBC is real — and it needs to be made, particularly at a time when the future of the TV Licence is being challenged.
But across 56 pages, one question is missing: Growth for whom?
The report measures where money goes, which sectors benefit and how many jobs are created. But it does not ask who gets those opportunities.
The report measures everything except people’s backgrounds. GVA is broken down by region, by sector, by BBC division. High-value jobs are tracked to the decimal point through Standard Occupational Classifications. Careers are traced across a 37-year dataset of 1.27 million individuals. Yet of its dozens of tables, figures and regressions, not one is broken down by ethnicity, class, disability or gender.
Consider the report’s most striking new finding. Analysis of IMDb data shows that a first BBC credit sets people on a durably higher career trajectory. Those who work with the BBC average 15.8 credits over their careers; those who never do average 5.2 — a threefold gap that holds at the median too. And the BBC typically intervenes within the first year of a career on lower-cost productions.
The report presents this as evidence of the BBC as a career booster. It is also an extraordinary admission of gatekeeping power. The BBC may say this is correlation rather than causation — that those who win a first credit were already the strongest candidates. But whether the credit creates the trajectory or merely selects for it, the gate is still the gate, and who holds it still matters. If a BBC credit compounds advantage for life, then the question of who receives that first credit is one of the most consequential equity questions in the British creative economy.
And getting through the door is only the start: the Centre’s own research this year, Breaking, drew on the testimony of 80 racially minoritised journalists in national UK television newsrooms and found that 63% had experienced racism in their workplace and 70% saw insufficient opportunities for career progression. Entry schemes without progression and culture change do not deliver the career trajectories the BBC’s data describes.
And it makes the geography of the BBC’s expansion matter even more: the corporation is moving its most concentrated new investment into one of Europe’s youngest cities, Birmingham, at exactly the career stage — the first credit, the entry-level apprenticeship, the first placement — where its own evidence says its influence is greatest.
The West Midlands — the region we work in, and one of the report’s flagship case studies — is promised an increase in network television spend from £24 million to £40 million a year, a new headquarters at the Tea Factory in Digbeth, and £282 million in additional economic value by 2031.
Nowhere does the report ask who will hold those jobs. The 2021 census in Birmingham recorded a population where one in five (20%) are disabled and a majority (51.4%) described themselves as being from Black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds. Birmingham’s young, diverse population is the talent pool the BBC’s own findings point at. The dataset exists — 60,759 BBC-
linked individuals. Nobody, it would appear on this evidence, has run the demographic analysis.
The word “diversity” appears throughout the BBC report but it refers to genre diversity, market diversity and, above all, supply chain diversification — the welcome but distinct business of contracting more SMEs. Diversity as economics has crowded out diversity as people.
The BBC’s actual workforce diversity strategy — Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, with its RISE and ELEVATE schemes — receives little more than a single paragraph. The BBC measures much of this elsewhere; it did not think it belonged in its growth story.
This matters because the report cites the BBC’s Public Purpose 4 — the Charter obligation to “reflect, represent and serve the diverse communities” of all the UK’s nations and regions — as the foundation of its partnership strategy. And it states that improving diversity in the BBC’s workforce influences how the BBC represents and portrays audiences on screen and on air.
The BBC accepts that the diversity of inputs shapes the diversity of outputs. Our ask is not that the BBC abandons economic rigour, but that it applies the same rigour to people that it applies to pounds.
The same is true of the report’s central thesis: that the BBC is an anchor institution whose presence propagates outward. Five years after the BBC expands in a region, the share of high-value jobs is roughly two percentage points higher than it would otherwise have been; a 15% increase in local BBC footprint doubles the growth rate of the surrounding creative cluster. We accept the evidence.
However, if the BBC does not look like its audiences in front of and behind the screen and microphone in the regions, how effective will moving production there be? £700 million moved out of London tells us nothing about inclusion unless the workforce data travels with it.
So, as Charter Review proceeds, we propose three things.
First, transparency: as it does in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and nationally, the BBC should publish workforce and commissioning diversity data at cluster or regional level —
linked individuals. Nobody, it would appear on this evidence, has run the demographic analysis.
The word “diversity” appears throughout the BBC report but it refers to genre diversity, market diversity and, above all, supply chain diversification — the welcome but distinct business of contracting more SMEs. Diversity as economics has crowded out diversity as people.
The BBC’s actual workforce diversity strategy — Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, with its RISE and ELEVATE schemes — receives little more than a single paragraph. The BBC measures much of this elsewhere; it did not think it belonged in its growth story.
This matters because the report cites the BBC’s Public Purpose 4 — the Charter obligation to “reflect, represent and serve the diverse communities” of all the UK’s nations and regions — as the foundation of its partnership strategy. And it states that improving diversity in the BBC’s workforce influences how the BBC represents and portrays audiences on screen and on air.
The BBC accepts that the diversity of inputs shapes the diversity of outputs. Our ask is not that the BBC abandons economic rigour, but that it applies the same rigour to people that it applies to pounds.
The same is true of the report’s central thesis: that the BBC is an anchor institution whose presence propagates outward. Five years after the BBC expands in a region, the share of high-value jobs is roughly two percentage points higher than it would otherwise have been; a 15% increase in local BBC footprint doubles the growth rate of the surrounding creative cluster. We accept the evidence.
However, if the BBC does not look like its audiences in front of and behind the screen and microphone in the regions, how effective will moving production there be? £700 million moved out of London tells us nothing about inclusion unless the workforce data travels with it.
So, as Charter Review proceeds, we propose three things.
First, transparency: as it does in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and nationally, the BBC should publish workforce and commissioning diversity data at cluster or regional level —
Salford, Cardiff, Glasgow, Belfast, Birmingham — so that the anchor-institution claim can be examined demographically as well as economically, and so that we can distinguish genuinely local, representative recruitment from productions that travel north with their London crews intact.
Second, accountability: the new Charter and any reformed funding settlement should carry demographic growth metrics alongside the economic ones. If the government’s creative industries ambitions are to be delivered partly through the BBC, the public is entitled to know that the resulting opportunity is shared. A growth framework that counts jobs but not who gets them is half a framework.
Third, inclusion by design: the BBC’s regional partnership agreements — the memoranda of understanding with the West Midlands Combined Authority and Create Central, and with the North East — should carry workforce representation commitments alongside their spending commitments. The report shows this is entirely practical: it cites the North East partnership’s
metric that the majority of productions funded there now have over 70% regional crew, up from 50% in 2022.
If crew localness can be measured, tracked and celebrated, so can crew representativeness. The BBC commissioned our Centre to measure the impact of its Creative Diversity Commitment. That work stressed the importance of allocating separate and ring-fenced funding for each of the different socio-demographic and other categories of diverse and under-represented talent. The measurement machinery exists; what is missing is publication and commitment.
Nor would the BBC be first: following recommendations in the Centre’s research on Channel 4’s Black to Front project, Channel 4 introduced off-screen diversity targets for all its productions. The BBC should do the same and demonstrate region by region that it is doing so.
The BBC has made a compelling case that it drives growth. The unfinished task is to show that the growth is fair.
References
- Breaking: The experience of racially minoritised people working in UK TV newsrooms (2025). Rohit Kachroo and Ellie Tomsett. Read the report
- BBC Creative Diversity Commitment (2024). Professor Panayiota Tsatsou, Nina Robinson, Dr Joanna Abeyie, Dr Aurora Herrera. Read the report
- Beyond Black to Front: Accessing Channel 4’s Black to Front Project and New Diversity and Inclusion Challenges (2022). Dr Stevie Marsden, Dr Jami Rogers, Prof Marcus Ryder, Vincent Obia. Read the report Office for National Statistics. How life has changed in Birmingham: Census 2021. ons.gov.uk
- Birmingham City Council, City Observatory. Census 2021 Highlights Briefing: Ethnicity. cityobservatory.birmingham.gov.uk