Key questions of racial, gender and sexual diversity missed out on parliamentarians’ scrutiny.
Every select committee inquiry produces two records. One is written: the submissions organisations research, reference and file by a given deadline. The other is spoken: the questions members choose to ask, and the answers witnesses choose to give. Comparing the two shows what an inquiry received and what it prioritised. On the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s BBC Royal Charter Review inquiry, that comparison deserves attention before the report is drafted.
The Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity, analysed both records in full: all 98 written submissions to the inquiry, totalling 297,041 words, and all eight oral evidence transcripts, totalling 160,905 words. Of the 33 witnesses who appeared across the eight oral sessions, only one, Bectu’s Philippa Childs, was asked to address workforce diversity in any depth.
At first glance the written record looks rich. The words diversity or diverse appear 244 times across 66 submissions. But the raw number needs unpacking. When we classified each use by context, the largest group, about a third, described the audiences and communities the BBC should serve, often echoing the existing Charter’s Public Purpose 4 and its “diverse communities of all the United Kingdom’s nations and regions”. Another quarter concerned content, supply and market plurality. Roughly a quarter concerned people: who is employed, trained, commissioned or promoted.
That workforce quarter is precise and quantified. The National Council for the Training of Journalists told the committee that journalism “remains socially narrow”, that 86 per cent of journalists come from white ethnic groups, and that while the BBC has progressed on gender, “gaps remain across ethnicity, disability and socio-economic background, particularly at senior levels”. The NUJ reported that “in 2025 the BBC’s mean gender pay gap increased to 5.7% while the mean ethnicity pay gap increased to 3.5%”.
Bectu wrote that the workforce “must reflect the diversity of the UK in terms of geography, socioeconomic background, ethnicity, disability, gender, age”. Directors UK asked for “diversity and equality off-screen” to be “consistently embedded throughout the commissioning, recruitment and hiring processes”. Equity noted that class “intersects with other identity markers such as race, gender, sexuality, disability and regional identity”.
Then there is the spoken record. Across 160,905 words of oral evidence, the word equality was used once, about paywalls. The word gender was never used. Nor were sexuality, LGBT or trans, by any member or any witness. Race and racism: zero. Ethnicity terms: five. Nobody asked the BBC’s chair or director general about workforce data, pay gaps or the corporation’s equality reporting. The Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, gave 18,865 words
of evidence containing no use of diversity, equality or inclusion at all.
Representation was not absent. It was present in a particular form. The inquiry opened with James Graham, British television’s most eloquent champion of working-class representation, who used his 2024 MacTaggart Lecture to make class the industry’s unfinished business, and who delivered on that brief here too: “We have diversity and inclusion forms, and increasingly you have to take it on trust that people are from the backgrounds that they say they are.”
No witness played that role for the protected characteristics. Individual members raised them in passing. Vicky Foxcroft, Labour MP for Lewisham North, pressed repeatedly on working-class backgrounds and, within that, on deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people. Dr Rupa Huq, Labour MP for Ealing Central and Acton, asked the sharpest race-related question of the inquiry, about which stories lead news bulletins depending on who the perpetrators and victims are. But these were moments, not a line of scrutiny, and no witness was invited to answer them with evidence.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, in the final session, spoke about the “class ceiling” that “comes very early on”. Class and region were examined seriously. That is welcome and overdue. But it means the inquiry’s spoken conception of representation narrowed to the two dimensions the Equality Act does not protect, while the protected characteristics went largely untested.
Analysis by the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity of the 98 written submissions and eight oral evidence sessions to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s BBC Royal Charter Review inquiry, 19 May to 13 July 2026.
|
Term |
Spoken (mentions) |
Written (mentions) |
Written (submissions using, of 98) |
|
diversity / diverse |
20 |
244 |
66 |
|
inclusion / inclusive |
5 |
75 |
33 |
|
equality |
1 |
11 |
11 |
|
gender |
0 |
12 |
9 |
|
sexuality / LGBT+ |
0 |
2 |
2 |
|
race / racial / racism |
0 |
4 |
4 |
|
ethnicity / ethnic |
5 |
11 |
7 |
|
disability / disabled |
4 |
111 |
15 |
|
working-class |
37 |
14 |
9 |
|
diversity / diverse |
20 |
244 |
The day after the Culture Secretary gave evidence, the BBC published its annual report and equality documents. They show on-screen Black, Asian and minority ethnic representation falling from 29.8 per cent to 26.5 per cent in a single year, and the gap in weekly reach between White and minority ethnic audiences widening to 24 percentage points. The BBC’s own data, published with a transparency that remains rare in this sector, describes exactly the trends the inquiry never explored.
BBC chair Samir Shah had told members that the corporation commissions against “protected characteristics”, arguing for a wider lens taking in class and opinion. The director general Matt Brittin volunteered that the BBC is “underserving younger audiences, working-class families and some minority ethnic groups”. Both statements invited a follow-up that never came.
But one detail is telling. The current Charter already contains a workforce diversity duty: Article 14 requires the BBC to reflect the UK’s diverse communities in its output, in where and by whom its services are delivered, and in the organisation and management of the BBC, with particular regard to underrepresented communities. Across 98 submissions and eight sessions, an inquiry into the Charter’s renewal never once tested how that duty is performing. The audience formula in Public Purpose 4 recurs throughout the written evidence; the workforce duty in Article 14 is cited by nobody, in writing or in the room.
So, we pose this constructively, as questions the report can still answer. Why is on-screen representation falling? Why is the reach gap widening? And should the next Charter measure who benefits from the BBC, not only where its value lands?
Sir Lenny Henry put it plainly in the Centre’s second annual lecture in May: “We are in a fight for the British media. Who tells our stories, who has the power to decide who those people are, and where those stories are heard.”
Last week in an opinion piece for Broadcast, we asked the BBC: growth for whom? This week we ask its scrutineers on the DCMS Select Committee a parallel question, in the hope and expectation that their report can still answer it: scrutiny for whom?