BBC MAKE INDIE PRODUCTION QUOTA BY SMALL MARGIN

ACCORDING to a recent report by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), the BBC have only just scraped through on its 25 per cent independent production quota.
The report made to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport on October 19, states that, of the BBC’s total output of broadcasting time for qualifying programmes, in the period April 1998 to March 1999, only 25.8 per cent were made by independent producers. While the BBC met the 25 per cent target, this is a decrease on the BBC’s performance during the previous reporting year. In April 1997 to March 1998 the BBC achieved a 29.2 per cent quota of qualifying programmes from independent producers.
John Vickers, the Director General of Fair Trading, said the change was largely due to the increase in qualifying hours following the inclusion of BBC Choice and News 24 in the monitoring, rather than any dramatic shift away from commissioning independent productions.
He also said that while review programmes such as ‘Sports Review’, ‘World Review’ and ‘Business Review’ could not be described as news because they reported events that had occurred during the previous year, the news output could be included in the productions quota.
Vickers concluded that while the BBC met the statutory requirements for the period April 1 1998 to March 31 1999, but that they passed the 25 per cent target by only 0.8 of a percentage point.