BBC: World Service

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Tuesday 27th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bakewell]

My Lords—

[Lord Triesman]

My Lords, the decisions that were taken in 2005 about reducing the number of eastern European language broadcasts, largely because there had been a great development in the democratic media in many of those countries, released money for the Farsi language service and for the 24-hour Arab service. I am very familiar with the decisions taken at that time. Would the noble Baroness agree that the cutting of those services, to the extent that they are being cut—and we should be under no delusion: they are being cut back—is going in the opposite direction of identifying where there are problems and addressing them?

[Baroness Warsi]

The noble Lord may well be comforted by the fact that, despite these budget reductions in the current financial climate, the FCO has been able to maintain the World Service’s share of the overall FCO budget at, or at about, the level that it was in 2007-08.