THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY: BBC DIVERSITY NUMBERS

In 2012 I was appointed the Chair of the Royal Television Society Diversity Committee.

One of the first things I did was hold a small closed door meeting with some of the great and the good working in television and interested in diversity to figure out what I should do as the new Chair.

At the meeting over coffee and Marks and Spencer's finger food one of the senior BBC executives told us that in reality the BBC did not really have a problem with ethnic diversity. The figures showed that the proportion of BAME staff at the organisation was only slightly lower than the population as a whole.

I was a little surprised so after the meeting I looked at the numbers and realized the big headline statistic the BBC exec was citing was not all it seemed.

Since then I have I have crunched the official BBC diversity numbers every year for journalists and diversity campaigners alike so they might better understand what they mean. Why?

Because if we do not properly understand the numbers we get to the place where some people, such as the BBC executive, say that we do not have a problem - at least privately.

This year I thought I would examine the first diversity staff report the BBC published in 2012 and compare it to the 2018 report and see what progress has been made in BAME employment.

So what has changed over 6 years at the BBC?

FIRST THE GOOD NEWS

In 2012 12.4% of the BBC’s total staff were BAME, in 2018 this has increased to 14.8%.

The other major progress is the percentage of BAME people working for News has increased from 11.3% to 15%.

For this reason it would at first appear that the BBC has made significant progress in addressing ethnic diversity over the last six years. However when one looks at the figures in more detail there is little to celebrate.

IMPORTANT DIVERSITY FIGURES AT THE BBC HAVE GONE BACKWARDS

The two most important departments that one needs to focus on when it comes to diversity and how programmes are made are BBC Studios and Radio & Education. These are the departments which produce the stories that are told, what we watch and how the UK is reflected on our screens and radios. It is at the heart of media diversity. Not all the roles in the departments are editorial - some are support staff, but they are as good a proxy as you can find, given that the BBC has declined to release figures on the percentage of BAME people in editorial roles, despite Freedom of Information requests for this figure.

So what does this proxy tell us? Over the last six years the BBC has restructured and certain departments have been renamed. Back in 2012 "BBC Studios" was effectively called “BBC Vision” while "Radio & Education" was called “Audio & Music". when they first published the 2012 diversity figures the BBC (rightly) had a stated target that by 2017 12.5% of BBC Vision staff should be BAME and 13.0% of Audio & Music staff should be BAME.

In these two departments BAME staff diversity has gone down. In 2012 the percentage of BAME staff working in BBC Vision was 9.7%. By 2018, that number had not risen - it had dropped to 9.6%. Audio & Music is no different. In 2012 the percentage of BAME staff was 11.1%, six years later it has now fallen to 11.0%.

 (Table on left shows BBC 2012 BAME figures for BBC Vision at 9.7%, Table on right shows BBC BAME figures for BBC Studios at 9.6%)

FREELANCERS - THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

Worryingly even the 9.6% and 11.0% figures is an over-representation of how many BAME people work on BBC productions.

To its credit, for the first time this year, the BBC published the size and diversity of its freelance workforce.

The figures reveal that for the all-important BBC Studios freelancers outnumber staff by 5 to 1. (In 2018 there were 6910 freelancers employed in BBC Studios compared to 1345 members of staff)

The percentage of freelancers who are BAME in BBC Studios is only 7.7%

Combining the staff numbers and the freelance numbers gives you a headline figure of at least 92% of people working on BBC Studio productions in the last year were white - possibly more.

If the story is so poor, then why is the BBC emphasizing the 14.8% headline figure?  What does it really mean?

In the last decade the BBC has heavily invested in Global News and reaching audiences outside of the UK. It has created exciting and very new successful outlets such as Persian and Pidgin Services. In 2012 BAME staff accounted for 45.6% of staff working in the BBC Global News division. By 2018 (restructured and renamed “World Service Group”) that percentage of BAME staff had accordingly increased to 54.4%. But these services by their very definition need a large BAME work force often based overseas in Africa and Asia. It is these services - targeting the rest of the world not the UK audience - that have significantly increased the headline 14.8% figure. And they have almost no influence in representing the country's rich diversity to itself.

REAL CHANGE OR WINDOW DRESSING?

Finally the figures even suggest that some other rises in relative BAME employment may have been more “cosmetic” than substantial.

Take the BBC News department. Since 2012 the percentage of BAME employed in this specific department has actually slowly risen by a tenth of a percentage or so each year, but between 2016 and 2017 the percentage jumped by 2.1%. In the same period the “White Other” category also grew from 6.4% to 10.7%. Again a huge jump. This kind of jump in figures usually points to a new way figures are classified or a departmental restructuring rather than a real change.

And it would align with another apparent diversity "success" that took place between 2016 and 2017 when numbers of employed disabled people jumped from 3.6% to 10.2%. Many people I spoke to think this is due to a change in how disability is defined although to the best of my knowledge the BBC has still not publicly explained how it achieved this disability diversity “success”.

If the News numbers really did increase by this amount in a single year it would be very useful for the BBC to tell us how it was achieved so other departments could learn by its example. Or if it was simply due to reclassification and restructuring then that would be good to know as well so we can understand the numbers and do not have false hope that there has been progress when none has occurred.

ACTION NEEDS TO BE TAKEN

I was genuinely shocked when I went back to the original 2012 and compared them to 2018 figures.

There will be those people that will say that due to administrative restructures the departments I am comparing 2012 and 2018 figures to are not exactly the same – after working at the BBC for over twenty years I would argue against this.

But this is losing sight of the bigger picture - that by any definition the number of BAME people making programmes at the BBC has decreased. And the headline 14.8% figure is massively inflated by a non-white workforce broadcasting programmes outside of the UK.

And that reveals the crux of the problem. 

Most of the current and former BAME BBC people I have spoken to while conducting this research say they “knew” that there had been no progress on diversity at the BBC and things had gone backwards. They knew it not from looking at the numbers but from their own lived experience of working there.

In 2018, the BBC figures reveal that BAME staff were more likely to leave the BBC than their white counterparts, and even fewer received severance pay when they leave. Most I know have literally just handed in their notice and left, fed up with the lack of progress and glass ceilings.

Promoting headline figures such as 14.8% is misleading at best and might even hinder real action being taken.

I sincerely hope that BBC executives do not privately think what the executive voiced six years ago at the Royal Television Society meeting that looking at the headline figure the BBC really doesn’t have a problem.