BBC Trust

BBC Asian Network has been given permission by the BBC Trust to remove regular language programming from its schedule. The Trust is reissuing the service licence for Asian Network with amendments which remove this commitment.

The decision follows the Trust’s consideration of an assessment carried out by the BBC Executive of the impact of the plans.  This has led the Trust to conclude that the plans did not represent a significant change to the UK public services and so did not require a public value test.

The decision represents a change to Asian Network’s stated key characteristics in its service licence and so the Trust considered whether a public value test should be carried out prior to the decision being taken. The Trust drew on evidence from the BBC Executive’s assessment as well as its previous work in this area, including its review of Asian Network, published in 2015.

According to the Framework Agreement, the Trust must consider four criteria in deciding whether or not a public value test is required. This proposal was assessed against them as follows::

• The likely impact on audiences: the Trust agreed with the Executive’s assessment that the station’s audience reach and the average time spent listening to the station would not be materially affected by the change
• Impact on others: the Trust examined how any increase in time spent listening to Asian Network might affect commercial radio stations and concluded, on the basis of examining the current listening habits of the Asian Network audience, that these would not be likely to have any major impact on commercial stations, including Asian radio stations.

• Financial impact, novelty and duration were not major factors in the Trust’s decision: the proposed changes would not involve the BBC in a new area of activity. The financial implications are negligible and the proposed changes would be permanent

Having considered the change against each of these criteria, the Trust concluded that this did not constitute a significant change to the BBC’s UK public services and that a public value test was not required before taking a decision on this matter.

The Trust has amended the service licence for Asian Network by removing the commitment within its remit that "programming should be provided in a range of South Asian languages." It has also removed the condition that Asian Network should "provide at least 20 hours of language programming each week."