Plans to sell off the headquarters of BBC Monitoring and cut nearly a third of its staff would put open-source intelligence-gathering at risk and “is the height of folly”, an influential committee of MPs has warned.
BBC Monitoring, based at Caversham Park in Reading, translates and analyses foreign broadcasts and other open-source material including social media, magazines and papers, mainly for the British government.
However, the corporation plans to save £4 million a year by cutting 100 of its 320 staff in the UK and relocating workers to central London.
In a highly critical report published yesterday, the defence select committee warned that when East-West relations were at a new low it was absurd to dismantle such an important source of intelligence gathering.
Julian Lewis, the committee’s chairman, said the organisation was to open-source intelligence what Bletchley Park was to secret intelligence. It was “one of the few tools still left in the government’s arsenal which can provide almost real-time information and analysis on global developments”, he said.
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The committee is particularly critical of the proposal to break the physical link between the monitoring unit and Open Source Enterprise, its US equivalent, which is run by the American intelligence services in the same building.
Under the present arrangement the Americans gather 75 per cent of the foreign material while the UK covers 25 per cent and they swap the information received.
Mr Lewis believes that the BBC is trying to break up the monitoring service, which costs £25 million a year, because it thinks it should not be providing an intelligence gathering service for the government.
The committee recommends that the government reinstate the previous model of funding through a ring-fenced grant rather than allowing it to come from the licence fee.
Several military chiefs also expressed their concern in evidence to the defence committee. Air Marshal (Rtd) Christopher Nickols, a former chief of defence intelligence, said that BBC Monitoring was absolutely key to providing defence intelligence with indicators and warnings because it covered areas in more detail than other agencies. Often it was the only information available.
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The BBC pointed out that the government had already approved its plans to sell Caversham Park but it admitted that it had not finalised where all the staff would be relocated.
A spokesman said: “The media landscape has changed vastly since the creation of BBC Monitoring in the 1930s, and we believe our planned restructure is vital to equip us for a world in which digital skills are far more important than physical location.”
The spokesman said it would honour the 2010 agreement, when the cost of the service was handed to the licence-fee payer, but that it would offer additional services if the government agreed to fund them directly.
