BBC has ruined its coverage of business

The BBC’s Today programme is supposed to be the epitome of serious news. So no wonder eyebrows were raised yesterday when the lead item on its flagship radio show was an interview with a disgraced TV presenter about his secret love affair.

There was particular astonishment among veteran journalists that Amol Rajan’s sit-down with a self-pitying Phillip Schofield trumped coverage of the Government’s decision to go to war with a judge heading its Covid inquiry.

Listeners were equally horrified. One tweeted: “When did Radio 4 turn into Hello! magazine? The Phillip Schofield story isn’t worthy of the

Today programme, never mind its key headlines … demise of genuine news BBC is fast and furious.”

Another simply said: “Radio 4 Today news leading on someone called

Phillip Schofield – RIP Today.”

It is further evidence – if any were needed – of the fierce struggle taking place between the traditional values of the BBC and what it deems to be stories of relevance. Put another way – what really matters versus creating noise.

This same battle is behind its shocking downgrading of business coverage. The seeds of this demise go back to a massive shake-up of the BBC in 2021 that saw entire teams moved out of London to cities across Britain as part of its own version of levelling up.

The climate and science team was relocated to Cardiff; Radio 1’s Newsbeat reporters ended up in Birmingham. My personal favourite was the decision to base its technology coverage in Glasgow. A great city, no doubt – but hardly a pre-eminent tech hub.

The business team was sent to Salford, which, with the best will in the world, is not the centre of the business world, as rebelling BBC journalists pointed out at the time. In a letter to the then chairman, the Boris Johnson ‘When did Radio 4 turn into Hello! magazine? The story isn’t worthy of Today’ loan facilitator Richard Sharp, furious staff called the move “ridiculous”, expressing “deep concerns” that the quality of the coverage would suffer.

Their main fear – quite rightly – was that by moving 200 miles away from “the world’s pre-eminent financial centre” they would be “starved of access” to the key movers and shakers. In the end, many – some among the BBC’s best – chose to quit.

It is now clear – just two years later – that the rebels were right. The move has been a disaster. For anyone with a serious interest in business, the Today programme at 6am is the only way to start the day. When I started out as a young reporter nearly 20 years ago, I recall one colleague chastising another for missing it on one occasion. It “sets the agenda”, she reminded him sternly.

Sadly, that’s not the case any more. These days, the BBC’s business coverage is shallow at best, summed up somewhat unfortunately by a tweet from Rajan of an internal document that listed the senior staff who had contributed to the broadcast that day. The names of both the business presenter and producer were blank.

One veteran business journalist responded despairingly that sister show Wake up to Money had been reduced to little more than a

“magazine show” with “no serious coverage of markets, big business or economics” and “no serious guests”.

At Today serious questions can be a struggle, too. Only this week, listeners were treated to a soft interview with telecoms tycoon Sir Charles Dunstone, as he neared a deal to save estate agents Purplebricks from oblivion.

The Carphone Warehouse founder was asked whether he was “worried” about “a difficult time for the housing market” – an understatement, given that mortgage lending has collapsed to the lowest monthly level on record, and valuations are falling at the fastest rate in 14 years. A better question would have been whether he was worried about the fate of Purplebricks.

There was no mention of the rival bidder that pulled out the day before after discovering its finances were “significantly worse than expected”.

Outright bloopers are becoming commonplace, it seems. In the same programme, a lobbyist for the space industry claimed it supports 18pc of UK GDP. This was an “extraordinary figure”, Justin Webb remarked – so extraordinary that it was wrong. It took a text from business editor Simon Jack to prompt a correction.

Next up was Anne Boden, founder of Starling Bank. Allowing women to run the same number of companies as men could add £250bn to GDP she told Martha Kearney, who responded that it was a “huge sum of money”. “Implausible” would have been more appropriate.

At such a critical time for Britain and the economy, the BBC appears to have all but abdicated its responsibility for covering business properly. With audience levels for the breakfast news show at their lowest since 1999, the BBC’s director-general Tim Davie must intervene before it’s too late.