Anne Bulford’s speech to the Media & Telecoms Conference

Speech by Anne Bulford, Deputy Director-General of the BBC to the Media & Telecoms Conference on Thursday 8 March 2018.

It’s a pleasure to be here today. I’m particularly pleased to have the opportunity to speak on International Women’s Day.

The BBC has been under the spotlight on gender and equality issues in recent months.

We have been working tremendously hard as an organisation to address the issues raised, and to meet the truly ambitious, long-term goals we have set ourselves.

We face challenges, and we have plenty to do to be the exemplar we want to be. But we’re determined to get there. We are making progress. Just today, there are a whole range of dedicated events happening in our locations across the country, designed specifically to support more women to make more progress more quickly. And I’m proud of what we’re doing – day-in, day-out across our output to represent the whole country and help make the UK a better, fairer place.

But today I want to focus on another, hugely important issue. It’s one with serious implications for the whole of the industry in this country. And this film, I think, gets to the heart of it…

What that film brings home to me – I hope it does to you – is not just the incredible quality and range of what we do at the BBC. It also serves to highlight just how important it is for our audiences to be able to watch content that is original, distinctive, and – above all – British.

This is what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about some of the seismic changes we are seeing in our industry. And I want to focus on what they mean for the BBC, for the future of British content as a whole, and how all of us need to respond.

For the full speech see: Anne Bulford’s speech to the Media & Telecoms Conference