Zarin Patel at the BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) group finance director (GFD) has been much in the news lately. On the job since December 2004, Zarin Patel is a member of the BBC’s executive board, reporting to director-general Mark Thompson. and a governor of the University of Arts in London. As GFD she has been credited with whittling down the BBC’s enormous expenses by outsour­cing and job cuts, by finding ways of getting its large audience to pay up its license fees as well as by selling off useless assets. Needless to say that while her approach is said to have raised the BBC’s efficiency levels her personal popularity with those affected has taken a beating.

The latest in a slew of reports is one from The Sunday Times (February 17, 2008) titled "Swingeing cuts create leaner BBC.” "It looks like a down-at-heel food depot surrounded by a car park that stretches to the new Westfield shopping center rising up over Shepherds Bush in west London. But looking out from the window of her new office at the other side of bustling Wood Lane, BBC finance director Zarin Patel sees only opportunity,” writes James Ashton. "Combined with Television Centre, already slated for sale, and the dilapidated home of BBC Worldwide, with its views of the Hammersmith flyover, the BBC is sitting on one of the capital’s largest brownfield development sites,” he notes. The Television Centre is said to have received offers from Germany and Japan and along with the surrounding land may increase the BBC’s coffers by upto £ 300 million, assesses Ashton. "If we can pull this off, it could become an amazing regeneration,” Patel told him.

Zarin Patel: regenerating BBC funds

Simplifying the corporation’s buildings is top of her priority list in the run-up to 2012 — when 1,600 staff will have moved north to Salford, and Broadcasting House will be reopened after a £ 600 m refit, he writes.

"It is abandoning Marylebone High Street, home of BBC London, and selling Elstree studios, where EastEnders is made. In all, the corporation is quitting 30 percent of its property over six years. After that, Patel will turn her attention to the BBC’s production outposts around the world and 46 regional radio stations to see where savings can be made. That could lead to a ‘hub and spoke’ set-up with larger regional centers surrounded by small satellite radio studios.

"Three years into the job, Patel’s role is very different from that of a FTSE 100 finance director,” writes Ashton of the lady who joined BBC after a stint at global accountancy firm KPMG. "With many of her commercial rivals suffering from falling advertising income, it is an enviable position. The only trouble is that it is difficult to gauge what constitutes value for money in the BBC’s output. Critics, who rail at the spending on little-watched digital channels, legions of online staff and giant taxi bills, may think efficiency is a little-used word at White City.

"Director-general Mark Thompson would disagree. He is axing 2,500 jobs, mainly in news and factual programming to make up for a licence-fee settlement that was £ 300 m a year less than what the BBC wanted.

"Patel, the main business brain in the organization, is eyeing savings elsewhere. She has already had some success. Spending on BBC overheads was 11.5 percent of programming expenditure last year, down from 24 percent seven years ago. Her target is to find 3 percent of annual efficiencies, giving Thompson the freedom to send a planeload of journalists to cover the Beijing Olympics if he wants to.

"With six weeks to go until the end of a three-year period in which the BBC promised to make £ 355 m of annual cost savings, Patel is £ 15 m ahead. Much of it came from property and switching a TV licence sales contract from the Post Office to Paypoint. And there is more to come,” notes Ashton.