Kate Lamble is not a household name like Emily Maitlis or Andrew Marr, other former BBC journalists. Having risen through the ranks of specialist science journalism, Lamble has never presented a primetime show. For the past seven years, Lamble has covered the Grenfell Tower inquiry – listening to hours and hours of often heartbreaking testimony – until last week, two days after the inquiry published its final report, when she announced she had been made redundant and would be leaving the BBC.
Among more than 1,000 comments on her post on X, seen 1.5m times, was one from the survivors’ group Grenfell United. “It saddens us to see this huge error by the BBC, Kate has supported the Grenfell cause from the beginning and made our story more accessible to the public.” Lamble is understood to have decided to be “totally open” about her involuntary departure as she worried these people would think she had chosen to walk away.
The role of the media is far from central to Grenfell, but it is important – the tragedy was in large part about missed warnings and attention not being paid. Among the very many lessons to be learned, it seems that one – the importance of local and specialist journalism – has already been forgotten. And not just by commercial news outlets chasing ever-diminishing profits, and running from irrelevancy, but by Britain’s public broadcaster.
Lamble is just one of more than 100 journalists to leave the BBC since plans to save a further £500m from the BBC News budget were announced last November. The director-general, Tim Davie – who is being grilled today in parliament over Huw Edwards and the future of the BBC – said in March that the BBC needed to make annual savings of £700m a year following a decline in its income of about 30% between 2010 and 2020. Like the NHS – another complex organisation tasked with providing a universal service – fewer resources has meant “difficult decisions”.
The priority in news has been to try to follow audiences from broadcast TV, down 11% over five years, to digital. In essence, this has meant fewer investigative deep-dives in audio and TV, and more work online from BBC Verify. So more people to explain the line taken by that day’s news bulletins, more talking heads on a sofa – and fewer to spend years gaining the trust of traumatised people and understanding the technical details of cladding and local governance. A joke among her colleagues was that Lamble was the kind of journalist who could wear a T-shirt printed with: “I think you’ll find it’s more complicated than that.”
To be fair to the BBC, these decisions in an industry that is always undergoing change are not easy or straightforward. BBC management argues that TikTok videos on daily news are essential if it is to win over younger viewers, while Newsnight’s viewing figures have gone up since most of the journalists were sacked to make way for a debate show. But at the heart of this is an agenda that sees the news in simple “top-line” terms – often the same perspective as that taken by rivals – is less interested in stories that take time and effort to report.
The BBC has also been forced to make up for the failings of commercial news businesses running local newspapers – £8m a year of its licence fee is now used to fund 150 “local democracy” reporters, covering local politics, who are employed by regional news organisations. At the same time, the BBC has just announced a further 115 editorial and production job cuts in the regions and devolved nations, according to Press Gazette.
Speaking on the day the final Grenfell inquiry report was published, Ed Daffarn, a survivor and founder member of Grenfell United, told the BBC Radio 4 Media Show that the community had been “lucky” when he first started blogging in the hope-filled early days of the internet, because a local reporter for the Kensington & Chelsea Chronicle reported on their complaints about unsafe housing. The title was then closed down by Trinity Mirror in 2014, three years before the devastating fire, and, said Daffarn: “sadly … the focus on kind of very local issues was diluted, and we lost that ability to, even on a very local level, have our voice heard”.
At the start of party conference season, the BBC has highlighted the fact that previous Conservative governments have forced it to shoulder more of the cost of the World Service (which used to be funded by the Foreign Office) alongside the local democracy jobs. The latter comes as Davie announced a net loss of 500 jobs across all public service departments earlier this year, not just in news. The pressures that bear upon the organisation are real. But if management prioritises its commercial future at the expense of its public service present, who among us will remember what is so special and distinctive about the BBC? For all the well-known and well-paid presenters on BBC TV and radio, the heart of the BBC are the legions of lesser-known producers and fixers slogging away on relatively low salaries on stories that they think make a difference. We will miss them when they’ve gone.
Jane Martinson is a Guardian columnist
