The forming parties want to make significant cuts to the NPO, but how expensive is public broadcasting really?

The forming parties want to make significant cuts to the NPO, but how expensive is public broadcasting really?

Insight into every euro, that was the idea at the NPO in 2019. It was already known at the time that the public broadcaster had insufficient insight into the expenditure of public money. Think of exorbitant salaries of presenters, inflated production costs due to constructions with outside producers and a lost relationship between program costs and performance. But after the Court of Audit published the report ‘Hilversum in Beeld’ in 2019, the NPO definitively adopted the idiom of the Hague accountants. Since then, the following has been true: sensible, economical and careful.

The NPO recently explained to the House of Representatives that broadcasters and outdoor producers now have to propose programs. In the MediaModule system, ‘uniform program budgets’ are ‘linked to cost accounting’. In the case of “deviations between budget and realization”, clarification is requested by the NPO. “All data and indicators are available at program and genre level through an extensive dashboard” and “cost bandwidths have been developed that make benchmarking possible.” In short, everything is assessed against the financial bar.

Efficiency has thus become a goal in itself. According to some makers, it has a suffocating effect. Director Roel van Broekhoven (73) recently broke in NRC the NPO bureaucracy that plagues ‘its’ VPRO. He quits. Van Broekhoven, VPRO editor-in-chief Sarah Sylbing noted in a response, “talks about the urge to control and from his maker’s perspective I can imagine something about that.” She made documentaries herself Guilty and Classes. “The frameworks are tighter,” she writes.

Three important amounts

Can it be even tighter? That will have to be the case if the four forming parties (PVV, NSC, VVD, BBB) find each other in the middle. A cutback of 200 to 300 million euros is hanging over the formation table. That is not too bad in the light of the efforts of the two largest parties at the negotiating table, namely PVV (get rid of the NPO) and VVD (400 million in cuts).

But what does the NPO actually cost? The figures regularly lead to confusion, but one thing is certain: public broadcasting is more expensive every year.

Roughly three amounts are important in the discussion. First of all, the total costs of the NPO and everything that falls under it, including the thirteen broadcasters. In 2023 this was 1.1 billion euros. Then there is the contribution from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the ‘OCW contribution’, which funds the performance of their public task. This was 935 million euros in 2023. The fact that the NPO spends more than the ministry finances is possible due to a number of NPO activities. For example, the subscription fees for the video service NPO Plus.

Then there is the third amount: the part of that contribution from the ministry that is actually tax money. Because the government’s contribution to national public broadcasting consists of approximately 15 percent of advertising revenues that the NPO has also earned itself, as it were. The STER, which operates the advertising space on public channels, first transfers the proceeds to the ministry, which then distributes this money across the (public) media landscape. When everything is peeled back, the NPO will cost around 800 million euros in taxpayers’ money in 2023.

The various variables are sometimes used to portray the NPO as more expensive than it is. BBB MP Mona Keijzer said in the SBS program last month Orange summer that the public broadcaster costs 1.2 billion euros. However, this amount concerns the total contribution of the government to public media, including local and regional channels (170 million) and the Institute for Sound and Vision (30 million). Here too, the STER revenues (2023: 175 million euros) are part of this contribution.

In fact, the NPO is one of the cheaper public broadcasters in Europe. In Hilversum, administrators like to look at international research from the EBU, the association of European public broadcasters, which shows that Dutch citizens pay less for public broadcasting than in many other European countries. But sometimes apples and oranges are compared. For example, the Swiss broadcaster broadcasts in four languages ​​and the BBC is a global institution, so it is logical that they are more expensive. “We have not been able to determine to what extent the EBU research corrects for these types of differences,” the Court wrote.

So you should mainly compare the NPO with the NPO. When the government made the forecast for the next five years on Budget Day in 2019, it was estimated that the ministry’s structural contribution to the NPO would be less than 800 million euros in 2024. In reality, as emerged from the NPO’s budget request for 2024 last autumn, this will rise to 950 million (not including incidental expenditure on registration of ‘super events’ of 18 million). Of course, most of this is due to inflation. The main causes are legally guaranteed compensation for price increases.

It is clear that the NPO had an excellent manager in the last two Rutte cabinets: there was no cutbacks. Although the possibilities for advertising were limited, the ministry compensated this (structurally) with 40 million euros. In the meantime, STER income has never really suffered, allowing the NPO to expand.

Director of the STERFrank Volmer If you don’t broadcast football, you affect the earning capacity of the STER. You must remain able to reach a large and diverse audience.

Frank Volmer, director of the STER, thinks that a reduction of 200 million euros can be possible and still offer a high-quality offering. But, he says, the STER must be given the opportunity to get more money from the market to compensate the budget. Currently, only public benefit institutions are allowed to advertise on the NPO’s online channels. Volmer thinks that breaking this open could generate tens of millions for commercial parties. The Public Broadcasting Advisory Board, the Van Geel Committee, also advised the State Secretary last year to lift this restriction.

Also crucial, says Volmer, is that sports and entertainment remain part of the public offering. “If you don’t broadcast football, you affect the earning capacity of the STER. You must remain able to reach a large and diverse audience.”

Keijzer (BBB) ​​recently sided with market parties RTL and Talpa in the House of Representatives (see inset), when she was critical of the Van Geel report and its advice to revalue entertainment as a public task. “We rightly hear from the commercial broadcasters that there is unfair competition,” Keijzer said. “Certainly when it becomes possible to increase STER contributions to public broadcasters. The commercial broadcasters are of course fishing in the same pond.”

According to Volmer, “the commercial people are lobbying themselves to exhaustion”, but politicians should not listen to that. Give a clear budgetary target, “and then leave it to the NPO and the broadcasters themselves to see where they can do with less. But as a politician, stay out of substantive programming and do not insist on one less channel.” He thinks that there is a lot to be gained from efficiency: an NPO-wide human resources and ICT departments, and the consolidation of “management layers and staffs” at the NPO.

Where can the knife go?

The NPO is the governing body itself, which in fact produces nothing but only organizes it. About 150 million will go there. Another 100 million will go towards the organizational costs of the broadcasters. A quarter of the costs are spent on organizing the NPO, according to annual reports from 2018 to 2022 and budgets for 2023 and 2024.

Broadcasting directors hesitate to make their own suggestions about what the knife can do. What else is responsible? And when is it at the expense of quality? Do you go to football with fourteen cameras, or with seven? From how many places can you beat Remembrance Day? Everything can be done with less, says a former broadcaster who does not want his name in the newspaper. “But you do get a different product.”

Jan Slagter of Omroep MAX also thinks that there is a lot to be gained from a tighter NPO organization, he said last month in A.D. He also believes that the sports offering outside the European Championships and World Cups and summaries of the Premier League should be revised. But that is where complexity takes its revenge, because it is unclear what can be gained from this in the short term. The NOS has already secured the rights for the Summer and Winter Games until 2032. European football has been broadcast by commercials for years.

Scrapping a channel, as NSC suggests in its election manifesto? Opposite the Telegraph EO director Arjan Lock recently seemed prepared to sacrifice youth channel NPO3. But that is more nuanced. Lock, also chairman of the College of Broadcasters, now believes in “a shift from the budget for television to online content if necessary”, if that is necessary to reach young people.

Director Lonneke van der Zee of BNNVARA believes that politics “should remain at a great distance”, she says. “You would almost believe that this is a substantial expenditure for the government, while it amounts to 0.2 percent of total government expenditure. Then you can only conclude that this is symbolic politics.”

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According to Van der Zee, quitting NPO3 “hardly results in any savings”, while there is a risk that young people will no longer be reached. A BBC model, in which pluralism is not arranged through broadcasters but through programming within one broadcaster, also “sounds very elegant, but is not well thought out.” The independent broadcasters in particular “ensure that topics are highlighted from diverse perspectives,” says Van der Zee. “That makes our system so rich.”

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