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facility was operating. They had decided against advance publicity which ran the potential risk of provoking the SAG into taking some action to interfere with the project or the equipment, which had to be delivered through South Africa. On East Africa, the BBC outlined the difficulties associated with the Seychelles Government demand for a fee of £3.14m for a licence to receive the BBC satellite signal. The BBC were firmly resisting this unreasonable demand and hoped their compromise offer of £150,000 would be accepted. Meanwhile work on the project had stopped and unless this problem was resolved within the next few months it would be difficult to achieve the target for completion by the end of 1988. Mr Barrington said it was important to keep the FCO fully informed about this development in view of the bilateral political implications. Britain, the six new transmitters at Rampisham were now installed and running and all four new ones at Daventry should be running by the end of March. On Orfordness, the BBC explained the difficulty of the site, which had led to the higher than originally estimated construction costs recently given to the FCO. The BBC were considering alternative cheaper proposals for achieving the same transmission benefits by putting the Orfordness transmitters at other existing relay stations in Britain.
9.
In
Turning to longer term proposals, Mr Barrington referred to the FCO's continued interest in a medium wave signal to the Maghreb, but doubts about the effectiveness of a 50 kW transmitter in Gibraltar. The BBC confirmed they were looking into alternative ways of providing a good medium wave signal to the main population centres and would be giving the FCO further information in due course. On the Seychelles, the Prescription Committee had noted that the addition of two more transmitters would improve the flexibility of the relay station, but had decided that the time to consider this would be after the station was operating to assess its effectiveness. The Committee had agreed there was a good case for trying to improve audibility in the Indian Sub-Continent and the BBC were asked to work up a proposal with a view to this being a priority after 1991.
Other Points
10. On audience figures, Mr Barrington referred to the Committee's interest in receiving a breakdown of the External Services' estimated 120m regular listeners between the individual language services. The BBC agreed to provide this.
11. On Costs of Services, the BBC agreed to comment on the FCO's table of direct and indirect costs of individual vernacular services, but they pointed out the difficulty in apportioning indirect costs and their fundamental disagreement with the way in which the FCO had been allocating these costs to individual countries as part of a resource allocation exercise.
On the purchase of Bush House, the BBC said the discussions with Hambros Bank had not resulted in a realistic financial
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