The BBC is planning to open a new tech hub in Newcastle as part of a wider plan to ensure two-thirds of its staff are based outside of London by 2027, its director general has said.

Tony Hall announced the plan for the new hub in the north-east of England on Wednesday to develop the technology that underpins the iPlayer and BBC Sounds services it hopes will lure young audiences back to the broadcaster. At the moment about half of the BBC’s staff are employed in the capital, suggesting the corporation intends to move around 3,000 roles out of the capital in the coming years.

The decision to use Hall’s start-of-year speech to emphasise increased regional spending chimes with the Conservative government’s pledge to “level up” parts of the country by pushing institutions to move jobs outside London.

Hall said Newcastle is “a city looking for fresh ideas, collaboration and innovation, with two highly successful universities and a digital cluster growing faster than any area outside London”. He pledged to hire a new group of software engineers, designers, product developers and data scientists to develop streaming services in the BBC’s existing Newcastle office, although senior technology managers are likely to remain in London and the corporation did not confirm how many developers will be based in the north.

The director general also trailed other investment outside of London, which will see the production arm BBC Studios boost staffing levels at its natural history unit in Bristol, while more BBC Sounds staff will move from London to Salford to work with the service’s newly appointed controller Jonathan Wall.

The BBC is facing a battle with the government to secure its financial future after an election campaign that saw the corporation’s news output battered by accusations of bias from all sides of the political spectrum. Although the existence of the licence fee funding model is guaranteed for the next seven years, BBC executives are already looking ahead to the forthcoming negotiations with the government which will set the amount it can charge for the licence fee from 2022 onwards.

In addition, after the Conservatives’ landslide victory, ministers commissioned a review that will look at decriminalising non-payment of the licence fee and turning it into a civil offence. Previous studies have concluded that such a move could cost the BBC hundreds of millions of pounds of funding due to increased non-payment by members of the public.

During the election campaign Boris Johnson said he did not intend to abolish the licence fee but suggested it was increasingly anachronistic, telling an audience in Washington that “you have to ask yourself whether that kind of approach to funding a TV media organisation still makes sense in the long term given the way other media organisations manage to fund themselves”.

Since returning to power, the Conservatives have pulled ministers from political shows such as the Today programme, while prioritising more general interest programmes such as BBC Breakfast.

Hall also told staff on Wednesday that he wanted to double the BBC’s global audience to a billion people every week by 2030, with a suggestion that ministers could provide extra funding to help the broadcaster expand around the world: “The previous government backed the World Service with new funding, and I look forward to working with this government too.”

He also pledged a year of stories focused on the climate crisis in the run-up to the Glasgow climate conference. He said: “Nobody has done more than the BBC to highlight the challenges of climate change,” and promised to look at ways to make the corporation carbon neutral.