The broadcaster has agreed to archive 11,000 recipes from its website as part of savings intended to stop it competing with newspapers

Approximately 11,000 online recipes are to be dropped following a review of the BBC’s online output that promises to save £15m a year by cutting back on magazine-style content as well as local news.

The recipes are being “archived or mothballed”, a source said, and will “fall off the face of the internet” after the food site is closed.

The broadcaster will archive the recipes on its food site although recipes from television shows will remain online for a 30-day period after transmission and the plans will not affect commercial services such as BBC Good Food. Other text-based online offerings are also expected to be hit. A number of travel articles are also expected to be taken offline.

Although the recipes will still exist online they will be hard to find. One BBC source said: “The website will be closed and viewers will have to make a concerted effort to access the archive.”

In an announcement due to be made to staff on Tuesday, the BBC will promise a more “focused and distinctive service” with a number of well-known services either closed or scaled down over the next 12 months.

Tuesday’s announcement comes after a bruising battle with the government over the BBC’s market impact, which resulted in last week’s white paper. Although it was widely considered to be better than expected for the BBC, the corporation is responding to comments made by George Osborne, the chancellor, last summer in which he said the BBC was being “imperial in its ambitions” by expanding into content such as recipes.

A BBC insider said the changes were an attempt to focus on distinctive content online, an adjective to be added to the corporation’s mission statement.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest BBC food recipes website front screengrab Photograph: BBC food

“While our audiences expect us to be online, we have never sought to be all things to all people and the changes being announced will ensure that we are not,” he said. “These changes won’t be popular with all members of the public, but we think they are the right thing to do.”

Rumoured plans of cuts to the recipe site have already prompted chef Jack Monroe to promise to post recipes online as a public benefit. In a Facebook post last week, Monroe wrote: “I learned to cook on the dole using free recipes online and for the BBC to reduce this vital service is an abomination.”

A separate review of the BBC news channels is expected to outline several options, including a possible merger.

At a meeting later on Tuesday for all staff James Harding, the director of BBC news and current affairs, is expected to say that no decision on the three channels – BBC News, Parliament and World - will be taken until the summer. One option could be merging the 24-hour news service with the BBC World service, for example.

The online creative review, which was launched last autumn by Harding, is expected to outline six key areas of “distinctive public service content” online.



These, broadly, are impartial and accurate news, live sport coverage and sport news, the “best of arts and culture, history and science” pulled together in a new “ideas service”, educational services such as BBC Bitesize, entertainment offered through BBC iPlayer, and national events such as royal weddings.

Given the focus on online news, the announcement is not expected to cover the future of the BBC News channel or the closure of any particular show.

However, director general, Tony Hall, a former news executive, believed that news should be at the heart of the BBC’s offering and will fight against plans to curtail it significantly.

Tuesday’s announcement will confirm plans outlined in the white paper to overhaul the BBC’s local news pages so that stories provided by other news organisations can be linked to, for example.

Earlier this year, BBC news announced that it was looking to make £80m in savings over the next four years as the corporation tries to save £550m a year by 2021-22. The £15m saved from the online creative review is in addition to the annual savings.

In an interview last July before the funding settlement with the BBC, Osborne indicated that the licence-fee-funded BBC should not be allowed to crowd out newspaper competition.

“If you’ve got a website that’s got features and cooking recipes – effectively the BBC website becomes the national newspaper as well as the national broadcaster. There are those sorts of issues we need to look at very carefully,” he said.

“You wouldn’t want the BBC to completely crowd out national newspapers. If you look at the BBC website it is a good product but it is becoming a bit more imperial in its ambitions.”

The BBC has fought back by pointing out that online competition is now global; it accounts for about 4.5% of UK adults’ time online compared with Facebook’s 20%.