[DTV]

I’ve never understood why the BBC is always so afraid to say services are closing because of budget cuts. Surely it helps the case for increasing the licence fee?

I suspect there's an element of overcautiousness at work here. The licence fee cuts are ultimately a government decision and so there might be a concern that being seen to 'regrettably' cut services due to budget cuts could be viewed as an implicit criticism of the cuts and thus government policy. It's definitely overthinking things, but is the sort of mad logic that often is involved in the BBC's attempts to avoid the government's ire.

Also, to be fair, favouring terms like 'finding efficiencies' and 'modernisation' over 'we have no money' is not an exclusively BBC thing. Organisations and companies will always try to put a positive/neutral spin on negative stories.