BBC Help

Why did I receive an automated, not personal, reply to my email that didn’t provide me with a specific answer to my question?

We get asked thousands of enquiries every month on a very wide range of topics and some are very specific so we regret we cannot promise to research and answer them all. Many others are often about the same issues where information may already be online, or where we either don't have a specific answer yet, or would have to spend a lot of time researching the answers. In some cases we regret we may not be able to help you.

The BBC is committed to ensuring that as much of the Licence Fee as possible is spent on making programmes to provide best value to our audiences, and this is why we can't always undertake to use resources to research individual answers to the many enquiries we receive. We hope you understand the reasons for this.

To help us respond to all email enquiries we therefore send pre-written automated responses to the most commonly asked questions people ask. These may be able to point to where you can find more specific information online. Our response is based on how we categorise the enquiry after we've read it, and means that we can report the nature and type of information people are requesting to programme teams to encourage better information to be published on our programme websites.

We aim to make as much information as possible available on our website because we know information about our programmes is important to our audience. We make the most requested information available, and in many cases our response will point you to where it can be found, but in practice it's impossible for us to answer everything that people ask us about.

We created our FAQ site a few years ago to help answer many of the frequently asked questions we receive, and we keep this site as up-to-date and as relevant as we can. We monitor what we're being asked on a daily basis and use this to add new FAQs or amend existing answers.

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