IT looks like a down-at-heel food depot surrounded by a car park that stretches to the new Westfield shopping centre rising up over Shepherds Bush in west London. But looking out from the window of her new office at the other side of bustling Wood Lane, BBC finance director Zarin Patel sees only opportunity.

Combined with Television Centre, already slated for sale, and the dilapidated home of BBC Worldwide, with its views of the Hammersmith flyover, the BBC is sitting on one of the capital’s largest brownfield development sites.

With input from other landowners, including Marks & Spencer, property group Helical Bar and assorted pension funds, a blueprint of what the 43-acre area could look like is being drawn up by Jones Lang Lasalle, the property services firm.

“If we can pull this off, it could become an amazing regeneration,” said Patel. Simplifying the corporation’s buildings is top of her priority list in the run-up to 2012 — when 1,600 staff will have moved north to Salford, and Broadcasting House will be reopened after a £600m refit.

Plenty of offers have already come in to buy Television Centre, some from Japan and Germany. It is expected to raise no more than £100m, however, because it is in such poor condition and needs an asbestos clean-up before it can be developed, probably into flats and leisure venues. Surrounding land could increase that to boost the corporation’s coffers by £300m.

Patel insisted that the BBC had “caught up” on a £20m overspend at Grade II-listed Broadcasting House — attributed to enhancements such as new technology for its Arabic service — by vacating surplus property nearby.

It is abandoning Marylebone High Street, home of BBC London, and selling Elstree studios, where EastEnders is made. In all, the corporation is quitting 30% of its property over six years.

After that, Patel will turn her attention to the BBC’s production outposts around the world and 46 regional radio stations to see where savings can be made. That could lead to a “hub and spoke” set-up with larger regional centres surrounded by small satellite radio studios.

Three years into the job, Patel’s role is very different from that of a FTSE 100 finance director. Having no real bottom line and a reliable top line means she could just sit back and watch the £3.2 billion-a-year licence fee wash through into programming, star salaries and property until it runs out. With many of her commercial rivals suffering from falling advertising income, it is an enviable position.

The only trouble is that it is difficult to gauge what constitutes value for money in the BBC’s output. Critics, who rail at the spending on little-watched digital channels, legions of online staff and giant taxi bills, may think efficiency is a little-used word at White City.

Director-general Mark Thompson would disagree. He is axing 2,500 jobs, mainly in news and factual programming to make up for a licence-fee settlement that was £300m a year less than the BBC wanted.

Patel, the main business brain in the organisation, is eyeing savings elsewhere. She has already had some success. Spending on BBC overheads was 11.5% of programming expenditure last year, down from 24% seven years ago. Her target is to find 3% of annual efficiencies, giving Thompson the freedom to send a planeload of journalists to cover the Beijing Olympics if he wants to.

With six weeks to go until the end of a three-year period in which the BBC promised to make £355m of annual cost savings, Patel is £15m ahead. Much of it came from property and switching a TV licence sales contract from the Post Office to Paypoint. And there is more to come.

“The real challenge is that we are essentially a fixed-income business,” said Patel. “We have to make everything go further.”

That seems radical stuff for an organisation known better for spending than for saving. But Patel has been single-minded in carrying on the work of her predecessor John Smith by outsourcing non-core activities. Often unpopular with staff whose pensions have been hit, they have at least gone some way to giving the BBC more focus.

Currently on the block is BBC Resources, which includes studios, outside-broadcast trucks and a post-production unit. Patel admitted that “the current climate makes it tricky” to sell anything, but she is hopeful of getting it done by April.

The disposal, held up by union concerns, is the last of the present round that has led to 45% of the BBC’s activities being outsourced.

In 2004, Siemens bought the BBC’s technology arm and gained a plum contract to provide IT desktop support. Red Bee Media, the rebadged BBC Broadcast, is now in private-equity hands. It handles trailers and subtitling.

Now Patel is looking at the second generation of those contract renewals. The BBC spends £1.3 billion with outside suppliers. Stripping out independent programme makers, this equates to £1 billion split between eight contractors. Patel would ideally reduce that to five and thinks Siemens, Red Bee and others should pitch as a joint venture for a great swathe of digital back-up work next time they try to renew their contracts.

She also sent finance and accounting to a low-cost centre in India through an £85m deal with Xansa, the outsourcing firm. Patel regards this as something of a victory. “People told me I would never get anything offshored at the BBC,” she said. “I was delighted to prove them wrong.”

But Patel rules out sending the licence-fee collection contract overseas. That is currently in the hands of Capita, which was overlooked last week for another piece of BBC business. Patel opted for Eaga to handle the £500m job of helping the elderly and disabled switch to digital television before the analogue signal is turned off in 2012.

This year’s 3% licence-fee increase is cut to 1.4% once the cost of paying for the switchover programme is factored in and constitutes a fall after stripping out inflation.

No wonder Patel wants to drive down the cost of collecting the licence fee, which she was responsible for when she arrived from KPMG a decade ago.

Some 20% of payments are made online today, which she wants increased to 50% by the time Capita’s contract runs out in 2012. She wants direct-debit payments raised from 50% to 70%.

“Hardened evaders” are among the 5% who didn’t pay last year, but so are “urban professionals” moving homes regularly in London boroughs such as Camden, Hackney and Brixton, particularly those living in blocks of flats.

“The nature of the collection challenge has changed,” she said. Many people are chased by text message. A cash scheme to contribute as little as £2 a week — like the old stamps system — has 1.5m participants.

Patel is already throwing round ideas about licence-fee renewal next time round. The BBC weighed up the idea of trying to charge for high-definition services last time, but the cost of installing conditional access systems would have made it too expensive.

“It is right to think openly — and controversially, as well,” said Patel.

BBC NUMBERS

£3.2 billion: annual licence-fee revenue £111m: BBC Worldwide’s profits 8: the number of national television channels 10: national radio services 40: local radio stations 240: websites on bbc.co.uk 233m: the global audience for BBC news 33: the number of languages broadcast by the World Service 23,000: number of employees 2,500: number of jobs to be cut 124,000: viewer and listener complaints 20%: the proportion of BBC costs spent on rights and on-air talent, including . . . £171.6m: the cost of the four-year deal to broadcast Premiership football highlights £18m: Jonathan Ross’s three-year pay package

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