As Director-General, Birt was tasked with securing the BBC's future at a time of rapid technical, cultural and economic changes in world broadcasting. In seven years, Birt restructured and modernised the corporation which he wanted to make "the best managed public sector organisation". Birt imposed a policy of radical change to deliver efficiency savings. In April 1993 he introduced Producer Choice, giving programme makers the power to buy services from outside the BBC. This theoretically reduced the cost to licence-payers of the BBC's historic resource base. Faced with high rental fees from the BBC's record library, producers found it cheaper to buy records from local record shops. In-house facilities were closed or stood idle, allegedly as a result of Birt's "creative accounting" methods.