NEARLY 2,000 jobs at the BBC are to be lost, with major cuts to sports and entertainment programme spending and local radio stations, as the corporation seeks to save £670 million a year over the next four years.
Three hundred managers will be made redundant, along with several hundred journalists – leading journalists to warn that strike action is inevitable.
“It’s obviously a really bad watershed moment for the BBC today and a really bad day for British journalism,” said National Union of Journalists general secretary Michelle Stanistreet.
Major cuts are to be made from 2013 to the BBC's 24-hour News Channel, according to internal BBC documents seen by The Irish Times, with cuts to business, sports and weather coverage, along with an end to having two presenters on air.
“We will at times cover fewer stories, or need to find other ways to report stories than we do at the moment. But the newsroom will still be very well resourced to focus on maintaining the quality of the coverage we provide on the main agenda of the day,” staff were told in an email.
BBC 2's daytime schedules will be largely filled by repeats, while BBC 3 and BBC 4 will face substantial cuts. Management says Radio 4 service will be the most protected. Though it will have less money for factual programmes and will broadcast more repeats, it will get money for high-profile projects like the A History of the World In 100 Objectsseries.
For Irish fans of Radio 4, however, the day when the BBC stops broadcasting the station on long wave has moved closer, though no precise date has been set.
Up to a quarter of all back-office staff will be sacked over the next four years, while 1,000 more will have to move to the BBC’s new operation in Salford in Manchester if they want to hold onto their jobs – though the northern location has proved already to be a deeply unpopular option for many based in London.
Despite calls by some, BBC director-general Mark Thompson opted to make savings across all operations, rather than closing particular divisions, such as the BBC 3 TV station.
However, the cuts to local radio services, with night-time programming going, and redundancies in all of them, could provoke a major backlash.
Defending the changes, the head of the BBC’s Trust, Lord Patten, said 90 per cent of local radio listeners were in the mornings, at “drive time” or in the evening: “It’s only when there isn’t a peak audience that we’re proposing sharing. At the end of the day, we have to find a way that the BBC can live within this budget.”
