BBC funding cutbacks
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Apart from selling off Television Centre, the BBC is set to make 1800 staff redundant in its effort to plug a £2bn funding gap. It’ll be the invisibles who disappear, of course: not the big names.
But when you look at the numbers, that makes sense. You could argue that Jonathan Ross should go, on account of his £6m salary alone, but if you split that up among the 1800 set to lose their jobs, it equates to just £3333 a head.
Perhaps Graham Norton, then. Snipping him from the payroll would save a cool £2.5m and immediately improve the quality of the Beeb’s prime-time output.
But no - cutting the big names isn’t the way to make up a £2,000,000,000 shortfall. It’s such a staggering figure that it equates to £1.1m for each of those 1800 destined to lose their jobs, which is why more dramatic savings need to be made elsewhere.
Sadly the predicted increase in repeats is inevitable, and the sale of Television Centre will certainly help, but snipping the odd £6m here by canning Ross’s contract, or £800,000 by giving Wogan a permanent lie-in won’t do the trick. We’d have to lose 333 Ross salaries, 3703 of Chris Evans or 2000 Jeremy Paxmans to do that and, frankly, the BBC just doesn’t have that many of any of them.
So instead it should return to the policy of spending its money where it’s seen – on screen – and ask the top management to trim their own rewards instead. Looking at last year’s Annual Report and Accounts, the Board of just 16 people took home a total of £4,611,000 in salaries and bonuses, to which you can further add their pension contributions. Upper-limit management salaries just beneath these are not revealed, but it’s likely many are not far behind.
How they can call for job cuts lower down the chain and continue to take home these sky-high salaries is beyond most license payers’ comprehension.
Isn’t this where they should be looking to make the first savings?
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