The BBC is to cut a further 1,700 jobs and freeze senior manager pay and bonuses for ‘top talent’ in an effort to save £400m and protect the programmes and services it offers, the organisation’s director-general, Mark Thompson announced yesterday.
Speaking at the Changing Media Summit in London, Thompson said that despite already cutting 7,200 jobs in the past four years, the BBC must now undergo a “bigger programme of restructuring and redundancy”.
This week, journalists at the BBC have also voted in favour of two national one-day strikes against compulsory redundancies, with the most urgent threat of compulsory cuts at the World Service’s South Asian section where up to 20 jobs are at risk.
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Jeremy Dear, the union’s general secretary, said: “Once again NUJ members at the BBC have shown they will not accept compulsory redundancies.”
He added: “Journalists at the South Asian services have been fighting a heroic struggle against the outsourcing of their jobs, which will sacrifice editorial independence. Now they have the weight of thousands of NUJ members at the BBC behind them.”
