BBC set to shed 12% of workforce

The BBC is poised to cut at least 12 per cent of its workforce, with the brunt of more than 2,000 redundancies falling on factual programming, senior staff have been told. The final tally of job losses, which will have to be approved by the BBC Trust, could approach 2,800, according to one person familiar with the situation.

Mark Thompson, the corporation’s director-general, is seeking cuts amounting to 6 per cent of its £3bn-plus annual budget over each of the next five years. A below-inflation licence fee settlement in January left him £2bn short of the funds he had sought for the period.

Somehow they'll have to struggle on with just 20,000 employees and a paltry £2,820,000,000+ next year. And we might have to cope with the loss of things like, erm, BBC4, (annual budget: £46.8, million, mission: "An ambitious range of innovative high-quality output that is intellectually and culturally enriching", audience share: 0.4 per cent) and it's marvellous innovative and high-quality productions such as, Armando Iannucci's Time Trumpet. Somehow I'll think we'll survive.

I'm a supporter of the BBC but when any large organisation is handed billions of pounds every year which it doesn't need to earn you have a recipe for waste and extravagance. But why does the brunt of the job cuts fall on factual programming? Why can't cuts be made accross the board? There isn't an organisation in the world where you couldn't find 6 completely redundant employees in every 100.