BBC To Pay £5.6M for Staff Move to Bristol

[Teddy Bear]

At best, the BBC can make the excuse for taking the decision to move studios and some staff from London to Salford, for the cost of at least £1Billion, in that it was made before the 'cuts' were imposed.

Given the contentiousness of this decision, as well as the surrounding problems that have developed since this decision, you'd think that the BBC would avoid getting into further costs and difficulties by repeating such a venture.

At least you'd think so if the BBC was a responsible and conscientious organisation, in which case this site for one wouldn't exist.

BBC to pay out £5.6million for ANOTHER staff move from Birmingham to Bristol

By Paul Revoir

The BBC is facing a bill of up to £5.6million to cover the cost of relocating and making redundant staff as a result of a decision to move staff from Birmingham to Bristol.

Bosses have decided to move TV shows like Gardener’s World, Countryfile, The Sky At Night and Hairy Bikers along with radio shows such as Farming Today, from the second city to the west country, in a bid to put more of its factual shows in one place.

Critics have accused the BBC of weakening Birmingham as a major presence in its programme-making leaving it with The Archers and daytime drama Doctors as well as regional shows and The Asian Network radio service.

The expenditure on the move comes on top of the corporation’s bill of nearly £200million to move major part of its operations and workforce to Salford.

Staff moving from London to the north have enjoyed generous relocation packages, which has seen rental assistance or help in buying new houses.

About 140 roles are affected by the plans to shift jobs to Bristol, with up to 80 of them being given the offer of a deal to relocate and the rest set to be made redundant.

According to a Freedom of Information report seen by industry magazine Broadcast, the broadcaster is facing a bill of £4million if its target for relocating staff is met.

But this figure increases to considerably more if significant numbers refuse to make the 90-mile move and choose to take made redundancy. Another £230,000 is expected to go on dual running costs.

These figures also do not include the £2.2million a year lease the BBC has at The Mailbox premises, which has a no-break clause until 2026.

This raises the prospect of the BBC spending millions on a building that will be under-used.

But the BBC said it may move other parts of the BBC to the Mailbox offices in the future.

The FOI response said: ‘Birmingham is one of the smallest bases, and most susceptible to job losses through single commissioning decisions, and too small to justify the significant investment in technologies that will drive efficiencies elsewhere.’

The BBC said: ‘Although the move from Birmingham to Bristol is a creative and business decision aimed at securing the long term future of in-house factual production, the net present value of the financial benefit of integration is £2,672,385 to the end of the financial year 2016/17.’

[cherenkov]

I suppose you could say that BBC Bristol with it's Natural History global supremacy (the only reason I still pay the licence) is based there already, so it might conceivably be justified if some of their almost consistent excellence rubbed off on the others on arrival.

However the move to Salford is likely to, if not already, have the opposite effect. Everyone with talent and ambition, presumably the kind of people the BBC want to attract and hold on to will wish to remain based in London, one of the great TV and entertainment centres of the world, as per LA and New York. They will not see a move to a cultural backwater they've possibly never even heard of before, called Salford, as being advantageous for their careers, however much they would like to add a stint at the BBC to their CV.

The big gainers will be ITV, Sky, Channel 4, Five.....

Eventually will come failure and the ignominious return to the hub. When will the BBC start coming to terms with the true nature of human beings and start realising their staff shouldn't be treated like pawns in their political machinations, and realise that the licence payers have a right to expect them to be politically neutral and not the fawning, craven puppy dogs of the Old/New/Same as Same as- Labour Party!

[Teddy Bear]

The big gainers will be ITV, Sky, Channel 4, Five.....

Not to mention Hazel Blears, the Labour MP whose constituency the BBC now occupy there.

"Something is rotten in the state of Salford"

[cherenkov]

The relationship between the Labour party and the BBC, under the auspices of the TUC, is the single biggest threat to UK democracy, not to mention the prosperity, or lack of, of future generations for a century, at least, to come.

Why the government does not address this disgrace is regrettable but understandable. So undermined in their credibility have they come to believe they have been made by the BBC and their fellow-traitors, that they believe that the public have fallen for the corporation's anti-government garbage dished up as political neutrality.

I think they are wrong. I have come to see, because of my career, that the people of this country are still not nearly as stupid and gullible as the BBC/Labour/TUC/C of E Alliance so desperately have tried to make us.

This, I hope with all my heart, will be the year that the above realise that their decades of trying to turn us into compliant intellectual cabbage equivalents hasn't worked.

They are certainly going to huff and puff, and even though it will cost the UK billions I confess part of me hopes that the tossers will be stupid enough to use their 'trade union power' to wreck the Olympic Games. Politics by then will be irrelevant, we ALL will know who to blame.