Post by Teddy Bear on Apr 18, 2012 22:14:08 GMT
An excellent piece by Steve Doughty in the Daily Mail which covers the recent overpaid redundancy payments made by the Beeb, and which Carl posted here, and covers a few other points besides.
Thousands of redundancies later, and the BBC is still a bloated bureaucracy
By STEVE DOUGHTY
Readers of Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 will recollect that the super-capitalist character Milo Minderbinder is able to buy eggs in Malta for seven cents apiece and then sell them to his comrades at a profit for five cents.
Heller must have some avid fans among the managers at the BBC, who have pulled off a similar impossible-looking achievement.
Since 2005, they have given redundancy payments to 5,992 employees in the name of cutting costs. The Corporation’s employee headcount has, over the same period, gone down by 3,369.
It would, of course, be unfair to compare the BBC’s staffing policies with Heller’s satirical version of World War Two. Milo Minderbinder made money. The BBC’s redundancy payments have cost £277 million.
But it would be interesting to find out exactly how wisely the Corporation spent more on pay-offs for surplus staff than it has on its move to Salford.
In the bad old days of very powerful trade unions, unwary employers would find themselves handing out large redundancy payments to workers who would somehow manage to turn up on the payroll again the following week.
Rest assured that nothing like this has happened at the BBC. The 2,600 or so jobs that didn’t go are nothing to do with any sort of merry-go-round of perks for the boys and girls, with prizes to match the National Lottery.
One of these people was paid £949,000; another got £600,000; four were paid off with more than £400,000; and a dozen left with between £300,000 and £400,000. The average was more than £46,000. Nice work if you can get it.
According to a statement, ‘the BBC has made significant reductions in its headcount as part of overall efficiency savings. While this has necessitated some one-off redundancy costs, this is outweighed by the cumulative savings achieved over this period of £2.7 billion.’
With savings like that, I ought to be seeing my licence fee going down. We must be getting an announcement soon.
Alternatively, I could be getting £2.7 billion worth of improved service. In fact, this seems to be the answer. The BBC has had to hire lots of new people to do important work like running iPlayer and BBC Persia, we are told.
Bureacuracy: For every cut the BBC makes, it creates another level of administration
I may be a cynic, but I do not believe you need 2,600 people to run iPlayer and BBC Persia.
What I think is this. The BBC’s formidable bureaucrats have done what all bureaucrats do, and responded to attempts to curb their empires by building new ones. This is all carried out under fancy names that are designed to convince people that real cost-cutting is going on.
So the redundancy payments were part of efficiency drives called Value for Money and Continuous Improvement. Yes, really.
Some have been made under the latest savings campaign, called Delivering Quality First. This will involve getting rid of new daytime programming on BBC Two, and some cuts to radio comedy, and so on.
We will in the months to come discover how much quality is getting delivered through all this. What is not going to happen is any serious reduction in the £5 billion a year the Corporation costs to run, any serious thinning of the ranks of the political advisers and communications consultants who infest its offices, any pruning of fringe channels or operations with nil public service justification.
Milo Minderbinder turned out not to be selling seven cent eggs at five cents for a profit at all. His business methods led to a deal with the Germans, who paid him to arrange for American planes to bomb their own base.
I’m not saying the BBC is conning us about its redundancies and its cost-cutting. However, over roughly the same period as the £277 million redundancy programme, it borrowed £140 million from a bank run by the European Union and took another £3 million from Brussels in grants.
Come friendly bombs and fall on Salford.
By STEVE DOUGHTY
Readers of Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 will recollect that the super-capitalist character Milo Minderbinder is able to buy eggs in Malta for seven cents apiece and then sell them to his comrades at a profit for five cents.
Heller must have some avid fans among the managers at the BBC, who have pulled off a similar impossible-looking achievement.
Since 2005, they have given redundancy payments to 5,992 employees in the name of cutting costs. The Corporation’s employee headcount has, over the same period, gone down by 3,369.
It would, of course, be unfair to compare the BBC’s staffing policies with Heller’s satirical version of World War Two. Milo Minderbinder made money. The BBC’s redundancy payments have cost £277 million.
But it would be interesting to find out exactly how wisely the Corporation spent more on pay-offs for surplus staff than it has on its move to Salford.
In the bad old days of very powerful trade unions, unwary employers would find themselves handing out large redundancy payments to workers who would somehow manage to turn up on the payroll again the following week.
Rest assured that nothing like this has happened at the BBC. The 2,600 or so jobs that didn’t go are nothing to do with any sort of merry-go-round of perks for the boys and girls, with prizes to match the National Lottery.
One of these people was paid £949,000; another got £600,000; four were paid off with more than £400,000; and a dozen left with between £300,000 and £400,000. The average was more than £46,000. Nice work if you can get it.
According to a statement, ‘the BBC has made significant reductions in its headcount as part of overall efficiency savings. While this has necessitated some one-off redundancy costs, this is outweighed by the cumulative savings achieved over this period of £2.7 billion.’
With savings like that, I ought to be seeing my licence fee going down. We must be getting an announcement soon.
Alternatively, I could be getting £2.7 billion worth of improved service. In fact, this seems to be the answer. The BBC has had to hire lots of new people to do important work like running iPlayer and BBC Persia, we are told.
Bureacuracy: For every cut the BBC makes, it creates another level of administration
I may be a cynic, but I do not believe you need 2,600 people to run iPlayer and BBC Persia.
What I think is this. The BBC’s formidable bureaucrats have done what all bureaucrats do, and responded to attempts to curb their empires by building new ones. This is all carried out under fancy names that are designed to convince people that real cost-cutting is going on.
So the redundancy payments were part of efficiency drives called Value for Money and Continuous Improvement. Yes, really.
Some have been made under the latest savings campaign, called Delivering Quality First. This will involve getting rid of new daytime programming on BBC Two, and some cuts to radio comedy, and so on.
We will in the months to come discover how much quality is getting delivered through all this. What is not going to happen is any serious reduction in the £5 billion a year the Corporation costs to run, any serious thinning of the ranks of the political advisers and communications consultants who infest its offices, any pruning of fringe channels or operations with nil public service justification.
Milo Minderbinder turned out not to be selling seven cent eggs at five cents for a profit at all. His business methods led to a deal with the Germans, who paid him to arrange for American planes to bomb their own base.
I’m not saying the BBC is conning us about its redundancies and its cost-cutting. However, over roughly the same period as the £277 million redundancy programme, it borrowed £140 million from a bank run by the European Union and took another £3 million from Brussels in grants.
Come friendly bombs and fall on Salford.