BBC Monitoring today announced spending cuts and proposed post closures in response to the decision by the Cabinet Office, following last October’s HM Government Comprehensive Spending Review, to cut £3m per annum over two years from BBC Monitoring’s grant of £23.2m per annum. This follows a cut of £1.4m by the Cabinet Office in April 2010.
Announcing the cuts package to staff today, the Director of BBC Monitoring, Chris Westcott, said that: “regrettably service cuts and post closures are inevitable given the scale of the cut in funding from the Cabinet Office. We are now beginning a period of consultation with staff on our proposals.”
BBC Monitoring proposes to cut £3m per annum from its costs by closing 72 posts – about 16%. 18 new posts would be created.
(Source: BBC Press Office)
on Jan 17th, 2011 at 21:21
I don’t know whether the move to UK licence-fee funding as opposed to government funding in 2013 will be a lifeline or a curse for what’s left of Monitoring. As “managers” at Caversham found out after breaking up the old Afghan team a decade ago, once the collective linguistic and historical expertise is disbanded, it is hard to reassemble it at short notice the next time the shit hits the fan in a faraway place of which the UK knows little.