Eyes peeled

A difficult week ahead for BBC executives, who are currently watching their backs as well as fronts.

Personnel head honcho Lucy Adams, co-creator of the current pension options, faces staff for a series of one-hour seminars, in which, one suspects, she'll do her best to limit contributions from the floor.

Meanwhile, her co-author, finance director Zarin Patel has to keep prodding the sum button on her calculator, to see what the BBC can afford over the remainder of the licence fee settlement. The new career average scheme will need more support - but it's hard to work out how much, until you know which option everyone's going to take.  All the talk of using property sales to help is wrong; Zarin's calculations on capital have banked on 30% property sales for some time (and she probably over-estimated the likely returns). Now, she's also got to re-calculate with a frozen licence fee for two years, and plan with the real possibility that Jeremy Hunt will seek to reduce it further in the later years of the Coalition.  Meanwhile, the pressure to fund redundancy deals will continue, as Zarin seeks to cut at least 5% a year in "efficiencies", and though the staff have lost attractive payments from the pension scheme on redundancy, many "creatives" will now take what little money there is and run.

Meanwhile, to improve the mood of the staff, Jeremy Hunt, and The Daily Mail, Mark Thompson has to produce a much leaner and cheaper top management structure - and fast. Combining functions is always a good way to save money - how about, say, finance and HR ?  Ah, the team behind the original, now obviously wrong, pension options....