Listening less

It'll be getting a bit twitchy at Bush House.  Sister service BBC Monitoring at Caversham has just announced a net loss of 54 posts over the next two years, to respond to an FCO cut in funding of £3m each year. That takes the listening post to 2013/14 and the comparative comfort of licence fee funding.

54 jobs from a total of 450 worldwide is a cut of 16%.  Monitoring started at Evesham in 1939 just before the outbreak of war, with 50 staff tuning in to wire services and radio broadcasts from across the Channel.  In 1942, numbers had grown to 500, and the operation moved to Caversham Park, near Reading.  I've visited once, in 1973, and little was done to dispel the belief that US experts were also somewhere in the building.

In theory, the information produced is supported by "customers" - but they are largely the Foreign Office and the BBC.  The list of languages transcribed remains extensive, but you'd have to be pretty suspicious, surely, to want transcripts of Icelandic, Creole, Finnish and Afrikaans broadcasts, wouldn't you ?

Sages are forecasting announcements about World Service next week.