Oi, Guv, the tribes need sorting

Dear Lord Patten,

First on your agenda, please.  The division of the BBC into mega-silos - Vision, Audio & Music, News/Journalism, Future Media & Technology, Operations, and the baby North  - looks sensible from an O&D point of view, and is probably better than the 15-odd feuding baronies that Greg Dyke found when he came.  But if you don't sort out a new form of financial discipline, the big boys are on the verge of tearing each other apart.

Every year, the divisions are allotted funds by the centre. Every year they get a mix of cuts and re-investment, in a painful process of bidding and counter bidding; divisional directors regard it as their given right to acquire budget at all costs. Every February/March, they find they've underspent, because the managers are terrified of "trouble"; yet they know if they "give money back", they'll never see it again in the years ahead - it'll go to a rival silo. So, like local councils, they scrabble to find pavements that can be relaid in the last four weeks of the financial year.  Every year this happens.  The BBC does not deal with the managers and their financial forecasters who get it wrong, underspend or overspend.

These silo wars are also evident in the current, shroud-waving, leaking of "ideas" to save money, whether it be an afternoon of repeats on BBC2; an end to luxurious coverage of F1 and Wimbledon; or the "merger" of Five Live and English local radio. No sign of a cross-divisional initiative, or anything that "transcends silos", in the ineffable words of Pat Younge.

So, good Lord, get in there - make the business managers run another form of bottom-up budget forecasting alongside their current failed system for at least a year.  Find, for the first time, an ethical way to incentivise managers who can and will do things more cheaply, without incurring a penalty on their division, and the opprobrium of their executives.  You boasted of your financial achievements at the EU in front of the DCMS Select Committee - it may prove a more valuable asset than you thought in the years ahead.

Yours

A well-wisher