At home with Lord Patten

Yesterday I took a prowl round Lord Patten's comments about the World Service to the Sunday Telegraph; here's a few thoughts about his domestic strategy.

First, the giving of the interview. It's billed as his first newspaper interview since his appointment to the BBC - "setting out his agenda".  Oddly short, then, at 800 words (many of them those of media correspondent Jonathan Wynne-Jones - where was the more savvy Neil Midgley, assistant editor, media ?)    Oddly placed ?  Perhaps not - the BBC and News International are not best friends - the Times got a leak of the original Delivering Quality First drafts, but it was against Thommo's wishes, and someone got fired.  An interview with the Observer or Independent would be seen as too patsy. The interview is so brief it could have been done on the phone quite late - giving Wynne-Jones and the Telegraph desk little chance to beat it up further.

Patten will have chosen his words very carefully, and discussed the move with Thommo.  There's probably more flesh to come in the BBC's house mag, Ariel, this week - the staff resent reading about changes in the national press first, but have come to expect it.

So to the actual words: "We have to make sure that the BBC is seen to live up to the public service ethos," said Lord Patten. "We have to try to make sure that the BBC is regarded as more efficient than is the case today".  A bit of flag-waving to the Coalition.  Note that previous Governments have believed that the BBC should match Civil Service "efficiency targets".  The BBC announcement of a pay offer of just 2% to staff on less than £60k will have been discreetly communicated to Treasury paymasters in advance. What money on a similar or slightly better offer to nurses, police, etc later in the year ?

He said he is looking to introduce a new system that would prevent pay for senior executives being hugely out of proportion with that of average employees.  This looks like a victory for those who believe in a multiplication scale of pay for public sector - i.e the CEO should never be paid more than 20 times the salary of the lowest paid worker.  This gives you a top and bottom for your salary range, and a curving line joins the two.  Will Hutton's report for the Government in March, favoured multiples, but with no upper limit - just transparency of the calculation.  A move to such a system would end industry benchmarking, and make the BBC much more explicitly a Civil Service career.  It is, interestingly, at odds with those like Pat Younge and Lucy Adams, who think that casualisation is the answer to saving money.

"It's got to be a strategy for dealing with people in the medium and long-term so that would include people who are there at the moment," he said – although he added that current contracts would not be broken. Not only, therefore, has the BBC got a plan for changing executive remuneration, there's an implementation plan - Pat Younge and Lucy Adams will be given time to move on, but their replacements will be cheaper.

He signalled that either BBC 3 or BBC 4 could be lost, but stressed that he hadn't "issued a death sentence" over them yet. This has provoked a row on what was or wasn't said.  Someone was presumably listening in to the interview from Mark Devane's communications team at the Trust and eventually issued a denial that a decision had been taken.  This is a not a denial of that 3 or 4 could be on the list of cuts posted to The Trust by The Executive.

The full proposal will therefore be interesting, and may be more of a repositioning than might be anticipated, effectively ending both 3 and 4 in their current guise.   BBC1 - mix unchanged; BBC2 - strengthened in drama, documentaries and (high) culture; BBC Extra (where there was BBC3 and 4) - strengthened in popular culture and live music.   Then, in daytime, a merger of Cbeebies and CBBC so that transmission costs are reduced; a variant could see Cbeebies on BBC2 in daytime - thus protecting jobs in Salford.  

"I think we're bound to face some tough decisions in the area of sport. It's extremely difficult for the BBC to bid for as many sports rights as it would like".   Essentially, farewell to F1. Even at four or five hours a race.