Don't panic

At the BBC, the last week of July is the traditional time for the DG's pre-holiday message to staff, which always ends with a variant of this exhortation "If you are able to take a break over the summer, I hope you have a great time." (This year, the email will have special meaning for some staff at BBC Wales, who can't do production work even if they want to).

Thommo's theme for 2011 is basically "Don't panic" about the 20% cuts that loom ahead as a consequence of the licence fee settlement. Here's an annotated version of the key bits.

 "Our current proposals would see 10% productivity [more 'sharing'of staff], 8% scope reductions [BBC3 & 4 to close at 1am, bye bye to Formula 1], with the final 2% to be found from the current efficiency programme [we always seem to underspend under Zarin] and from increased commercial revenue [Patten thinks John Smith could give much more] .... We haven’t ruled out service closures yet but the work so far suggests there’s a smarter way of making savings without taking entire services away from the public [yes, it's salami slicing time]".

"Inevitably the financial challenge we face will mean post closures over the period to 2016 and I appreciate it’s important to end the uncertainty as soon as we can. I expect percentage job losses to be relatively higher in non content areas and among senior managers, and lower in content areas but this picture will vary across the BBC and over time. As always, where possible, we will seek to implement this through turnover, redeployment and voluntary redundancy [cold comfort to the 100 or so in BBC World Service and BBC Monitoring that Lucy Adams deems unavoidable]. We expect the total job losses to be lower than some of the wild numbers I’ve seen in the press"


All the best, etc. [First sighting of this sign-off - clearly spending too much time in Salford]

One presumes Mark is now off on hols, and thus unavailable to assist during the NUJ strike planned for next Monday.  Who will play "Gold Commander" ?