Making allowances

According to staff magazine Ariel, the BBC's director of business operations Lucy Adams has put on her listening hair-do,and postponed plans to get rid of so-called "Unpredictability Allowances".

In an all-staff email she wrote "We will make the necessary reform of UPA for existing staff part of this wider pay and grading review, which we plan to conclude by mid-2013, so that everyone can see the proposals in their entirety."

This is the umpteenth time ending this ineffective and old-fashioned pay supplement has been put in the "too difficult" box. 8,015 staff get either UPA or a "flexibility" allowance - and most of them work in News, where everything is too difficult.  When they move from real jobs into management, working from home one day a week and writing all staff emails, the allowances are usually consolidated into pensionable pay. Little chance of that for 8,015 now...