The BBC, which currently has about 21,500 full-time equivalent employees, has announced it will cut between 1,800 and 2,000 jobs in a bid to tackle “significant financial pressures”.
Philippa Childs, head of broadcasting union Bectu, warned that “cuts of this magnitude” would be “devastating for the workforce and the BBC as a whole”.
The broadcaster needs to make £500m savings over the next two years, and interim director general Rhodri Talfan Davies did not rule out axing entire channels or services.
“We need to look at everything, and at a scale of £500m inevitably there are going to be some big and some difficult choices, but we do need to step through this carefully,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Media Show.
“For audiences, the job in hand now over the next three or four months is to work through how we make those changes without damaging the services that we know are critical to the BBC across radio and television and online,” he said.
He said the corporation would give more details later this year about how its services would be affected.
