BBC will remain "strong and independent" - director general
The BBC's director general, Mark Thompson, has pledged that "Britain will have a strong and independent BBC for the foreseeable future" despite the corporation having to make savings of £560m.
It is understood the BBC will have to cut about £140m a year from its annual £3.6bn budget after the government chose to freeze the TV licence fee and charge the BBC with new funding commitments including World Service.
But writing in today Guardian, Thompson indicates that the outcome of the coalition's Comprehensive Spending Review is not as stifling for the BBC as pundits predicted. "It wasn't what media observers expected," he writes.
Problems would have been caused, however, had ministers gone ahead with mooted plans to make the BBC cover the cost of free licence fees for the over 75s. That was "something which the BBC would have found not just financially disastrous, but constitutionally unacceptable," according to Thompson.
In his piece today Thompson says "there is no question" that the settlement with government reached on the eve of the spending review announcement "is tough", but counters claims that the BBC has been singled out for special treatment.
He writes: "[The settlement] calls for the BBC to make 4% of efficiency savings for each of the last years of the charter period. These savings will inevitably involve difficult choices. Yet it would be wrong to claim that the efficiencies show that the BBC is being singled out for special punishment. That 4% annual efficiency rate is a benchmark across the public sector with some bodies facing much deeper cuts.
"Anyone who believes that the BBC could have achieved a licence fee settlement at any stage, and under any government, which would have called for lower efficiency targets than other public bodies were facing, is deluding themselves."
Thompson claims the agreement will actually strengthen the BBC's independence and promises the corporation will do "everything we can" to ensure cuts are not made to content.
Instead there will be a "leaner BBC, with fewer managers and much simpler processes and structures". Thompson has already started a cull of BBC executives, including director for the north Peter Salmon.