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BBC North West chief says London press coverage of Salford is 'bollocks'

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By The Drum Team, Editorial

January 21, 2011 | 3 min read

Aziz Rashid, the BBC's head of regional and local progammes for the North West of England, has described the London press reaction to the Corporations planned move to Salford as 'bollocks'.

Speak at a lunch aimed at vulnerable groups the executive, who has been in the region for 18 months and has responsibility for 250 staff across online, radio and television, responded to a question about the reluctance of London staff to make the move North.

He responded: “Don't believe what you hear in the London media! It's bollocks, okay? It is. We need to look at this (the move) from a Northern perspective, this is fantastic.

“There are people in London who want to say this is going to be a disaster, what on earth are people doing moving departments to Manchester. Manchester has been the centre of huge creative industries in the past and the BBC will be, once again, bringing great creative businesses to the North West.

“I have absolutely no fear that they will be really successful and that will be fantastic, and there are very good reasons why people can't move.

“If you ask one thousand five hundred people in Oxford Road if they could move to London, I daresay half of them wouldn't, because of lots of different reasons, and for one or two of them it's because they love living in Manchester and there's nothing wrong with that actually, and by the same token there's nothing wrong with wanting to live in London if that's where you are, and where your parents are, where your family are.

“I think that it's fine, people might want to live in London, some people might want to live in Manchester, I just would not get upset about that actually, I think you take it on the chin, and hey, it means that seven hundred new jobs are going to be created for people across the country, hopefully for lots of people in the North West and Media City, that is fantastic, that's got to be great for the North West. And actually let's look at it from the North West perspective and not from London centric media view of the world, I refuse to do that. I think we know that the move to Manchester is a better one than staying in London anyway, so great really.”

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