BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, is set to cut hundreds of jobs, including those in its news division next week, the Financial Times reported. The move comes ahead of talks with ministers over future funding.
With over 20,000 staff, the BBC is expected to cut about a tenth of its costs resulting in 2,000 job losses. The news division, which employs a quarter of the staff, is set to be the first to reveal its plan next week.
The news division manages television, websites, radio, and app across the regions. Cuts in the department are expected to lead to a large number of job losses.
The announcement is expected to affect specific radio shows, the Financial Times reported, quoting insiders. The cuts could be noticeable to BBC viewers and listeners, sources said.
Other teams, such as content, can more easily cut costs from non-staff areas, insiders told the FT.
In an interview with the FT last month, the new director-general Matt Brittin had warned of ‘hard and unpopular choices’ for a financially stable future.
The public service broadcaster has already deployed several cost-cutting measures including reducing expenditure on travel, recruitment, management consultancies, conferences, awards, and events.
The BBC first announced the plans to cut up to 2,000 jobs to save 10 per cent of its annual budget – 500 million pounds ($677 million) – over the next two years in April.
“I know this creates real uncertainty, but we wanted to be open about the challenge,” interim Director-General Rhodri Talfan Davies had said in a staff email.
Meta, Ikea, Starbucks, Cloudflare: Job Cuts Across Sectors
Earlier in May, Meta announced plans to cut 8,000 jobs that is layoff nearly 10 per cent of its workforce. The first messages were reported from its Singapore hub.
Inter Ikea Group, the holding company that oversees Ikea, announced plans to cut 850 jobs, saying its organisation with 27,700 employees overall had grown too “complex”.
Starbucks too has been trying to reduce costs and has resorted to job cuts. In May it announced plans to layoff 300 corporate employees and close some US offices. Last year, the company laid off 2,000 corporate employees and closed hundreds of stores in the US, Canada and Europe.
Cybersecurity firm Cloudflare shared plans to layoff over 1,100 staff globally as it restructures the business around artificial intelligence. Cloudflare said its internal use of AI had risen by more than 600 per cent in just three months, prompting the company to restructure how it works.
