Following the big changes and job losses announced at the BBC (reported earlier on radioinfo), ABC Radio National’s Media Report spoke to a former the head of the BBC and a former BBC staffer about the implications of the changes.

Presenter, Mick O’Regan, told listeners:

This week, the BBC published a blueprint for the feature. It features almost 3000 fewer staff and a reorientation of the Corporation to better reflect its audience. For Mark Thompson, the BBC is at a critical point in its history, and must take risks to remain relevant.

Mark Thompson: I think we face new challenges now. In the last four years the BBC I think has very successfully been launching new services, it’s had a licencee which has been growing in real terms, and that’s been the focus of the BBC’s activity. I think now we do need to look and see whether we ourselves can find a way of paying for at least some of this vision of the BBC of the future.

Mick O’Regan: Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC.

Now for an assessment of the changes that Mark Thompson has initiated, I spoke to the former Chief Executive of Broadcasting at the BBC, Will Wyatt.

Will Wyatt: He’s done four things: he’s reviewed four areas of the BBC, he’s reviewed value for money, and believes he can make considerable savings by reducing the back-up services of the BBC, things like Human Resources, Finance staff and so on. He thinks he can get very, very big savings out of those, he also reviewed the commercial activities and a couple of parts of the BBC which could go, be sold off or partnered out. There’s BBC Resources, all the studios and so on, and the Broadcast Unit which plays out all the channels and makes the trailers.

He looked too at the supply of programming, and he’s going to create more room for independent producers to have their access to the BBC. That will mean reductions in some of the staff in factual areas of producing programs. And the last part, he looked at the BBC’s operations around the UK, and should it be more out of London, and concluded that it should be, and intends to move nearly 2,000 people from London to Manchester; all the Sport and all the Children’s Programs and stuff from other elements.

Mick O’Regan: Now I’d like to come to that move of staff to Manchester in just a moment, but just coming back to Mark Thompson, he made a key speech in the last couple of days where he talked about that he’d come back to the BBC at a critical moment in its history, and that he basically said that there was a need for both a spirit of conservation, the nurturing and protecting of some of the BBC’s greatest strengths, but also for a spirit of quite radical change. What are we seeing more of here, the radical change or the conservation?

Will Wyatt: We’re seeing both. I mean he’s been very careful not to criticise Greg Dyke, but it’s hard not to see that he feels that the BBC’s gone off, lost it’s direction in terms of its programming policies, and he’s determined to pull it back into the sort of emphasis on excellence, ambition and depth of information and so on, rather than just competitiveness. I think that’s one big thing, and you can call that I think the conservative side of it. The radical side is saying Look, the digital age is with us; more than 50% of the public in the UK have digital television, people are going to receive their information and entertainment in quite different ways in the future, thorough mobile devices and broadband as well as TV, and the BBC’s got to prepare itself for that world, and that means getting lean and much more flexible.

Mick O’Regan: And one of the other things that he said is that the BBC needed ‘an irreversible shift in the culture’ of the organisation, towards simplicity, opportunity and creativity. Is this notion of the need for a culture change, does that emanate from the criticisms that Lord Hutton made in the inquiry following David Kelly’s death?

Will Wyatt: I don’t think this precisely does, I think, I would hope that the BBC feel that they’ve done a lot on the news front to deal with that side of a culture change, although there may be some kind of veiled reference to that. I think he’s thinking very, very much about the fact that the BBC is large, it has always been rather bureaucratic and slow-moving in its processes (sic) and they need to cut through some of that and get decisions made more quickly and more commissioning and decision-making devolved away from groups of people at the top, and so the whole place operates in a kind of nimbler way, and with a greater simplicity.