STEPHEN GLOVER

WHAT is the BBC most renowned for? What does it do better than anything else? The answer can be supplied in one word. News.

Other broadcasters also produce excellent drama, and churn out their fair share of soap operas. Long gone are the days when the BBC provided unrivalled sports coverage. But so far as radio and television news are concerned, Auntie still reigns supreme.

Like many others, I happen to think some of the Corporation’s reporting is slanted against the Tories — a view evidently also held in No 10. Such a bias doubtless reflects the metropolitan and liberal prejudices of many of the BBC’s journalists.

Wasteful

Nevertheless, it is impossible not to respect the range and depth of its news operation — not least on the BBC World Service, which is rightly admired around the globe.

So yesterday’s announcement by the Beeb that it will cut 450 jobs in its news department — about one in 12 — is inevitably worrying.

It is doubly so when one considers that the organisation is one of the most wasteful and spendthrift known to man. It boasts legions of wellremunerated managers, and dozens of overpaid ‘ stars’, for all of whom some belttightening is long overdue.

Why make draconian cutbacks to the core business of news provision when there are so many areas of the BBC where considerable savings could be made without anyone in the outside world even noticing?

The answer, I believe, is that narrow-minded bureaucrats who can’t see the wood for the trees remorselessly pursue their goal without ever asking themselves whether it is the right one.

In this case, the goal is to cut £40 million a year from the news budget until 2022 to add to reductions of the same amount that supposedly have already been achieved.

Needless to say, I don’t suggest no economies can be made in the area of news. For instance, there are cases of duplication when several BBC reporters find themselves covering the same story.

Let me offer a few ideas as to how much greater sums than £40 million could be saved by the Corporation without it jeopardising what it does best.

It could close down littlewatched BBC4 (annual cost £44 million) and merge it with BBC2. BBC4 was launched 18 years ago by an expansionist Beeb which had embarked on a spending spree encouraged by the then Labour government.

In fact, BBC4 is very good, producing original, high quality programmes. It does what BBC2 did before it dumbed down. Put them together and you will have a widely watched, and better, channel.

Another £12 million could be saved by closing down Radio 6 Music, also launched in the heady, empire-building days in the early years of the century. It features the sort of music that can be heard on Radio 1 and Radio 2, and has only a tiny audience.

There! I have already clawed back significantly more than the £40 million being lopped off the news budget, and I have barely started. Much more is to come.

Lamentable

If Auntie’s former profligacy is any guide, enormous sums of money are still being wasted on out- of- control capital projects. There was an overspend of £107 million on the £ 1 billion cost of refurbishing Broadcasting House in London.

You may say that the money has already been squandered. It is water under the bridge, alas. But the Beeb has existing projects whose cost- control has been lamentable.

One of them is a new set for the soap opera EastEnders, whose audience has plummeted in recent years. Nonetheless, £ 60 million was put aside for a new site, supposed to be finished in 2018. The National Audit Office says it will cost £ 87 million, and be ready in 2023.

This is licence-payers’ money being poured down the drain. Have any of the Beeb’s lavishly rewarded senior executives been made to walk the plank for financial mismanagement? Of course not.

And, my, what savings could be made among these overpaid panjandrums! At the last count, 75 senior managers at the Corporation earned more than the Prime Minister.

Would there be so many of them, and would they be so well paid, in a commercial organisation of the same size? I very much doubt it.

Looking at the remuneration of top executives, one has to pinch oneself to remember that the BBC is part of the public service. And yet these are not public service salaries.

Perhaps many people will not object to the directorgeneral, Tony Hall, being paid between £450,000 and £454,999. (Annoyingly, the BBC publishes its employees’ salaries in bands.)

But should Charlotte Moore, so- called director of content, receive between £370,000 and £ 374,999 — a 13.8 per cent increase on the previous year, when the average pay increase is about 3 per cent?

And was it necessary to give James Purnell, director of radio and education, a £20,000 rise to £315,000 a year — nearly two-and-a-half times what he got when he was a Labour culture secretary? Among these shadowy executives with their grandiloquent-sounding titles, there are three individuals in charge of human resources. Two are paid about £200,000, and one up to £315,000.

Presumably these splendid people were at least partly responsible for maintaining the gender pay gap at the BBC, which is going to cost Auntie millions of pounds now that significant inequalities are coming to light.

With a certain amount of culling and salary readjustment, I am confident that we could find some pretty juicy savings which could be ploughed back into the depleted news budget.

Riches

I am also sure that a beadyeyed look at the salary of overpaid stars would release a few more million. Why should Gary Lineker trouser a whopping £1,754,999 a year for introducing Match Of The Day? He is also paid untold riches for similar work on BT Sport.

Is Mr Lineker so irreplaceable that he should get a Fat Cat salary for working in the public sector? Why is the admittedly genial Alan Shearer paid up to £444,999 for offering his reflections on the same programme?

This is my principal question to Tony Hall and the senior management of the BBC. Given the stratospheric salaries of some executives and stars — one or two of whose heads may roll in the coming weeks — are you comfortable about sacking so many less exalted journalists, nearly all of whom get by on modest pay?

Surely, if you are proud of the BBC’s worldwide reputation for news, you should show solidarity with these hardworking reporters, and first prune the bloated packages of some stars and executives.

But that would demand vision and courage — as it would demand vision and courage to shut down a littlewatched channel, or get rid of a director ultimately responsible for a gigantic overspend. That would happen in the real world, but not at the Beeb.

The more one looks at it, the clearer it is that there is huge scope for finding economies amounting to many tens of millions of pounds at the Corporation without damaging its prized news coverage in the smallest degree.

There is, in truth, no reason at all for the BBC to weaken itself. Which is why it is such a tragedy that this is precisely what it is about to do.