The BBC is planning to make up to 2,000 job cuts in one of its most brutal cost-cutting efforts to date.
Rhodri Talfan Davies, the BBC’s interim director general, is expected to announce the redundancy proposals in an all-staff call on Wednesday afternoon local time, sources told Deadline.
The meeting will be led by Talfan Davies, the BBC’s interim director general; CFO Bérangère Michel; and John Curbishley, the corporation’s chief strategy and transformation officer.
Broadcast, the UK television industry trade title, first reported the 2,000 job cuts figure. Deadline revealed on Tuesday that the BBC was preparing to detail the savings plan today.
The job cuts will represent roughly one in 10 members of staff across the BBC’s licence fee-funded and commercial operations. The BBC had 21,508 employees last year.
It comes after the BBC announced in February that it planned to slash its cost base by £500M ($675M) over the next three years, expanding on an existing target worth £1.5B.
The BBC’s annual plan, published last month, made clear that the corporation faces “difficult” financial choices and that content would not be protected from cuts.
The BBC has been drawing up radical plans to save £100M through outsourcing thousands of non-content jobs — including HR, finance, legal, and operations — to private sector companies. Deadline revealed details of the changes last year, with executives dubbing the plan Project Ada.
A BBC source said the corporation was getting some “bad news out of the way” before Matt Brittin, the former Google executive, joins as director general on May 18.
A BBC spokesperson declined to comment, but pointed to a previous statement, which said: “Over the last three years we have delivered more than a half a billion pounds worth of savings, much of which we’ve been able to reinvest into our output across the BBC.
“In a rapidly changing media market, we continue to face substantial financial pressures. As a result we expect to make further savings over the next three years of around 10% of our costs. This is about the BBC becoming more productive and prioritising our offer to audiences to ensure we’re providing the best value for money, both now and in the future.”