By Martin Sewell, a solicitor based in Kent.
When I heard that the proposed financial settlement for the BBC is likely to play out as a 16% revenue reduction, my mind went immediately to a local firm of Legal Aid Lawyers who were obliged to make identical across the Board pay reductions 18 months ago.
Unlike the BBC, legal aid lawyers have had but one extremely modest pay increase in 12 years, and have become habituated to making do with less, whilst facing a year or year exhortation that standards need not suffer if efficiency savings were pursued.
If anyone has demonstrated that much can be done in such difficult financial circumstances, then this sector might offer themselves in a consultancy role to others. There comes a point however when the pressure tells and the toughest decisions have to be taken. As far as I am aware, nobody left the firm in question. A combination of loyalty, stoicism, and lack of alternatives meant that people just had to take the pain.
It was, incidentally, Labour-inflicted pain.
I am sure that there are many in the upper echelons of the BBC who regard such decisions as the end of civilisation as they know it, and in a way they are right. They contemplate a future with fewer sequins, hospitality vans, taxis and hotel nights. Some are even facing having to face the indignity of moving to Salford.
Yet when you reach the point where there is no more money, indeed there is less, there is only one way to respond and that principle applies whether you are a small business, a State broadcaster, or a Government.
I am sure that most of us would find it hard to believe that when secretaries, receptionists and newly qualified young lawyers have demonstrated their ability to live through such difficulties, the Mark Thompson’s, Stephen Fry’s and Gary Lineker’s cannot find it within themselves to take the strain.
When I ran a High Street Practice, it was always a point of honour that staff secured at least an inflation rise every year, even if the owners of the business had a reduced income. I am sure most other firms took a similar approach. It was good business, for recruiting and retaining staff should be a priority for any well run concern. A similar set of decisions face the BBC management.
Not everyone has to lose 16% and I would commend to them the approach of building from the least well paid upwards. If one can discern the culture of the BBC from its news room and current affairs questions, then re-distribution is a valued principle. Would not consistency be demonstrated by balancing the cuts in favour of the worse off?
As I have written before, it is a good thing to ask the BBC, and anyone else, to live up to its declared principles.
To its great credit, this appears to be the approach adopted by the Government.
In many of its chosen priorities it has shied away from rewarding its core supporters and tried to cushion the less well off. This can be seen in its protection of the overseas aid budget, through the retention of Child Benefit for lower earners.
Now the Government has made its decision on the Licence Fee, the BBC needs to go through the same balancing exercises as every other small business and the Government itself.
My suspicion is that the objection to undertaking budgetary review does not come from a belief that it cannot be made to work, but from the ( politically) unpalatable knowledge that it can.
If they should have any difficulty in achieving their objectives, I can put them in touch with thousands of Legal Aid lawyers who could show them how it is done.
