Leviathan

DO YOU prefer your cuts by amputation or salami slicing? It's a question that sorts one brand of manager in a cost-cutting era from another. Except at the BBC, where the intention seems to be to do both at once, therefore ensuring that neither is done with conviction. The corporation has just announced that it will not be cutting the Asian Network, one of the services it had recently earmarked for closure. A short consultation concluded that the alternative plan—launching a patchwork of services on the  hard-to-receive Medium Wave—would not adequately replace the service offered via the network.  Also, BBC audiences being highly  sensitive to any threatened reductions, the Network's listenership rose as soon as it was threatend with being disbanded. Result: Asian Network will continue to exist, but lose half its funding.

At this time last year, a similar hokey-cokey was conducted on the future of 6 Radio, the indie-music station. It was to be closed in order to show the management was serious about pruning the BBC's sprawling output—and then wasn't. The BBC Trust, responding to indie-loving petition-gatherers, ruled against the management. The Beeb's cuts strategy looks indecisive, to say the least, and at worst chaotic.

In essence, the argument reflects division between salami slicers. Chief among them is BBC director-general Mark Thompson who, having engineered a cuts deal with George Osborne on the eve of the last spending review, baulks at the immediate effect being seen to be an amputation of services. Where the Asian Network or 6 Radio was planned to go, might not one day BBC3 or 4 follow? This is a "legacy question," insiders say, for Mr Thompson. In order to avoid high-profile amputations, the cuts are being "work-streamed"—in other words, visited across the board by a league of senior managers.

This has the effect of demoralising just about everyone, but it spreads the pain, and the blame. Leviathan wonders however whether Lord Patten, the incoming chairman of the BBC Trust, who set a robust tone in his appearance before the Culture Select Committee last week, will share the view that charcuterie is the best way to enact a major funding cut. With the exception of BBC online (undergoing a 25% cull) and the World Service, which has taken a major hit,  very few hard questions have been asked by BBC management of what services deserve to remain and which do not. The outgoing chairman declared that the salami slicing was now in endangering the quality of core programmes and that another approach was needed.  Lord Patten may wish to make a stronger case for amputation.

THE BBC is in some uproar over plans to move "Question Time", its discussion programme, to Glasgow. It has already lost its present editor, who doesn’t fancy a relocation. The programme’s presenter, David Dimbleby, is also unkeen, saying that it is "like trying to report on Holyrood from London. You have to be around swirl of Westminster life." It’s the tip of an argument about the corporation's commitment to boost regional representation by moving programmes to the regions. Whatever the intention, the result has often been to add cost and cumbersome logistics to programme-making.

Now it emerges that staff will have to be flown from Scotland to London to brief Mr Dimbleby. Has the BBC stopped to analyse the growth in its carbon footprint from farming out programmes which have no intrinsic reason to be made outside the capital? Here is a pressing matter for the BBC Trust's new chairman (due to be appointed in the next two weeks) to address. Of course the BBC has a duty to reflect and comment on life in the regions and nations and to ensure its programme diversity covers the whole country, not just London. Also, having invested in vastly expensive buildings in Salford and Glasgow, it clearly feels the need to do something with them (though there may be other commercial answers to that problem).

But existing requirements and programme diversity do not mean that the present policy is the right one—or that it should be continued without further scrutiny. The stumbling block, according to BBC executives, is existing guidelines from Ofcom, agreed under the last government, which specify quotas of output to be made outside London. The media regulator in effect required the BBC to behave like a government quango, dispersing jobs and production, and the BBC duly obliged. Now, with severe cuts to make and a Tory culture secretary saying that he expects Ofcom to play less of a part in policy decisions and stick to regulation, the arrangement needs to be looked at again—both by Ofcom and the BBC, when it gets its new arbiter.