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UK – BBC spends over £650,000 on recruitment despite promising to cut jobs

09 July 2014

The BBC employs more people than it did a year ago despite a public pledge to cut staff numbers, and has spent more than £650,000 on recruitment consultants in the past 12 months, reports The Daily Telegraph.

The number of staff employed by the corporation in 2013 was 22,039, up from 21,729 in 2012.

In 2011, Mark Thompson, the then Director–General, said the BBC would lose 2,000 jobs by 2017 as part of cost–cutting measures. Yet the newly published figures show that the headcount has risen.

The increase followed a particularly busy year for the BBC, with extra staff covering the 2012 Olympic Games and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. The figures include permanent staff, and those on fixed–term and flexible contracts.

At the same time, according to figures obtained via a Freedom of Information request and published in the Guardian, the BBC spent £657,522 in 2013 on: "Recruitment consultants, executive search and headhunting firms for the hiring of BBC staff at all grades, including senior staff and members of the executive board."

A BBC spokesman said: "The BBC's main recruitment channel is our jobs website. We do, however, sometimes use external recruitment consultants to help ensure we obtain applications from a wide range of high–quality candidates, often for very specialised roles."

Of the rise in headcount, the spokesman said external events – particularly those in Scotland – accounted for some of the figures: "The BBC is in a period of change and we are making savings in our overall costs of £850 million by 2017, but occasionally staff numbers will fluctuate depending on programme schedules and other special projects, such as the Commonwealth Games, covering the Scottish referendum, further development and personalisation of iPlayer."

When Mark Thompson announced the "significant" job losses in 2011 as part of the Delivery Quality First project, he promised they would lead to "a smaller, radically reshaped BBC".

In recent months, the BBC has hired a number of staff from rival broadcasters. The high–profile appointments are said to have caused disquiet in the newsroom at a time when 500 BBC News jobs are said to be at risk.

The current Director–General, Lord Hall, advised that the number of staff employed in the BBC's core finance team will have dropped from 635 in 2006 to 280 by 2016.