Licence fee talks that motivated bosses' tough stance

It's fairly obvious that the main reason for Mark Thompson's proposed changes to the BBC is less to do with saving money but more concerned with forcibly increasing the quota of independent production company usage at the BBC after years of missed quota targets. This decision is mainly political (based partly on licence fee renegotiation) but Mark Thompson's own beliefs must be a significant factor.

Cutting back on foreign correspondents may theoretically also save some money, but this puts at risk both the impartiality of the BBC on a world perspective and makes the BBC's foreign news reporting less flexible and more reliant on the output provided by other broadcasters. And cutting back on researchers makes the BBC's factual output more unreliable and prone to errors, as recent events have shown.

Instead of cutting back on various essential services, another approach might be to completely re-examine the BBC's relationships with commercial partners (such as Flextech) and perform a strict audit on the effectiveness of the BBC's digital-only channels. But this issue is unlikely to be touched for several more years since the remits of BBCs Three and Four were supposedly 'government-approved'.

There may still be further scope for increasing the efficency of the BBC's operations but value for money from the licence fee will not be obtained if the BBC's core services suffer as a result of cutbacks. However even if most or all of the planned cutbacks are implemented, there is nothing that can't theoretically be 'undone' in the future if it all goes horribly wrong.