This is taken from Broadcast:

Lay-offs at BBC down to 93
by Geoff White

The number of BBC staff facing compulsory redundancy has dropped below 100, less than one year after BBC director general Mark Thompson announced that 3,780 jobs would be lost across the corporation.

Through a combination of voluntary redundancies, recruitment freezes and outsourcing, broadcasting unions and management have whittled down the number of compulsory redundancies to just 93.

Around 2,000 staff are believed to have applied for voluntary redundancy, according to union sources, with as many as 1,300 expected to leave by July.

Outsourcing will account for 750 of the job losses - 260 jobs in BBC People will be handed to private firm Capita, 40 jobs in finance will be outsourced by 2008, and the corporation is looking into the outsourcing of the remainder.

The rest of the cuts have been and will be achieved through recruitment freezes, where a vacant post is simply not filled and natural turnover as workers leave the corporation.

Thompson is now on target for a reduction by almost one in five staff by March 2008. In total, 2,050 jobs in production will have been axed, with a further 1,730 in backroom and support departments.

The lion's share of the 93 compulsory redundancies are in BBC Wales, where 40 staff face the axe, and in the factual and learning department, where 27 compulsory cuts are threatened.

The unions have called on management to postpone these cuts in the hope of achieving them through natural turnover over the next two years. However, Bectu has admitted that, if the compulsory cuts do not affect their members, strike action would be unlikely.