Call for talks on BBC sell-off

BECTU has called for urgent talks with government after a shock announcement that the sale of BBC Broadcast has been agreed.

A consortium led by Australian banking group Macquarie was revealed as the winning bidder for the BBC subsidiary company with an agreed sale price of £166 million.

The announcement was made at 2 am on Monday June 27 to coincide with the opening of stock exchanges in Australia, but most staff employed by BBC Broadcast found out the news only when they reported for work later that morning.

On the BBC's original timetable, a final bidder to buy the company was not due to be named until early July, and BECTU was expecting a round of meetings with other possible buyers to discuss the terms and benefits on offer to Broadcast's 900-plus staff.

The sale still needs approval from government, but the early announcement of Macquarie as the buyer makes it likely that the BBC will meet its own target of August for completion of the privatisation exercise.

BECTU is asking to meet the Minister for Culture, Media, and Sport, as soon as possible to voice concerns about the sell-off.

Although Macquarie has promised to meet union demands for protection of terms and conditions once Broadcast is sold, including access to a final-salary pension scheme, members in BBC Broadcast are expected to reject the sale on principle in a ballot which closes on July 4.

Broadcast members are balloting in parallel with others in the BBC itself, and another subsidiary BBC Resources, on a package tabled by the BBC at ACAS in May after a one-day stoppage.

One of the issues that led to the strike was the position of staff in Broadcast and Resources if their companies were sold, as planned, as part of a major BBC shake-up led by Director-General Mark Thompson.

All three staff unions had demanded that staff affected by privatisation should be given guarantees at least as good as those won by BECTU for members in BBC Technology which was sold to Siemens for £150 million last October.

These included a three-year promise of no changes in terms and conditions, a guarantee that there would be no compulsory redundancies for at least one year, and the right to join a final salary pension scheme "broadly comparable" to the BBC's own.

The ACAS package contained a commitment that, by the time a shortlist of four final bidders had submitted their best offers in mid-June, the unions' demands would be met. On that basis, BECTU is recommending that Broadcast members should accept the ACAS offer, although in a separate ballot-form question, they are also being asked if they support or reject the principle of being sold off.

At a meeting with unions on June 23, intended as the first of a series of talks with all four shortlisted bidders, managers from the Macquarie consortium confirmed that all union demands for staff guarantees would be met if they bought BBC Broadcast, including the creation of a new final-salary pension scheme for the company's staff.

Macquarie also made a commitment that, from 2007, BBC Broadcast would increase its contribution to the new pension scheme from 6%, the rate at which the BBC itself plans to pay by then, to 20% of the wage bill.

Despite welcoming the assurances from Macquarie, now revealed as the winning bidder, unions remain concerned about the long-term impact on the BBC of "selling the family silver" as officials have described the process of privatisation which began with the sale of the Corporation's transmitter network in 1997.

If the Broadcast sale goes ahead, it will represent the third multi-million pound privatisation since then. Another planned sell-off, the privatisation of BBC Resources Ltd, will be put on ice for at least two years if BECTU members accept the ACAS package in their ballot.