• Six injured on ground after US fighter jet crashes • US military denies shooting Libyan civilians in rescue • Fighting continues on the ground Read the Guardian’s latest news story Follow live updates here 6.35pm: France’s foreign minister, Alain Juppé, has announced that a meeting of foreign ministers from countries taking part in the military action on Libya would be held in the next few days and mentioned Paris, Brussels and London as possible venues. Kim Willsher in Paris reports for the Guardian: He spoke to the French parliament as it emerged the coalition of countries involved in the operation was riven with disagreements over who should lead it and the role of Nato. France has opposed Nato taking charge of the military operation. “At the president’s behest and with the agreement of our British colleagues that we set up a political structure to oversee the operations involving foreign ministers from the countries taking part and the Arab League,” Juppé said. Laurent Tessiere, spokesman for the French ministry of defence, said France had opposed Nato running the operation because it did not want to “send the message that this was a western only led operation” and said this was a “key political dimension to be understood by the Arab world”. He admitted discussions over the role of Nato had been a “very vivid debate” that was still going on but that the views of countries involved was “converging towards a solution”. And he denied reports that France had not consulted with its allies over the timing of air strikes against Libya. He said the French chief of military staff had negotiated for days “and sometimes whole nights” with his opposite numbers in the UK and the US. 6.31pm: It’s clear that Western forces want to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi, Libya’s deputy foreign minister has said in an interview with Reuters. “That’s the problem now we are seeing, the coalition forces they are part of the war against the legitimate government,” Khaled Kaim claimed, adding that coalition forces were also striking soldiers in their barracks. Kaim said it was clear from a strike that damaged a building in Gaddafi’s Tripoli headquarters that Western forces want to assassinate the Libyan leader. All sides should declare a ceasefire with the aim of stabilising Libya, he said, adding that the regime was was looking to Libya’s tribes to help it open a dialogue with rebels. 6.20pm: Good evening and welcome to our continuing coverage of events in Libya. You can catch up with earlier coverage here . • There are conflicting accounts of events following the crash of a US F-15E Strike Eagle in Libya after which six civilians were injured. A US spokesman has “100%” denied reports that the civilians were injured by shooting from a US helicopter rescue mission for the two pilots. A US admiral earlier refused to deny that a crew sent to rescue downed airmen opened fire on Libyan villagers. A witness reportedly said the rescue team fired shots to keep the Libyans away, then swooped in and rescued one of the crew. Six Libyans are said to be wounded. The F-15E Strike Eagle jet was conducting a mission Monday night when it crashed outside Benghazi, apparently from a malfunction. • Residents in Misrata, western Libya, say the town has come under heavy tank and sniper fire. Doctors reportedly are operating on people with bullet and shrapnel wounds in hospital corridors. Ajdabiya and Zintan have also reportedly been under attack in a continuing onslaught from Muammar Gaddafi’s forces. • The US insists it will hand control of military operations to its allies within days amid rows over Nato’s leadership role in the air campaign. France has proposed that a new political steering committee outside Nato be responsible for overseeing military operations as some Nato countries oppose military intervention in Libya. Here is the latest story on events today . Full live coverage continues here. Libya Arab and Middle East unrest Middle East Defence policy Ben Quinn guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Tyler Hicks and his New York Times colleagues were trying to leave Ajdabiya when their driver stumbled into a checkpoint manned by Gadhafi’s forces—and Hicks immediately knew something was wrong. “I was yelling to the driver, ‘Keep driving! Don’t stop! Don’t stop!’” he tells the Times . “I knew…
Continue reading …A US F-15E Strike Eagle jet has crash-landed near Benghazi, reports the Telegraph , the apparent victim of mechanical failure rather than Libyan fire. One crewmember has been recovered, the US military confirms; it is on a mission to recover the other one. The two were separated because they ejected at…
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The sheer variety of British new writing means that refracting plays through the prism of national identity, as Aleks Sierz’s new book does, feels blinkered Pick a play – any play written in the last decade – and the chances are Aleks Sierz could offer an interpretation about how it refracts national identity. Mike Bartlett’s Cock would be a portrait of an uncertain, indecisive Britain, endlessly caught between two possible futures. Ghost Stories ? Why, the crippling paranoia born of a fragmented society, in which everyone is ultimately alone. And the Rain Falls Down ? What could be more British than obsession with the weather? I’m being facetious, of course. Only one of those examples (Cock) comes from Sierz’s new – and broadly enjoyable – book, Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today , a survey of the last 10 years of new writing in the UK. In it, Sierz attempts a working definition of new writing, assesses the health of our new writing culture and pulls together a composite picture of contemporary Britain. It’s a neat reflection of theatre’s uncanny capacity to echo and encapsulate its surrounding society. Often overly neat. Reading Rewriting the Nation, I found myself nagged by the very concept it examines. What, I kept thinking, makes a play a state of the nation play ? How does it mark itself out as such? Watching Cock at the Royal Court last year, it never once occurred to me that Ben Whishaw’s John might be “a metaphor for a nation unsure of itself”. Undoubtedly it tackles sexuality, but it also seemed concerned with generations. Yet if age felt important, why not nationality? After all, I thought of these people as British – sometimes, particularly so – and yet that seems to be secondary, if not irrelevant. Sometimes there’s no room for doubt, if only because the title of a play doesn’t allow for it. A nation can be a play’s constant or protagonist, as in Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice , which focused satirically on waves of immigration into the East End of London, or else its pivot. By placing Englishmen abroad, DC Moore’s The Empire highlights their Englishness, just as Roy Williams does with the England match of Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads . Other plays are draped in national iconography: Jerusalem, set on St George’s Day, bombards us with English symbols from the off, beginning with a St George’s cross and Hubert Parry’s stirring setting of William Blake. Elsewhere, however, it’s harder to discern. Setting can, but doesn’t necessarily, confer state of the nation status. How crucial is Leeds to Blasted or London to Earthquakes in London? I suspect both could be broadly the same play if set elsewhere, but their stress on setting forces location – and with it, national identity – into the crosshairs. Likewise, while institutions inevitably reflect the society that created and continues to shape them, they can also function as metaphors or microcosms of that society. Michael Billington suggested that Nina Raine’s Tiger Country showed the state of the NHS without reaching beyond to the state of the nation, as does Peter Nichols’s The National Health. I read Mogadishu in terms of its wider political implications, but not John Donnelly’s The Knowledge , even though both are set in schools. Family structures and organisations can exact a similar multiplicity. It seems a cop out to say so, but there’s no way out bar subjective perception. Whether you see a character as a particular individual or representative, as English or simply as human, depends on the angle of approach. That said, though there aren’t strict parameters that identify a state-of-the-nation play, to refract everything through the prism of national identity, as Sierz does, feels singularly blinkered. Theatre Matt Trueman guardian.co.uk
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Michael Gove’s remark that children should be reading 50 books a year is called into question by authors from Philip Pullman to children’s laureate Anthony Browne Education secretary Michael Gove has suggested that children as young as 11 should be reading 50 books a year – and that leading children’s authors should recommend them. Following a tour he made of America’s independently-run, state-funded charter schools – including the Infinity Charter School in Harlem, which set its pupils a “50-book challenge” over the course of a year – Gove said that schools in the UK needed to “raise the bar” on children’s reading: “Recently, I asked to see what students were reading at GCSE,” Gove said. “I discovered that something like 80-90% were just reading one or two novels – and overwhelmingly it was the case that it included Of Mice and Men. We should be saying that our children should be reading 50 books a year, not just one or two for GCSE.” The education secretary’s remarks follow a December report that showed British teenagers slumping from 17th to 25th place in an international league table for reading standards. But children’s laureate Anthony Browne has said Gove’s aims are at odds with the library closures happening under his government’s watch. He declared himself “surprised” at Gove’s comments, “given that the government is cutting library budgets, and that programmes giving free books to children, such as Bookstart, are also being cut.” “It’s always good to hear that the importance of children’s reading is recognised – but rather than setting an arbitrary number of books that children ought to read, I feel it’s the quality of children’s reading experiences that really matter,” Browne said. “Pleasure, engagement and enjoyment of books is what counts – not simply meeting targets.” Browne’s views were echoed by others’. Frank Cottrell Boyce , author of children’s novels Cosmic and Millions, said that while Gove’s instincts were right, the government’s wider actions were “militating against what Gove wants – like closing libraries, which is just a disaster.” Alan Garner, author of children’s classic The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, meanwhile, questioned the advisability of turning books into numbers. “Is any number a useful guide?” he asked. “The important aim should be a reading that is wide and deep rather than numerical. In my own primary school years I read everything I could find, which amounted to at least four books a week and as many comics as possible. The Beano and The Dandy were equal with Tarzan of the Apes, Enid Blyton, HG Wells, Kipling, wildlife books, fairy tales, encyclopaedias. This resulted, painlessly, in a large vocabulary, an awareness of differences of style, the absorption of grammar and syntax and an ability to spell.” Philip Pullman, author of the prizewinning His Dark Materials trilogy, agreed – and added a further caveat. “I’m all in favour of children reading books, of course, the more the merrier,” he said. “What I’m wary of is that people will start saying that quality is more important than quantity. When it comes to reading books, children should be allowed – and encouraged – to read as much rubbish as they want to. But that can only happen when there are plenty of good books as well as rubbish all around them. Where are they going to get these 50 books a year from?” Meanwhile, Miranda McKearney, chief executive of the Reading Agency, which runs an annual Summer Reading Challenge in which children are encouraged to read six library books over the holiday, expressed concern over the execution of Gove’s ambition. “So often the discussion about how to inspire children to read focuses just on schools, but libraries, and families, have a key role to play,” she said. “We won’t crack the problems unless we build a more systemic approach.” Michael Gove Young people Children Children and teenagers Children’s laureate Benedicte Page guardian.co.uk
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Party leader tells candidates they have ‘everything to gain’ in the six weeks before elections which polls suggest Labour will win Alex Salmond has admitted the Scottish National party is still short of achieving a winning position in the race to triumph at the Holyrood elections in May, as the campaign jumped into gear. Speaking just after Holyrood was formally dissolved, Salmond appeared to hint that the SNP was starting as underdog when he told his party’s candidates that they had “nothing to fear” but had “everything to gain” in this campaign. He said the SNP were still three points off achieving the 40% of the votes they needed on 5 May to secure a second term in office. As the Weber Shandwick “poll of polls” showed Labour eight points clear of the SNP, Salmond acknowledged that a sufficient number of voters still had to be persuaded that his party was best able to govern Scotland. Referring to that 40% target, he said: “The recent polls show us within touching distance of achieving that objective, still a few points behind but I think we can go into this campaign with confidence. Because as the choice becomes clear, [as] the contrast between the SNP team and the Labour team becomes starkly obvious and as the message of a 100 brilliant commitments by this SNP government becomes clear, then we’ve nothing to fear from this campaign. “On the contrary, we’ve everything to gain in this next six weeks. Can we take our vote from 37% to 40% over the next six weeks, you bet we can.” Salmond’s cautious assessment is confirmed by senior party figures, who admit privately that its private polling puts the SNP three to four points behind Labour. Asked whether he did see himself as the underdog, Salmond said: “It’s a neck and neck race, and I’m taking nothing for granted. That’s your word, not mine. I’m quite happy with the position we’re in … It’s going to be a close finish.” That contrasts strongly with the SNP’s consistent lead in the polls at this point during the 2007 campaign, when the party won its first term of government. By the start of that campaign, the nationalists had established a lead in the polls for several months. The next Scottish parliament is expected to sit for a five-year term, after Westminster passed legislation fixing its current parliament at five years which would have clashed with the original May 2015 date for the following Holyrood election. Holyrood now has new powers to hold its election a year later. Weber Shandwick and its politics website ScotlandVotes.com said analysis of all the recent polls put Labour on course to win 60 of Holyrood’s 129 seats – five short of majority – against the SNP’s 46 seats. Moray Macdonald, Weber Shandwick’s deputy managing director in Scotland, said Labour was taking votes chiefly at the expense of the Liberal Democrats, who are down to 9% and are expected to suffer heavily with public anger over the Lib Dem-Tory coalition in Westminster. The main parties are expected to unveil their manifestos in early April and formally launch their campaigns from next week. Labour began its effort with a 48-hour tour of “battleground” seats in Edinburgh, Fife and central Scotland by its Scottish leader, Iain Gray. Speaking during the last first minister’s questions in Holyrood before the parliament was dissolved, Gray accused Salmond of holding back crucial announcements until the last four weeks for “partisan party advantage”. He said: “Well, it doesn’t make up for four years of promises broken, schools unbuilt, projects cancelled, criminals released and thousands extra on the dole. Times up. Hasn’t the first minister failed on all the big issues that really matter?” Scottish National Party (SNP) Scottish politics Alex Salmond Scotland Labour Liberal Democrats Conservatives Severin Carrell guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Workers resumed efforts to bring Japan’s Fukushima nuclear complex under control today but a pool for storing spent fuel at the plant has presented yet another problem, AP reports. A nuclear safety official says the pool is heating up and temperatures are at or near the boiling point. The pool…
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Changing the way the health service operates is essential, argues former minister Lord Warner in a new book At a time when Labour may think it has the government on the ropes over its planned NHS shakeup, the party’s leadership is unlikely to welcome a book being launched next week by Lord Warner, the former health minister under Tony Blair, on why the health service should embrace market-based reform. But Warner has never been one to hold back on speaking his mind. In 2009, when Gordon Brown was pushing through policy of free personal care at home, Warner branded it a “cruel deception”. Last month, as a member of the Dilnot commission on long-term care funding, he appeared to jump the gun on the commission’s conclusions by declaring that any compulsory form of care insurance would not “fit the public mood music”. Now the former civil servant, social services director and Youth Justice Board chair is returning to the NHS debate with some typically trenchant reflections on what he thinks should be done to secure the service for the future. While the government could succeed where Labour lost its nerve on reform, he thinks, the plans before parliament need some serious underpinning to work. “Simply increasing the influence of clinicians without changing the way the NHS does its business will not deliver desired change,” Warner concludes in the book, A Suitable Case for Treatment – the NHS and Reform. “Without a more robust financial, economic and performance architecture, greater devolution and clinician power could produce financial meltdown …” It is clear from the book that Warner was frustrated by much of his ministerial experience, from 2003 to 2006, particularly after becoming minister of state in 2005 and taking responsibility for NHS delivery and subsequently reform. He acknowledges that Labour “saved” the service, but laments the “serious mistakes” he believes it made in failing to achieve effective commissioning of healthcare, allowing an excessive expansion of the workforce, thus worsening productivity, and ducking the challenge of replacing seriously underperforming and unsustainable hospitals and other care providers. It is the latter that he regards as the acid test of the coalition’s plans, much of which he admits he supports. “Having given people a reasonable chance to remedy their defects,” he says, “you have to be able then to remove them and let some new players come in. Whether they are from the NHS, social enterprise or the private sector, I don’t think I care. “But one of the things I do care about, which is one of the reasons for writing the book, is just allowing failure to carry on, taking taxpayers’ money and giving lousy services to the public. And many of those lousy services are in the poorer areas: the sharp-elbowed middle classes usually find some way to cope with the problem.” He wants to see evidence that the coalition is serious about penalising failure. He wants also a tougher financial management regime for the new-look NHS and intends to table an amendment to the reform legislation in the Lords, proposing a financial management standards board sitting within the NHS commissioning board and drawing on outside expertise. Appalling management “No one else in the world would be running an £80bn or £100bn business based on the kind of appalling financial management we have in the NHS,” he says. “It’s a very curious state of affairs to be expending that amount of public money on something where, on the whole, we don’t know the costs of goods and services and we certainly don’t know the different costs between different providers. “I find it difficult to see how you can have any kind of market of proper competition if you don’t have, in the public arena, a financial management system which delivers more and better information about the costs of goods and services.” Warner thinks the jury is out on whether GP-led commissioning will work as the coalition hopes. To do so, he says, it will need far better data collection and analysis than primary care trusts ever had and, above all, a willingness and capacity to “reign in” the acute hospital sector and switch resources into community health services and social care. The acute sector, he argues, is clinging to a model of care that is wholly outdated for the ageing population. “Stacking significant numbers of 85- to 90-year-olds, largely women, in the medical wards of acute hospitals doesn’t seem to me an appropriate clinical business response for this day and age,” he says. Urging a big shift towards more care of older people in nursing homes, which is far cheaper and away from the threat of hospital-acquired infections, he adds: “Many more could be in single rooms in nursing homes, being nursed and managed more safely than on bayed wards in hospitals.” Among other items on the Warner wish-list are a fresh and strategic approach to managing the NHS estate, making far better use of its land, buildings and facilities, and an end to national pay bargaining to allow flexibility in local labour markets. Such ideas, he accepts, clash with what he sees as the innately introspective nature of the NHS – “a major problem” – and an unwillingness among much of its leadership to approach it as a business. He likens the NHS mindset to that of local government leaders in the 1970s and early 1980s. “They were forced, brutally, by Thatcher to start looking outside for some of the solutions to their problems. It’s not about handing stuff over lock, stock and barrel to the private sector; it’s actually getting on your bike and going to look at how other businesses do their business.” As a minister, he recalls, he was repeatedly told that things he was suggesting were “not the NHS way”. “Well,” he says, “it’s about time they were.” But Warner is not confident. “Bringing about NHS change,” he reflects in the conclusion to his book, “becomes like a first world war battle, capturing a few yards at a time – often with casualties – and then along comes a new general who beats a retreat. As the coalition government tries to take the Blair reforms to their logical conclusion, history suggests they may have the same experience.” • A Suitable Case for Treatment, by Lord [Norman] Warner, is published by Grosvenor House at £16. NHS Health Doctors Nursing David Brindle guardian.co.uk
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On a run with the Kenyan military, Adharanand Finn experiences unexpected psychological challenges As birthday treats go, it’s an unusual one. I leave the house at 7am and head up the pot-holed road out of Nairobi and into Ngong. There, near the top of a hill, I pull off the road and follow a dirt track into a field. The wind is blowing hard as I come to a halt on the grass and step out of the car. Weathered military tents flap rhythmically along one side of the field. In front of the tents, about thirty men and women in running kit stand in lines listening as a man with a stick under his arm paces back and forth and talks to them in Kiswahili. I’m 37 years old today. And to celebrate, I’ve come for a morning run with the Kenyan Air Force. The lined-up personnel all turn to watch me as I walk across the grass to where a few plastic chairs have been left under a tree. One of the men breaks rank to come over to see me. I guess there needs to be some kind of security check in a military camp. The other people, I presume, are supposed to be standing to attention, but they’re all smiling at me. The lines are not even straight. I tell the man I was invited to run by one of the coaches, Benjamin Mbusya. It seems to be a good enough explanation, as he smiles, says “Karibu” (welcome) and returns to his line. The Kenyan armed forces employ athletes to live and train at various camps like this, mostly up here in the Ngong Hills – I pass two more on my way to the Air Force camp. The runners have to undergo some basic military training, and occasionally have to don uniform for a parade, but otherwise they live as full-time athletes with the freedom to come and go largely as they please. It’s a very loose arrangement and I find it hard to pin down exactly how it works. Nancy Langat, the Olympic 1500m champion, for example, is a member of this very camp, but she’s not here now. I can’t imagine she spends too much time here, to be honest. Unlike the camps in Iten, which are full of distance runners, this camp includes athletes from every event, from the high jump and shot put, to the sprints and hurdles. The military invests in the athletes in order to do well in the national championships, where it hopes to beat its arch rivals, the police and the prisons service. At the recent national cross country championships , the armed forces were outshone by the police, who named some of the best runners in the world, including both winners, Geoffrey Mutai and Linet Masai, among their ranks. I’m teamed up with a group of eight men for this morning’s one-hour forest run. Coach Benjamin orders one of the athletes to stick with me if I start to drop behind, which is reassuring. The run starts off at a gentle pace. “Poli, poli,” (slowly, slowly) they say. Falsely buoyed by my recent run with the Nairobi Hash House Harriers , where I was easily one of the fastest runners in the group, I set off at the front. For one mad moment I even contemplate pushing the pace on, before my rational self steps in to point out that I’m running with the Kenyan military here. The Hash House Harriers it is not. For the first half an hour or so, I push along happily in the group, up and down the hills, enjoying the sense of movement, the feeling of being part of a group, a tribe of steely warriors making our way purposefully across field and glade. We follow dirt tracks that meander up to the top of the hills. Up here the landscape resembles a huge British allotment, with small plots of cultivated land and wooden huts dotted everywhere. Except that the huts are people’s houses. After about half an hour, however, as the pace gradually, almost imperceptibly, increases, I begin to drift back. Up a particularly steep hill, my legs grow suddenly weary. Once the momentum of the group is lost, I find it harder to push myself on. The man who was ordered to stay with me eases down to my pace, along with another runner. Knowing that they will stay with me no matter how slow I go is not good for my motivation. On previous runs, the thought that I may end up lost has pushed me on, but here I’m free to give in to my legs’ demands, and slow down. I can’t quite decide, as I run, whether I’m being pathetic, or whether I’ve already been heroic for keeping up this long. The two runners next to me are finding the new pace very easy. This may be the military, but they’re very good natured about my slow running. There is no “beasting” or shouting, or even any real encouragement to go faster. “Just enjoy it,” one says to me when I apologise for slowing down. These really aren’t soldiers. As I don’t have a watch, I try asking them, between gasps, how far we have left to run. “This is the last hill,” says one, as we make our way through a herd of goats blocking the path. “Nearly there.” It’s amazing, sometimes, how psychological running is. Suddenly my legs feel light and frisky again. Once we get past the goats, I pick up the pace to the top of the hill and start stretching out along the gradual downhill slope on the other side. They match me stride for stride, of course, relieved to be moving again. The main group is actually not that far ahead. “Perhaps I can catch them,” I think, opening out my stride. It feels great. The last hill is done. It’s lovely downhill all the rest of the way. Although they call it a forest run, it is only now, for the first time, that we actually head into any forest. The path winds around from one side to the other, occasionally rising up a little short hill. At each turn I keep thinking we must be about to finish, but we don’t. “Five more minutes,” says one of the runners, sensing that I’m starting to slow again. Five minutes? That’s more than I was expecting. But I’ve slowed them down enough. I can manage. Finally the finish comes in sight. The other runners are standing around stretching. I make a vague attempt at a sprint, and then we’re done. Hand shakes all around. The others are smiling. I’m panting. But it’s done. Another run survived. I leave them eating mangoes for breakfast back at the camp as I return to Nairobi, where my wife and children have prepared a big chocolate cake for my birthday. • The book Running with the Kenyans by Adharanand Finn will be published in 2012 Running Fitness Adharanand Finn guardian.co.uk
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Mark Thompson says ‘Delivering Quality First’ initiative is looking at several cost-saving ideas put forward by staff Dan Sabbagh: Mark Thompson’s BBC cuts splurge Overnight programmes on BBC1 and BBC2 could be axed, and natural history shows and BBC1 dramas repeated more often, as part of a series of cost-saving ideas being considered by the BBC. According to the BBC director general, Mark Thompson, about £150m a year could be saved if output between 10.35pm and 6am was cut on the BBC’s main television channels. Programmes currently occupying those slots range from arts series Imagine to The Graham Norton Show, and from films to late night sport. In addition, BBC2 could lose its original daytime shows, BBC1 could be made “the home of regional and national programmes with BBC2 network only” and the corporation could “re-show BBC1 dramas and natural history programmes more often”, potentially in peak time. The ideas are some of many being discussed as part of Thompson’s “Delivering Quality First” (DQF) initiative, which aims to work out how the BBC can manage with a six-year licence fee freeze and taking on additional obligations such as BBC World Service after 2014-15 . Thompson unveiled 21 different proposals that have so far been put forward by staff but admitted there is chaff among the wheat, saying: “Some, frankly, are ideas that aren’t going to fly.” He would not be drawn on which ones he thought were, saying the BBC is still “engaging” with staff and the corporation’s policy will not be finalised until the summer. Thompson suggested that slots used by overnight programming could be taken up by HD shows. “What you could potentially do in a world where we are struggling to get [more] HD distribution, we could use early hours of the morning to broadcast some HD programmes,” he said. Broadcasting HD shows overnight could also potentially reduce the “download pressure” of viewers trying to watch them on the BBC iPlayer via broadband connections. However, key late night shows such as BBC2′s Newsnight are unlikely to be affected after Thompson said it was “one of our most important programmes”. Looking at the reasons behind DQF, he said the goal is to “improve the quality and value of the BBC’s services and maintain or increase their reach within the licence fee settlement”. Thompson said that “as a rule of thumb” although the licence fee will be frozen at £145.50 per household until the end of 2016, the “total amount of money available to the BBC will rise in nominal terms” due to the predicted increase in the number of households, existing savings, reduced collection costs and evasion and a drive to increase commercial revenue. He also said that taken together these factors amount to about a 10% increase in licence fee money by 2016, “around 1 or 2% a year” and that they are “roughly equivalent to the increase in [funding] obligations” the BBC is taking on, such as the World Service, S4C, and local news content. He explained: “If commercial revenue is strong it will more than help pay for the additional obligations and some of inflation.” Thompson said inflation was the main problem for the BBC, citing long-term strategic contracts and staff costs as key issues. He added that while many ideas have been put forward about how to change programming, he is looking for more ideas about how the BBC can “make things more decisive and quicker” and “issues around employment”. He reiterated that service “closures are unlikely”. He said the BBC is going to “over-deliver” on its current savings programme by about 2% of the licence fee. BBC staff will meet on 7 April to discuss the first stage of DQF, with policy finalised by July, when proposals will be put to executives and the BBC Trust. •
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