Staff at the world-famous Natural History Unit of the BBC are reeling after being told that one in three of them is to be made redundant as part of cuts across the corporation.

The unit, which has made some of the best-known series for the BBC, including Planet Earth and The Blue Planet, will lose 10 of its 35 producers, 9 of its 17 assistant producers and 23 of its 33 researchers. In total, 57 of the 180 full-time staff will be cut.

Insiders claimed yesterday that the unit would be quite unable to keep up the current quality of its output with such a drastic reduction in staff. The majority of the researchers, for example, have degrees in zoology or a related subject and are experts in their fields.

One senior BBC employee said: “I don’t see how we could produce half our current output with just ten researchers. It is a very time-consuming, labour-intensive job.”

Mark Thompson, the Director-General of the BBC, announced last week that the corporation’s staff would be cut by 1,800 posts as a result of a licence fee settlement that was less than had been asked for.

The Natural History Unit expected to lose 10 to 15 per cent of its budget, but the size of the cuts has come as a shock. The unit, which is based in Bristol, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year with a range of new series in production. They include Life, a ten-part series on evolution, presented by Sir David Attenborough, to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.

Keith Scholey, the head of in-house factual productions for the BBC, said that the cuts were “desperately painful” but inevitable. The budget of the unit, which produces 100 hours of programmes and 50 hours of radio each year, had grown to around £37 million this year. The plan is to bring it down to £25 million within five years to match its income from the licence fee and commercial co-productions.

“We hope to be able to do that in such a way that the audience at home won’t notice any reduction in quality or the amount of natural history programming,” Mr Scholey added.

The unit's output

— Animal Magic. 1962 — 1983 Weekly programme for children

— The World About Us. 1967 — 1983

— Life on Earth. 1979 series seen by 500 million people worldwide

— The Living World. 1984. Presented by David Attenborough

— Supersense. 1988. The world through animal senses

— Life in the Freezer. 1993. The frozen continent

— Walking with Dinosaurs. 1999. Computer generated dinosaurs Blue Planet. 2001. Natural history of the oceans

— British Isles — A Natural History. 2004

— Planet Earth. 2006 The world’s last wildernesses

— Saving Planet Earth. 2007

Source: BBC

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