A planned 48-hour strike by thousands of BBC staff scheduled for next Tuesday has been called off after the director general, Mark Thompson, agreed to a yearlong moratorium on compulsory redundancies.
Making a number of changes to his plan to slash jobs and reduce budgets by 15%, Mr Thompson pledged not to sell off the outside broadcast division BBC Resources. There will also be further negotiations on how the cuts will be managed to avoid a "revolving door" policy where staff are sacked only to be rehired months later.
But the director general said in an email to staff that there was "no further movement to make" and that he would not budge on the overall level of almost 4,000 job losses, almost certain to include compulsory cuts after the yearlong grace period.
Union officials agreed to call off Tuesday's strike and put the deal to their members but refused to recommend that they accept, warning that further strikes remained a possibility if the compromise deal was rejected.
A 20-hour meeting between unions and management was held at the government conciliation service Acas. The breakthrough came at around 7pm on Thursday when union officials left the offices for talks with Mr Thompson.
The two sides then spent most of the night in separate rooms with Acas officials acting as go-betweens. Leaders from the broadcasting union Bectu, the National Union of Journalists and Amicus emerged at 6am yesterday to announce that they had agreed to call off next week's strikes as a "gesture of goodwill".
The first stoppage in a planned series of strikes on Monday decimated the schedules on Radio 4 and Radio 5 Live and curtailed television news coverage as thousands of staff, including big names such as Jeremy Paxman, John Humphrys and Fiona Bruce, stayed at home.
The union leaders will put the BBC's new offer to representatives around the country at a meeting next Tuesday but are not recommending that they accept.
"Management has made significant concessions regarding privatisation but has failed adequately to address concerns over job losses. The unions reserve the right to give notice of further strike action should the proposal be rejected by representatives," they said.
BBC staff were split over whether to accept the offer. Some felt it represented a good starting point for negotiations but others, particularly in the news division, were angry that it did not address the central question of how the cuts would affect quality.
Mr Thompson has repeatedly insisted that the job cuts and budget reduction are vital to prepare the BBC for the digital age and secure a favourable licence fee settlement from the government. He wants to make annual savings of £355m over three years to reinvest in programming and new technology.
Yesterday in a memo to staff he said that the BBC had "approached the talks very flexibly and determined to find a resolution if at all possible", adding that he hoped the proposed deal would be "the first step in a new and productive relationship with the unions".
But he insisted that the BBC could not afford to cede any more ground and said there would be no more concessions, even if the unions called more strikes.
"We have told them that we have no further movement to make, no matter how long the dispute continues," he added.
BBC Resources, whose future was uncertain, will now remain part of the corporation until at least June 2007 if the offer is accepted. As part of the plan, the costume and wigs division would not be sold off.
The BBC and the unions said they would make no further comment until after Tuesday's meeting.
