[interestednovice]

Absolutely leewilliams, let’s not forget that a career in the media is all about profile and activity - so a year off, even if fully paid, does you no favours in the long run.

Also, although we can’t be certain about how the process was conducted exactly, we were critical here at the start that they simply hadn’t appointed enough Chief Presenters (so that much was obvious pretty early on). Employment law is very complicated, and I don’t want to talk about anybody’s case here because it is not the place for it, but I will just say that we do know that you can’t “fire and rehire” by making people redundant and then hiring new cheaper people to replace them in broadly the same role. If restructuring a business, and making redundancies, you have a duty to attempt to find new roles for them wherever possible. It doesn’t necessarily seem that the BBC did this fairly or correctly, especially for former UK NC presenters. I know their review concluded that their own processes were not wrong, but the poor nature of the outcome (leaving many presenters in limbo for so long) and continuing questions about whether they “hand picked” the initial chosen few ahead of time, really raises serious concerns that they might not have followed employment procedures correctly.