[qwerty123]

I agree. If we look at who they’ve appointed recently, then Ben will probably replace Maryam as a general “across the schedule” fill-in anchor, as Maryam moves to her new programme. But he won’t be able to appear as often as Maryam did in the role because he will also be doing some News at One shifts. So there is sort of at least half a job unfilled there. Meanwhile Annita will probably return to mornings, as she did before, filling the time somewhere between Sally Bundock’s shift and Lucy Hockings. But there are two shifts unfilled in mornings, so maybe Geeta will take the other one (perhaps the earlier mostly global-feed one, as she was historically more often a WN presenter).

So there is probably another presenter needed as fill-in cover for holidays and illness, and also cover for weekends which currently have no fixed presenters. It’s probably sensible to allocate two or three weekend presenters on a permanent basis and then use the “presenter-reporters” for the rest. This would easily give a job for everyone currently facing an uncertain future and the BBC could avoid the bad press and ill feeling in the newsroom. Given that so many people have already left the organisation, there really aren’t too many people for roles.

At this point there really isn’t any work in the channel for the remaining displaced presenters as even assuming that both Ben and Geeta are being used to cover days off it only leaves 13 slots per week for what may well be 6-8 reporter presenters (I would suspect that Ben Thompson, Sarah Campbell and Lucy Grey at the very least on top of those whose names have been leaked).
People like Frankie McCamley and Luxmy Gopal who are clearly ambitious in their careers are also likely to be more important to the BBC in the longer term than the off air presenters so the BBC need to be careful not to restrict the younger presenters opportunities to an extent that sees them looking for work elsewhere.
The remaining displaced presenters would be better served with being offered redundancy or being reallocated to other vacant roles within BBC News (for example to replace Alex Lovell in Bristol or to finally give some consistency to South tonight or to boost the BBC One team in order to remove the need for Maryam, Katya and Tina to be covering semi-regularly).