Cuts can be made at the BBC so long as it's the managers

Despite the grotesque sums paid to the likes of Jonathan Ross, most of those who do the actual work at the BBC are very stretched indeed. When I was on Radio 4's Today, we had 55 staff to produce 17 hours of radio each week - and we couldn't play any records or have any phone-ins.

Beneath the surface, the programme was often only separated from missing an interview, losing a clip or even falling off air by a single harried 22-year-old production assistant who'd already been on duty for 12 hours. And that was the BBC's flagship show. God knows what Good Morning Scunthorpe must have been like.

People pay their licence fee for the BBC, and know roughly what to expect in return. Will they be happy to have some of their money diverted to potentially more random, and less accountable, programme-makers?

Over the past couple of years, something even worse for British journalism than BBC cuts has happened. Across the commercial sector, from ITV to local newspapers, the current advertising-based business model is collapsing. It can no longer support the plural, diverse media that we need. That requires the crossing of old red lines and new, non-commercial sources of funding.

The BBC is vital, but it cannot be a monopoly. News and documentary-makers like Channel 4 are often as good, or better, despite their disparity in resources. For though the Corporation carries little fat at the programme level, there is one part of it Lord Carter can slice all he likes and do only good.

When I worked at the BBC, I sometimes ventured upstairs from the cramped news offices to marvel at the calm, beautifully furnished space given over to marketing executives and strategy co-ordinators.

As the BBC has collected more and more managers, it has become worse and worse managed. Almost every time its managers make a decision - from Quizgate to Ross to University Challenge - they get it wrong. Editorial compliance procedures, the consequences of those management mistakes, have become stifling.

Top-slicing would be OK if it did indeed mean slicing the top: transferring resources from BBC managers to non-BBC journalists and forcing the Corporation to focus on making programmes, rather than writing memos.