BBC staff have lifted their threat to strike during the Jubilee weekend celebrations after successful talks between the BBC and BECTU, the UK's media and entertainment union, and the National Union of Journalists (NUJ).

Although the BBC has refused to improve on the pay increase of 1%, unions say they have secured significant concessions over measures to redeploy staff, rather than make them redundant, as well as improving protection for non-permanent staff, and securing a guarantee that management will not attempt to introduce cuts to anti-social hours allowances for new staff and will not introduce regional pay bargaining outside London.

BECTU general secretary, Gerry Morrissey said:

During the talks the BBC also reportedly agreed to introduce an internal database for all staff under threat of redundancy, where employees can post their CV and notes of any work for which they think they might be suitable. Managers must now look in that database first for suitably qualified candidates prior to posting any internal job adverts and will be required to give unions reasons why they did not pick someone from the redundancy database for a job.