John Humphrys and Jeremy Paxman should stop complaining about the BBC budget cuts in public and raise their concerns about the impact on the news operation in private, the corporation’s Chairman said yesterday.

Sir Michael Lyons was speaking as Mark Thompson, the BBC Director-General, was criticised for a five-star trip to India while employees were braced for about 2,600 job cuts, including 600 among its news journalists.

Sir Michael summoned journalists to rally support for Mr Thompson’s restructuring and cost-cutting proposals, which are due to be announced next week, as senior executives complained that the BBC repeatedly shot itself in the foot when high-profile presenters complained about how the corporation was being run.

“In most companies you would not have members of staff openly debating strategy and whether it’s right or not,” Sir Michael said, before adding: “To say it’s untidy is perhaps an understatement.” The Chairman conceded that there was a “difficult balance to be struck” and that while he hoped that critics would make comments through internal channels, he was unsure that this would happen. “Will they do that? We will have to wait and see,” he said.

Last month Humphrys, the Radio 4 Today presenter, said: “If continuing with channels like BBC Three and BBC Four means that the price to pay is that there must be damaging cuts to core programmes, then I don’t believe that is a price worth paying.”

Jeremy Paxman, speaking in Edinburgh in August, described the BBC as “a bit like working in Stalin’s Russia, with one five-year plan, one resoundingly empty slogan after another”.

Despite the criticism, Sir Michael hinted that he shared Humphrys’s worries about the digital channels BBC Three and BBC Four, which have failed to attract big audiences despite substantial budgets. Although the BBC Trust, of which he is Chairman, has ruled out closing either channel to meet cost savings immediately, Sir Michael said that there was a need to “review this the other side of the digital switchover” in 2012. The Chairman made it clear that he supported the redundancy plans. He questioned whether job cuts were “actually the story here” and said that they would affect a small number of staff — although the figures amount to about 12 per cent of the workforce and about one in five in BBC News.

With Sir Michael in London, Mr Thompson was spending five days in India, including hosting a dinner in Bombay — the cost of which has been estimated at £12,000 — for the BBC’s Indian partners, as the corporation’s commercial arm tries to make inroads into the country’s growing markets.

His visit is the first to India by a BBC director-general, and comes just days before a meeting of the BBC Trust on October 17 at which Mr Thompson will present the cost-cutting plans for approval. Employees will learn their fate on October 18.

India accounts for 1 per cent of the £810 million annual turnover of the BBC’s commercial arm, Worldwide, with three channels available there — BBC World, BBC Entertainment and an Indian version of CBeebies.

The chief executive of Worldwide, John Smith, plans to triple this. “This is patently an important media market and we are increasingly an international media company,” Mr Smith, the BBC’s former finance director, said. “There is no fixed ceiling [on investment]; we will simply back what is appropriate to our strategy.”

A spokeswoman for Worldwide defended the timing of the trip, saying that it had been “long scheduled”. Because the trip falls under the BBC’s commercial activities, the corporation said that it was not under any obligation to disclose the costs of the dinner it was hosting.

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