LONDON, Oct 25: The BBC, the world's biggest public broadcaster, is to cut almost a quarter of its 28,000-strong workforce, in the biggest shake-up in its 82-year history, The Times newspaper in London said Monday.

The BBC rejected the report as speculative.

The daily said that news gathering and production operations at the broadcaster would bear the brunt of a series of cost-cutting exercises planned from next year by BBC chiefs and ordered by chairman Michael Grade.

A BBC spokesman said that the 6,000 staff losses quoted in The Times were "all purely speculative at this point", adding that four reviews on different aspects of the organisation were due to report in December.

The shake-up comes as the British government mulls the renewal in 2006 of the BBC's 10-year royal charter which enables it to gather a licence fee from all television owners in the country.

Licence fees brought the BBC an income of 2.8 billion pounds (four billion euros, 5.2 billion dollars) in 2003, The Times said.

Relations between Downing Street and the BBC have been strained since a row over Iraq last year.

Former BBC director general Greg Dyke resigned in January after an independent report into the suicide of respected defence ministry weapons expert David Kelly faulted the corporation for lax editorial management.

Kelly had been the source of a BBC radio report in May 2003 which alleged that Prime Minister Tony Blair's government had "sexed up" pre-war intelligence on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.-AFP