The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee has been having a torrid time trying to put together any reliable and coherent picture of what has been going on in the BBC over pay-offs to departing senior staff in the effort to cut the broadcaster’s operating costs.
It has seen the departing Head of Human Resources, Lucy Adams, deny all knowledge of a document and then have to admit she had written it.
It has heard the former Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, continue to assert that the BBC Trust had been briefed on the nature of the pay-offs to, for example, his own deputy, Mark Byford, who was given £1 million – £500,000 more than his contractual entitlement.
It has listened to the Chair of the BBC Trust, Chris Patten, repeatedly deny that he knew anything of this; and to his predecessor, Michael Lyons, declare that he ‘did not understand’ that payments had been made in excess of contractual requirements.
There is pitiably inadequate hard evidence to support or challenge anything because this ridiculously prodigal organisation had no systems capable of providing the necessary audit trail. They obviously didn’t have the budget to pay for it.
The contemptuous anger of the paying public was accurately communicated by Margaret Hodge, whose political career has seen no more potent performance than here in her chairing of this key parliamentary committee.
Beyond all the unprovables in the who knew whats and whens, one standout factor has played to the strengthening of the alienation of the public from its national broadcaster.
There is not one single sympathetic character in the parade of self-satisfied complacent fat cats with the glazed stare of the dictator – like Lord Patten; or the bean-counting policy wonks squinting into the light with no discernible imagination but pockets bagging under the loot- like Thompson and Byford [who chose not to appear].
Add to them the brief incumbent of the DG’s chair, the apparently gormless but profitably canny George Entwistle and his successor, Lord Hall, the lightweight who thought it appropriate on his first day to demonstrate for the cameras his proficiency in performing a song and dance routine.
Then there was the BBC Trust’s man on the Board’s ‘Remunerations Committee’, Marcus Agius. [Would someone care to offer the logic of how it is possible to be described as a 'Non Executive Director' who sits on the 'Executive Board'?] Due care for other people’s money is arguably erratic in Mr Agius. He had to resign as Chair of the Board of Barclays Bank after it was fined for manipulation of the Libor, the interbank lending rate.
You have to use this line up of undesirables as exemplars of the culture of governance at the BBC – and it is not a reassuring insight.
