BBC Trust

Debate between Gareth Johnson and Rob Wilson

Wednesday 24th April 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Wilson]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for leading the way in holding the BBC to account, in particular for its expenditure. If local authorities and Departments can account for everything over £500, there is absolutely no reason why the BBC should not do exactly the same.

Last autumn, the BBC instead suffered a severe loss of public trust and its problems were allowed to spiral out of control. While public trust in the BBC appears to have recovered somewhat in the months since, that is surely a reflection of the depth of the good will towards Auntie among the British public, and it should not be a cause for complacency. Unless the BBC has high standards of governance, with active leadership and oversight by its governing body, the chances are that it will be hit by more scandals, and that the cumulative effect on its reputation could be disastrous.

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate and on leading on such matters. As chairman of the all-party BBC group, I take an interest in the governance of the BBC. He mentioned the vile antics of Jimmy Savile, which affected several public sector organisations. The BBC, to its credit, set up two reviews to look at the effect on its organisation. It would be unfair to accuse the BBC of being the only organisation to be affected by Savile’s antics, and it has done more than some other public sector organisations affected by his behaviour.

[Mr Wilson]

I was going to come on to that point but, as my hon. Friend has made it, I agree that the BBC was not the only organisation affected by Jimmy Savile; there were problems in the NHS, Broadmoor and other places. The BBC reacted, but only when it was under enormous pressure to do so; it was dragged kicking and screaming to the point at which it would undertake reviews. I was in contact with the BBC from the very start, and I can tell the Chamber as a fact that it did not want to indulge in any form of review at that time. It got there in the end, but it should have got there much earlier, which is one of the main criticisms of the management at the time.

We need the BBC Trust to ensure that the BBC is open and transparent, accountable to the public and responsible in its use of public money. So far, in the post-Savile and McAlpine era, the signs are not encouraging. I want to focus on three matters of concern.

First, given the widespread public anger in recent years about lavish spending at the BBC, it is unacceptable that the BBC continues to refuse to publish the costs of the Pollard review and related post-Savile inquiries. According to some estimates, they may add up to more than the Leveson inquiry, which was a public inquiry on a vastly larger scale that lasted for almost a year rather than a couple of months at best. However, what is really inexplicable is that the BBC Trust has refused to challenge the corporation’s management to publish that information. I understand that Lord Laird wrote to Lord Patten last month seeking confirmation of how much the Pollard review will cost and that Lord Patten refused to provide or even find out the information. When Lord Laird wrote a further letter, Lord Patten did not respond, and has not yet done so as far as I know. Why should licence fee payers remain in the dark about the amount of money spent in their name?

More seriously, the Pollard report was full of holes from the day it was published. Lord Patten was keen to jump on the fact that the Pollard report exonerated the BBC management on the most serious charge, that of suppressing a “Newsnight” investigation into Savile to protect the corporate interests of the BBC, but the evidence compiled by Pollard does not in any way justify a clean bill of health. There is still no explanation of why deputy news chief Steve Mitchell took the “Newsnight” Savile investigation off the managed risk list of potentially controversial stories in November 2011, before it was quietly dropped by the then editor. Pollard, with no power to question witnesses under oath, completely failed to get a proper account of the conversations between the deputy head of news and the editor of “Newsnight” before what we are told was the editor’s personal decision to axe the Savile exposé. Pollard was particularly scathing about Mitchell’s convenient multiple lapses of memory during the inquiry, as well as several other aspects of Mitchell’s conduct, yet neither Mitchell nor anyone else at the BBC has been fired as a result of one of the most damaging failures in its history.

However, the most important unresolved issue, and the one that the BBC needs to learn lessons from, is whether—and if so, why—the BBC’s most senior management chose to ignore the multiple warnings they received about Savile. Let us not forget that Savile was probably the country’s most prolific paedophile ever discovered, and yet he worked seemingly unfettered at the BBC for decades. The BBC is not the only culprit, but it is astounding to think that the BBC’s culture, systems and management could have allowed that to happen, despite the wreckage caused to the lives of so many young people. It is still rather sickening to reflect on. The BBC would have emerged with far greater credit had it confronted the mounting allegations against Savile head-on. Instead, it kept them quiet for as long as it possibly could, before finally being publicly confronted and indeed engulfed by the truth. Years of rottenness tumbled into full view of the public.

The issue goes right to the top of the BBC at the time. In particular, the Pollard report concluded that it had no reason to disbelieve the story of then director-general Mark Thompson that he knew nothing about the sexual abuse allegations against Savile or about the nature of the “Newsnight” investigation until after he left the BBC. That is frankly implausible. The BBC’s former head of news and current head of radio, Helen Boaden, told the Pollard inquiry in a legal letter that she had informed Mark Thompson in December 2011 about the nature of the allegations against Savile. Shockingly, the evidence of the BBC’s then most senior female executive on the issue was given zero weight and was not even mentioned in the Pollard report. Instead, we were asked to believe that when Mark Thompson was sufficiently worried to call the head of BBC News to discuss the “Newsnight” investigation into Savile, he somehow, miraculously, never gained any indication of what the investigation was about.

Thompson maintains his denials of knowing anything about the Savile allegation, despite the fact that they were drawn to his office’s attention on at least 10 other occasions before he left the BBC in 2012. He even authorised the threat of a libel action to The Sunday Times. Leaders should be accountable for their own performance and for that of their organisations. It is not in the interests of the BBC or any other public sector organisation for a culture to emerge in which leaders may turn a blind eye to problems and evade their responsibilities with impunity.

I hope that the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport will make good its promise to call Helen Boaden and Mark Thompson before it to clear the matter up once and for all. MPs should not have to deal with such issues. Frankly, an active BBC Trust and an active chairman would have made it their business to get to the bottom of the matter without delay. Instead, having spent millions of pounds of public money on inquiries, Lord Patten and the trust seem content to pass lingering questions about failures in the BBC’s management into the hands of its executive. At the very least, that shows an amazing lack of curiosity by Lord Patten to get at the truth.

The BBC Trust’s chief response to the Savile and McAlpine scandals seems to have been to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money on getting rid of its previous choice of director-general, almost via constructive dismissal, and then parachuting in another one with no open competition or advertisement. The new director-general in turn has parachuted several cronies into lavishly paid top jobs with no open appointment process. Instead of making appointments at the top of the BBC more open and more meritocratic, they are now, ironically, less open than the procedures at the Bank of England. That is completely and utterly unacceptable.

Of course, I wish Lord Hall all the best in his difficult work, but the manner of his appointment, overseen by the BBC Trust, marks a step backwards, not forwards. As I understand it, the perception among BBC journalists is that the changes at the BBC since Savile, which was a gross failure of management, have entirely suited the management rather than the staff.

I have been less than impressed by the performance of the BBC’s other regulator, Ofcom. After the glaring flaws in the “Newsnight” report on child sex abuse allegations in north Wales became immediately obvious, I wrote to Ofcom asking it to investigate potentially serious breaches of the broadcasting code, and a related incident involving some fairly crass behaviour on ITV’s “This Morning” programme. Ofcom replied in November 2012 announcing that it had opened an investigation into both programmes. Nearly six months later, we are none the wiser as to its conclusions or even the state of its investigation. Again, instead of effective regulation and oversight, it looks as though Ofcom is happy for that issue to remain in the long grass.

I will conclude by asking a number of questions of the Minister. Does he agree with Lord Patten that governance is somehow a second-order issue? Does he think it is important that the BBC Trust is active, and a proactive guardian of licence fee payers’ interests? What assessment have the Government made of the current BBC Trust’s performance during the Savile and McAlpine scandals and more broadly? Does it have his full confidence? Does he agree with the right hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Dame Tessa Jowell) that the BBC Trust has

“not yet been a strong enough or assertive enough voice on behalf of the licence-fee payer”?

Above all, there are two key questions for the Government to consider. In the long term, is the trusteeship model right for oversight and regulation of the BBC? More immediately, given the reputational damage the BBC has suffered over the past year, does the Minister have confidence in the current trustees and are they the right people to lead the BBC into the next licence fee settlement and beyond?