What future now for the BBC Trust?
As the BBC sinks into yet another crisis, the future of the BBC Trust remains in the balance. Should it simply be put out of its misery? The answer from Raymond Snoddy is an emphatic no.
The public hue and cry is under way, in pursuit of the hapless and friendless BBC Trust. After the minor bloodletting at the Margaret Hodge Show on Monday the Trustees are as endangered as badgers in an experimental culling zone.
There was the warm up, the carefully placed leak in the Sunday Times, suggesting that the Trust was going to be abolished and replaced by Ofcom.
Then Hodge, speaking as she quite often does with the Royal “We” made it clear that she and all her colleagues thought the Trust was “broke.”
Up pops Jeremy Hunt on the Today programme to pronounce that the BBC Trust had been flawed since it began work in 2007 and its future was clearly under review. You would think Hunt would be far too busy with the problems of the National Health Service to be worrying about the BBC Trust.
The same song will be sung – though perhaps with more cautious words, at least for now – when the current Culture Secretary Maria Miller speaks at the Royal Television Society’s convention in Cambridge.
The Trust is so friendless that even its former chairman Sir Michael Lyons and its present chairman Lord Patten put a lot more effort into defending their own reputations this week than speaking up for the perfectly respectable work of the Trust itself.
Lord Patten has already indicated that he only wants to serve a single four-year term, which could run out just as the body is heading for the shredder. So he should be able to extract the maximum possible out of nice little £110,000 a year earner, however the politics play out.
As a very unstructured human drama, Monday’s Public Accounts Committee session just about held the interest of the audience, but ultimately little point was served.
No-one, whether BBC bureaucrats or MPs, emerged particularly well from the proceedings, except that Lord Patten managed to summon up enough energy to defend himself adroitly against the main charge he faced – misleading Parliament.
While there is a near compulsive desire to cheer on Margaret Hodge, because she is a Good Thing, she only managed a B grade in this performance.
She casually threw around the word “lying” which she couldn’t have done without the benefit of Parliamentary privilege. She failed to grasp the fact that the Trust is excluded constitutionally from getting involved in individual BBC salaries other than for the director-general.
So besotted was she by the issue of former deputy director-general Mark Byford’s near £1 million pay-off that not a word was said about much more serious issues: the £100 million lost on the BBC’s catastrophic digital project and whether former BBC director general Mark Thompson knew more about Newsnight’s Savile investigation than he has ever admitted publicly.
Hodge did score a direct hit of sorts when she asked whether Byford should not have been happy with the £500,000 pay-off he was entitled to, and didn’t really need the extra discretionary wonga to persuade him to continuing doing his job.
Thompson’s answer was breathtaking. The extra money was needed to ensure that Byford remained “focussed” on the many issues that the BBC faced at the time – sacking thousands of lesser mortals, the moves to Salford and Broadcasting House and the approach of the Olympics.
There are many views, some of them very rude, on how effective Mark Byford was as deputy-director general. But even his fiercest critics would have to accept that what he regarded as the best interests of the BBC is in his bone marrow. The notion that he would not have tried his best to the end without extra pump priming is just plain wrong and gratuitously insulting.
But what of the BBC Trust? Should it now just be put out of its misery?
The answer is an emphatic no.
There are really only three options for the governance of the BBC. Something that looks like the old Governors, creating a united board made up of executives and non-executives who are the representatives of the public.
This is a flawed system because the external “amateurs” are often captured as a result of the superior knowledge of the insiders. Which is why it was replaced.
As we have seen, the attempt to create some distance and space between the executives and the representatives in the BBC Trust with independent research, is itself flawed because that very space, admirably and deliberately created, leads to communication problems and misunderstandings.
The politicians now want to abolish the BBC Trust because of its obvious weaknesses.
Naturally they are now honing in on regulation of the BBC by Ofcom – another example of politicians inevitably being drawn to the worst possible idea in the way that iron filings are attracted to a magnet.
Giving Ofcom the power to regulate all of British broadcasting would be an unnecessary and potentially dangerous concentration of power. Ofcom’s view or the highway.
In a democracy, such as the haphazard one that has developed in the UK, diversification of centres of power and above all else diversity of opinion on subjective matters such as freedom of expression, remain vital. They are under threat already, not because of any over-arching conspiracy, but because of small examples of casual incompetence that flow from the likes of Leveson and the careless desire to abolish the BBC Trust.
Margaret Hodge this week was largely dealing with the past. Tony Hall has ushered in a new era at the BBC complete with long overdue limits on parting compensation.
For the Trust to survive it is now incumbent on the Lord Patten to raise his game, pay less attention to High Table dinners in Oxford and prove over the next two years that the separation of powers involved in the creation of the BBC Trust and the inevitable ambiguity that results, is the least bad system for governing the BBC.
As a recidivist politician he must realise what follies his fellow practitioners are capable of.