Counting the costs of the BBC’s mistakes

As a report into the BBC’s handling of the £100 million failed DMI nears publication, Raymond Snoddy examines other mismanaged and costly failures under Mark Thompson’s governance.

It has been another very bad week for the BBC – again. The highlight was the publication of the PricewaterhouseCoopers report into the Digital Media Initiative (DMI) fiasco.

The report was understandably critical of BBC management of the project. The consultants could hardly have reached any other decision given that DMI cost BBC licence payers at least £100 million with absolutely nothing to show for it, and had already been described by BBC Trustee Anthony Fry as “an absolute catastrophe.”

PwC found that the BBC should have realised that DMI was likely to fail as early as July 2011 and that the failure to realise the project was in serious trouble in a more timely way came from “weaknesses in project management and reporting, a lack of focus on business change and piecemeal assurance arrangements.”

The BBC had already garnered unfortunate headlines this week through the refusal of the BBC Trust to release information on a board paper on the project in 2011 through the Freedom of Information Act.

The defence is the standard one that such disclosure would “inhibit the free and frank provision of advice from BBC staff to senior managers.”

The same is said of the release of Cabinet papers, and there is some merit in the argument.

However when £100 million of licence fee money is totally wasted, money that could have protected programmes, services and jobs, perhaps different rules should apply.
We are after all talking about a sum larger than the entire annual budget of Radio 4.

There is a strong case for exceptional openness over who knew what was going on with the DMI in perhaps the quixotic hope that such damaging and disgraceful mismanagement of the public’s funds can be avoided in future.

We are indebted to the Guardian for that very typical BBC artefact – a Governance and Guidance flow chart. It shows that the project was organised in three different sections – executive, steering and leadership. Leaving aside the usual gobbledegook, the diagram just shrieks “cock-up in waiting”.

Why on earth wasn’t there a single, unified, small, high-level group in complete charge of a project that was billed as vital for the future of the BBC?

Instead of an internal BBC digital content archive, which would have meant that staff could have called up and edited any archive material on their computers, tapes are still being physically delivered to Broadcasting House.

One of the groups involved, the ‘business direction group’, was chaired by the former director general Mark Thompson who worked, according to the Guardian, along with Raymond Le Gue, whose role it was to “lead the project team, mitigate risks and drive decisions.” Ah, yes – mitigating risks.

It is unsurprising that the name of Mark Thompson should continuously crop up in connection with top BBC disasters of recent years. After all, he was director general from 2004 until 2012.

We know a lot – if not quite all – about the Savile tributes and Newsnight affairs, as well as the £25 million in severance payments to 150 staff, some of it in excess of statutory requirements.

Some will have forgotten that £150 million was also wasted on the BBC Digital Curriculum project, which became BBC Jam – the online educational service that ran from the beginning of 2006 to March 2007. It closed because of a hardly unexpected legal challenge from private sector competitors on fair trading grounds.

These could all be random, unrelated, unfortunate events and a host of wonderful programmes were created between 2004 and 2012. They did, however, all happen on Thomson’s watch, and at the very least, it can be argued that there was little sign of learning from past errors.

The obvious common factors would include convoluted management structures, an excess of arrogance and shortage of openness, and a tendency to operate in silos. There was also a distrust of technology that wasn’t invented inside the BBC, even though the days of in house BBC engineering excellence were long gone.

Despite the general early achievements of Tony Hall – he closed down DMI to stop throwing good money after bad and capped all severance payments at £150,000 – there are still echoes of that lack of openness.

At the recent Voice of the Listeners and Viewers conference, Lord Hall made it clear he had accepted the findings of the Pollard inquiry into the Newsnight affair, and that was that so far as he was concerned. It might not be everyone’s view but it was his, Hall said, with more than a touch of complacency.

Hall’s unwillingness to scratch every sore from the past is understandable but, in this case, wrong.

The former head of Sky News has admitted on tape that he made a “mistake” in his inquiry. More attention should have been given to claims that the BBC’s former director of news, Helen Boaden, made more extensive efforts to inform Thompson about the Newsnight investigation than previously realised. You can’t allow such a significant issue to dangle unresolved and expect it to go away.

As for the Public Accounts Committee report, the conclusions and the language were both predictable. The BBC system of governance was “broken” and the BBC Trust has only a limited time to show it can be made to work.

There was, of course, what looks like a culture of cronyism at the top of the BBC and certainly a cavalier attitude to licence fee money. But the BBC Trust was specifically told that its job was to set the strategic direction of the Corporation and not get involved in the operational running of the organisation.

There is room for argument about where exactly strategy merges with operations in areas such as reputational damage and whether its remit should have been interpreted a little more flexibly. But it is clear that the MPs wilfully ignored the remit that was ultimately given to the Trust by Parliament.

Interestingly, the Trust has now spelled this out to make it clear it has no role in the day-to-day running of the BBC.

As it’s nearly Christmas, here’s a small note of good news from the BBC: the Corporation is allowing the national DAB station Team Rock to re-broadcast Tommy Vance’s final Friday Rock Show from Radio 1 this Christmas.

A small step, but at least one that goes in the right direction for a change.