An award for Roly Keating for exceptional services to public service broadcasting
Another outbreak of trebles all round as the BBC made further progress in reducing the size of its phalanx of senior executives, says Raymond Snoddy. And then, something truly extraordinary happened…
When the current series of rows and recriminations at the BBC are finally over – if that day ever dawns – the BBC should spend a modest sum having a portrait painted.
It will not depict the image of 54-day director general George Entwistle, and certainly not the one-term BBC chairman Lord Patten.
The picture, which should be hung in a prominent place in New Broadcasting House, should show the unremarkable features of Roly Keating.
The former controller of both BBC 4 and BBC 2 was hardly ever the most high profile figure in the Corporation management. In image terms he then went positively subterranean by becoming director of the BBC’s archive content.
It’s the sort of deployment that usually follows some sort of corporate mishap, such as being involved in libelling Lord McAlpine or missing the scoop of the decade on Newsnight. Nothing like that here.
Keating may have actually wanted the job, but it seemed like the end of the story when he left his £250,000 BBC perch to run the British library for a more modest £150,000 a year stint among the books.
Naturally this was the BBC, so he left with a £350,000 compromise agreement that included a year’s salary plus £125,000 in lieu of notice.
Would he have gone without the pay-off and was the job going to disappear or not?
But what the hell. He was 51, there were probably no higher rungs to climb on the corporate ladder at the BBC, and his pay-off was agreed by both the then director-general Mark Thompson and Lucy Adams, the Corporation’s head of human resources.
Another outbreak of trebles all round as the BBC made further progress in reducing the size of its phalanx of senior executives.
Unfortunately, as the National Audit Office discovered, there had been no such agreement on the details of Keating’s award. And then something truly extraordinary happened.
Keating made it clear he was uncomfortable about receiving money which had not been “fully and appropriately authorised” – and gave the money back. He handed all the money back, minus the tax that had been deducted at source.
Has anything like it ever happened before at the BBC? Or indeed has anyone seen it happening anywhere throughout the entire media sector?
If a portrait is considered too formal or pompous a gesture to mark Keating’s selflessness, perhaps the Roly Keating award for exceptional services to public service broadcasting could be set up.
Another possibility would be to fund a documentary series carrying his name. Then when the other former senior BBC executives who have had their snouts in the trough, and have received controversial pay-offs start returning their money, new programme strands can be added. You could even fund a channel for a week or two.
As the dispute over the generous executive pay-offs looks like rumbling on into the autumn, there was the eye-watering news this week on the costs, so far of the mainly, Savile-linked inquiries.
The inquiries have eaten almost £5 million already. With the main investigation into Savile’s activities, and what BBC managers knew, still under way, the combined BBC efforts could easily surpass Lord Justice Leveson’s £6 million effort.
The £2.8 million spent on Nick Pollard’s look at Newsnight manifestations – £800,000 more than it was supposed to cost – is particularly interesting.
You would have to say that the £81,600 received by the former head of Sky News looks almost parsimonious, and certainly good value, considering what a through and forward-looking job he did.
Unsurprisingly, it was the lawyers who ran away with the costs. Pollard’s legal assistance from Reed Smith cost £893,501, more than 10 times Pollard’s fee. BBC witnesses received an additional £360,910 in legal support.
Entwistle received no less than £107,000 worth of legal support to appear before the review with Thompson given £86,000 for legal costs.
If you are going to carry out an inquiry it has to be both through and fair but were such large legal costs justified? These were not criminal trials where liberty might be at stake; these were only matters of professional competence and reputational damage and at the end of the process, only one early retirement was involved.
Should licence fee payers really have to pick up the legal costs of highly paid executives well able to speak for themselves?
The inquiry costs – large sums paid to departing executives, sometimes beyond strict contractual obligations – help to create an unfortunate image of a Corporation sure of its own sense of entitlement and casual with other people’s money.
And we haven’t even got into our stride yet on another inquiry into how the BBC managed to make such a total mess of the £100 million and counting Digital Media Initiative.
That review, which we trust will be published in full, should make interesting reading and probably a telling case study of how not to manage large technological projects.
If Tony Hall ever thought it was going to be easy to return to the BBC to sort the organisation out there must be few remaining illusions. In fact, it was from Hall that the most interesting new development at the BBC emerged this week.
Naturally he emphasised that, despite all the painfully obvious difficulties, the Corporation was still responsible for creating “absolutely extraordinary content” – from the Olympics and Wimbledon to dramas such as The Fall and The Village.
But Hall also made it clear he was working on a major piece of work to simplify the structure and weaken the dead hand of bureaucracy that still hovers over the BBC.
The director-general added that he would need some external help with his review. “I need some thinking about how people in the media deal with these sorts of issues. It is an overly complex organisation,” said Lord Hall.
We can only hope this is not code for another expensive foray into the world of management consultancy.
His own staff at the programme-making level would have many ideas about making the BBC a less bureaucratic and more creative place.
If external input is required then where better to look than Nick Pollard and we know his charges are reasonable.
It might be even better to ask Roly Keating who probably wouldn’t charge anything at all.