In response to the BBC’s Annual Report and Accounts published today, ITV chairman Richard Eyre has said that the BBC’s public service and commercial operations should be regulated independently by the Independent Television Commission (ITC), the National Audit Office and the Office of Fair Trading (OFT).
The BBC report details the Corporation’s financial performance and highlights which of its promises and commitments were met and which were not achieved. Whilst Eyre welcomes the increased transparency which the report provides, he is still concerned that the performance appraisal is not an independent one.
“The Governors have endorsed the high quality of programmes on BBC1 and BBC2 – but they are part of the body of the Corporation and their secretariat is staffed by BBC employees,” he said.
Eyre also remains unconvinced that the report satisfactorily answers questions of cross-subsidy and cross-promotion which ITV raised last week, prior to the BBC document publication (see ‘The BBC Is In Danger Of Diluting Its Public Service Ethos’, Says Richard Eyre). “It gives a more generous assessment of public service output on BBC1 than our own research suggests,” he says.
Concluding, Eyre said: “If it is important that the commercially funded broadcasters are independently regulated, then surely it is more so for the publicly funded broadcaster. It would be far better for licence payers, legislators, competitors and, ultimately, the Corporation itself, if all of the BBC’s operations were independently scrutinised and objectively assessed against measurable targets.”
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