Next Monday, the fight will continue when the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee will hold new hearings on the way the British Broadcasting Corporation gave large severance payments to senior editors in an effort to reduce its budget.
The payments were made largely when Mark Thompson, now the president and chief executive of The New York Times Company, was the director general of the BBC. Mr. Thompson ran the BBC from 2004 to 2012.
He will testify at the hearings, which follow a June report and a report published Wednesday by the National Audit Office. The auditors found that between 2009 and December 2012, the BBC paid more severance than it was contractually obliged to give to 22 senior managers out of 150 who left, at a total extra cost of £1.4 million, or about $2.2 million.
Two executives, the audit said, were given large severance payments even though they had already found new jobs. The decisions were “poor value for money, putting public trust in the BBC at risk,” the audit office said, blaming “weak governance arrangements” that included insufficient oversight.
The audit office found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing, but said the BBC had breached its own policy guidelines “too often without good reason.”
The BBC was trying to reach targets for budget and staffing cuts without compromising its enormous journalistic output. From 2005 until the end of 2012, the BBC cut its staff by more than 10 percent, or more than 2,000 full-time jobs, to 16,858.
Mr. Thompson, who declined to be interviewed, said in a statement in July that he had received approval for the key severance payments from an executive remuneration committee and the BBC Trust, an oversight panel, which had been “fully informed in advance.”
He said he had “made sure that the trust were aware of and understood all potentially contentious issues.” He responded after the chairman of the trust, Chris Patten, testified to his “shock and dismay” that some payments exceeded contractual obligations.
By 2010, Mr. Thompson has said, he had already cut 100 of 700 top jobs with more to come and had reduced pensions, salaries and benefits, including his own. He has argued that the severance payments were in line with contractual obligations and the needs of the BBC at the time.
Britons feel possessive about the BBC, and one of the national credos is “value for money,” especially true in a period of economic tightening. Britons pay £145.50 annually per household, or around $226, to watch color television on any device, including computers, and these payments last year provided the BBC £3.7 billion, or about $5.8 billion, an amount that is supplemented by commercial activities but represents 72 percent of the corporation’s income of £5.1 billion (around $8 billion).
So any suggestion that money was spent carelessly is politically delicate.
In hearings before the Public Accounts Committee in July, Mr. Patten acted surprised.
He said that only two specific cases had been referred to the trust and that he had been told by the director general that they were being settled on contractual terms. Later, “it was a question of shock and dismay for us how many had been beyond contractual,” he said. “The amount of control at the center over what was going on was simply not good enough.”
Tony Hall, the current BBC director general, appearing with Mr. Patten, said: “We got this wrong — we were overpaying. The fault lies with us. Culturally, we lost the plot.” Mr. Hall added: “There was not enough grip at the center of the organization. Things were devolved far too low down.”
Mr. Thompson responded in his statement that the trust had been told “in writing and orally” about the severance payments, including the one to his deputy, Mark Byford, whose job was eliminated, and about the savings that would incur. No one objected, Mr. Thompson said, and he looked forward to testifying in person.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/world/europe/britain-to-examine-why-bbc-severance-payments-exceeded-contract-terms.html?partner=rss&emc=rss