Three years ago, our columnist and former editor Charles Moore was summoned to Hastings Magistrates’ Court to pay £807 for refusing to pay his television licence. He was protesting against the BBC’s ‘gross violation of its charter’ by broadcasting obscene phone calls made by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand to the former Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs. The court did not have much time to hear his case, or anyone else’s. That day, 560 others would have been prosecuted for not paying their dues to the BBC. Now it has risen to 700 a day, accounting for an extraordinary one in ten of English court cases.
We now know why the Beeb needs the money: it has paid some £60 million in severance payments to various senior managers in the last eight years. When seven BBC executives were asked to explain this to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee this week, they exuded a sense of collective bewilderment that they should be brought to account. This is what happens if you can rely on the taxman to raise the money you spend. Michael Grade, former BBC chairman, put the problem succinctly. ‘Like the very wealthy son of a rich family,’ he said, ‘you don’t learn the value of money.’
The BBC’s problems do not stem from its recent payoffs: they are a symptom of a deeper malaise. It is a bureaucracy, designed for the 1930s, which has somehow made it to the 21st century. Listening to its executives waffle this week, it’s horribly clear that the BBC does not have leadership or even a hierarchy. It simply has a corporate culture in which success comes from keeping your head down. And its money is guaranteed, because people who don’t pay up are taken to court.
In the press, the hierarchy is a pyramid topped by the editor, with whom the buck stops.
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