It's the BBC Trust that's created this crisis, not the charter

The corporation's governing body may have had the right concerns ? but its evasive PAC performance has left it broken

If there was a consensus following the BBC's recent public accounts committee (PAC) bashing it was two-fold. First, as a spectacle, it had, in the words of committee chair Margaret Hodge MP, been "grossly unedifying". Second, it was that the BBC Trust was ? not to put too fine a point on it ? bust. And plainly the trust ? or more specifically those who appeared in front of the PAC ? did themselves very few favours.

Dealing with controversial payoffs to departing executives was always going to be tricky (especially since the BBC appeared to have been insufficiently rigorous in the way it went about it), as was so clearly exposed by the National Audit Office inquiry into the matter. But the trust managed to make themselves look evasive, to the point of lacking in candour. They denied the existence of documents or even any recollections relating to Mark Byford's payoff when initially approached by the NAO only to have several ? documents, emails, briefings etc ? appear only once former director general Mark Thompson began inquiring about them. What's more, having effectively accused Thompson of deliberately failing to inform them about Byford's payoff (which incidentally in the view of many PAC members is an assertion that Thompson very effectively rebuffed), the trust set off one of the most unseemly public spats in the BBC's recent history.

At the same time, by adopting an especially legalistic interpretation of the BBC's royal charter under which they operate, in effect saying that the trust was specifically prohibited from addressing the issue of executive remuneration in any detail, they made the trust itself appear anything but fit for purpose. Of course they had a point ? section 33 subsection 7 of the charter gives responsibility for determining senior executive remuneration to a committee of the executive board, albeit within a strategy to be approved by the trust. It also says, in section 9 subsection 3, the trust must not exercise or seek to exercise the functions of the executive board.

However, given the trust's overarching responsibility to be "guardians of the licence fee and the public interest", any defence of inaction based on the former is virtually bound to fail in the face of public scrutiny.

In truth, of course, the trust was concerned about senior executive pay and rightly so. Indeed, it was an open secret that relations between former trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons and Thompson became strained over just this issue. It is also plain that the trust ? if not all the individual trustees ? was broadly informed about the reality of Byford's exit arrangements. Actually it appears they were more concerned at the time about how Byford's critical role in foreseeing and heading off editorial misjudgments and disasters would be carried forward. Which, when you think of what happened with Newsnight, Savile and McAlpine after he'd gone, was a concern that trustees were right to focus on.

It does also appear as if, whatever their separate constitutional roles, the trust, the executive and the non-executive directors were all on more or less the same page on the need to reduce senior executive pay and numbers quickly. That that has actually happened might be taken as a sign that the system, for all its idiosyncrasies and the inevitable tensions within it, was actually working to deal with a serious and tricky longstanding issue.

The spectacle of apparent structural failure in the BBC's governance system would seem to have more to do with the way the trust chose to deal with the NAO and the PAC than anything fundamentally unworkable in the underlying charter.

Indeed, Lords Patten and Hall, on behalf of the trust and the executive acting together, have now written to the secretary of state saying they intend to review their working arrangements to make sure nothing like this happens again. Which is interesting since section 8 of the charter says: "The members of the trust and the members of the board (executive) shall never [my emphasis] act together as a single corporate body."

• BBC
• BBC Trust
• Television industry

Steve Hewlett

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Source: http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/sep/22/bbc-trust-charter

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