BBC Digital Initiative 'Overdue and Overbudget'

[Teddy Bear]

The BBC continues to give the impression that its managers are selected on the basis of their willingness to cooperate in the overall scam perpetuated by the BBC mindset, rather than any real credentials they have to do the particular job the role demands.

In the real world where they would actually have to earn their money from the service they provided they are clearly inadequate, and are at best amateur.

BBC's £130m digital initiative 'not good value for money', says NAO
The BBC has been condemned by the Government’s spending watchdog over its handling of a £130million project to modernise its TV and radio production, which is two years behind schedule at a predicted cost to licence fee payers of £10.7million.
By Neil Midgley, Assistant Editor (Media) 7:01AM GMT 02 Feb 2011

The damning report, which was issued yesterday by the National Audit Office, says that the way the BBC originally handled its Digital Media Initiative in 2008 “was not an effective way of approaching the delivery of a complex programme”.

Over two years from April 2009, the BBC expected the initiative - which is intended to take all of its production digital, doing away with old-fashioned video and audio tapes - to save £26million of licence-fee payers’ money.
However by 2009 the initiative was already 21 months behind schedule.

The BBC parted company with Siemens, the independent contractor it had engaged to deliver the project, and the planned savings were not delivered.
“The delay of 21 months and the £26 million in programme benefits the BBC did not achieve in that period, and had to find elsewhere in the BBC, meant that the early stage of the programme was not good value for money,” concluded the NAO report.

The NAO’s findings are the latest in a series of damaging reports that the watchdog has issued about BBC spending. Last year it was highly critical of the BBC’s handling of major building projects, including the £1billion redevelopment of Broadcasting House in central London, as well as the way the corporation had spent money on covering major events such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the Glastonbury music festival.

Yesterday’s new report made a number of serious criticisms of the BBC’s handling of the digital media project.
The NAO said that “the BBC did not have an up-to-date assessment of its contractor’s capacity and capability to deliver the Programme” and that “the financial benefits of the programme were initially overstated”.

The BBC originally planned that the digital media initiative would cost £81.7million and deliver £99.6million of benefits, giving a net gain of £17.9million. However the latest forecast, taking into account both the delays and the settlement that was reached with Siemens when their contract was terminated, is of a net cost to the BBC of £10.7million.
The NAO currently undertakes individual value-for-money studies at the BBC, as agreed by the supervisory BBC Trust.

However the Coalition has promised that the watchdog will be given “full access” to the BBC’s books before November of this year.

[Teddy Bear]

Well 2 years further down the road and £100 MILLION of licence fee money down the drain, and the BBC has finally decided to stop trying to develop their own system and use those already developed.

That may well be why they recently employed ex Labour minister James Purnell at a £295,000 salary to the position of director of strategy and digital to tell us this. Since the original decision to go ahead with the scheme was well before his time, naturally he comes across squeaky clean. Which is why he can announce 'We've messed up and we apologise to licence fee payers for that."
He says we now, but you can be sure as soon as criticism comes his way he will make sure the critic knows he actually had nothing to do with it.

What about those who were responsible for this appalling decision?

Well the BBC tells us under the sub-title of Disciplinary action

"There are now standard off-the-shelf products that provide the kind of digital production tools that simply didn't exist five years ago.

"We will be looking into what has happened and will take appropriate action, disciplinary or otherwise," he added.

John Linwood, the BBC's chief technology officer, has been suspended.

Sounds real tough
Is that suspended with pay and pension intact?
I think it must be, otherwise they would have been sure to tell us if not.

Here's what the BBC tells us about it so you can gauge the way they're trying to put it over the public, then what James Delingpole thinks.

BBC abandons £100m digital project

James Purnell, BBC's director of strategy and digital: "We've messed up, we're sorry"

The BBC has scrapped a £98m digital production system, which its director general said had "wasted a huge amount of licence fee payers' money".

The Digital Media Initiative was set up in 2008 but was halted last autumn having never become fully operational.

"I have serious concerns about how we managed this project," BBC director general Tony Hall said.

An independent review has been launched "to find out what went wrong and what lessons can be learned", he said.

The Digital Media Initiative (DMI) was intended to transform the way staff developed, used and shared video and audio material and was seen as an important part of a move of resources to Salford.

"Ambitious technology projects like this always carry a risk of failure," Lord Hall said.

"It does not mean we should not attempt them but we have a responsibility to keep them under much greater control than we did here."

Between 2010 and 2012, the project cost the corporation £98.4m. An internal review was set up in October 2012 after the BBC Trust expressed serious concerns.

In a letter to Margaret Hodge, chair of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, the BBC Trust's Anthony Fry revealed the project had generated "little or no assets".

"It is of utmost concern to us that a project which had already failed to deliver value for money in its early stages has now spent so much more of licence fee payers' money," he said.

"We intend to act quickly to ensure that there can be no repeat of a failure on this scale."

Mrs Hodge described the episode as "a terrible shock and clearly completely shambolic".

The corporation said the initiative had been badly managed and outpaced by changing technology, and that to carry on would be throwing good money after bad.

"It's struggled to keep pace with new developments and requirements both within the BBC and the wider broadcasting industry," Lord Hall wrote in an email to BBC staff.

Disciplinary action
"There are now standard off-the-shelf products that provide the kind of digital production tools that simply didn't exist five years ago.

"We will be looking into what has happened and will take appropriate action, disciplinary or otherwise," he added.

John Linwood, the BBC's chief technology officer, has been suspended.

In 2011, then director general Mark Thompson told the the Public Accounts Committee that the initiative was "critical" to the BBC's move to Media City in Salford and the establishment of new Broadcasting House.

"A lot of the future of the BBC is tied up in the successful delivery of this project," he said, at the time.

James Purnell, the BBC's director of strategy and digital, said: "In the future we are going to rely far more on off-the-shelf technology. We've messed up and we apologise to licence fee payers for that."

Yet he insisted the failed project was "the exception rather than the rule", citing technical successes such as the BBC iPlayer.

Basically - 'Lessons have been learned, let's move on, never mind about the money that's been wasted, we can waste lots more in the future, which is why we hired an ex-Labour Minister on £295k for starters, and keep it coming'.

Here's James Delingpole on the subject:

The BBC loses £100 million on useless technology. This happens because of the licence fee. So scrap it
By James Delingpole

The BBC has just lost £100 million on pointless new technology. I realise that this won't sound very much money if you are, say, a typical BBC programme director on upwards of £250,000 a year – but for some of us once you're losing £100 million here and £100 million there then pretty soon you're talking serious money.

What I find most extraordinary about this story is that it's one of those things that could only possibly happen in the fantastical parallel universe inhabited by public-sector institutions. The basic rules of business do not apply to the BBC bubble. That is the reason the licence fee should be scrapped – not because the Beeb doesn't produce some amazing programmes, which it does, but because it pays for this sort of catastrophe.
Any private institution which went and lost that much money thanks to incompetence would almost certainly have folded by now, and in the unlikely event that it survived numerous heads would undoubtedly roll. But at the BBC it's pretty much business as usual, with just one person suspended on full pay.

If this were an isolated incident it would merely be a scandalous curiosity. Unfortunately it is all too characteristic of the spectacular abuse of taxpayers' money which goes on throughout the public sector, of which the Corporation is a part. I give you by way of another noisome example the joyous news that the man in charge of the NHS at the time of the Mid Staffs deaths is to retire on a pension worth £2 million. Nice work if you can get it.

[Teddy Bear]

As I surmised, and the following article confirms, John Linwood, the man who had been responsible for producing this now failed digital project has been suspended - but still receives full pay.

Worse than that, it appears that back in 2011, when the first article on this thread showing the debacle going on, he also received a bonus of £70,000, making it £358,000 salary for the year.

They're still paying him while they've hired another to run his position.
And the BBC have the nerve to criticise bankers bonuses. Will be interesting to see if they fire him at the end of their 'inquiry' or simply move him somewhere else in the corporation, as is their norm.

I guess the latter.

After the article I'll post a few of the quite good comments made by its readers, to show a good deal of the public are truly aware and fed up with the BBC.

BBC suspends technology boss over 'wasted' £100m
The BBC has scrapped a £100m technology project and suspended the executive in charge after Director General Tony Hall admitted it had "wasted a huge amount of licence fee payers' money".


By Christopher Williams

Lord Hall said the Digital Media Initiative, an effort to develop desktop computer software to make the programme making process faster and more efficient, would be shut down immediately. It was meant to link up the way BBC staff create, share, manage and archive digital footage, and do away with video tape.

"The DMI project has wasted a huge amount of licence fee payers’ money and I saw no reason to allow that to continue which is why I have closed it," said the Director General.
"I have serious concerns about how we managed this project and the review that has been set up is designed to find out what went wrong and what lessons can be learned."

John Linwood, the BBC's £287,000-a-year chief technology officer, has been suspended on full pay while the review is conducted. He chaired the Digital Media Initiative steering group.

It follows a report in 2011 by the National Audit Office which found the BBC's approach to the project had been "disappointing" and that it was "not good value for money". It was already two years behind schedule and had been brought in-house by the BBC after contractor Siemens left.

In response the BBC Trust gave it the green light to continue, however, and BBC management claimed the Digital Media Initiative was "now well underway", "despite the initial difficulties".

In a letter to the Public Accounts Committee, BBC trustee Anthony Fry today said the project had created "little or no assets",
"It is of utmost concern to us that a project which had already failed to deliver value for money in its early stages has now spent so much more of licence fee payers' money," he said, inviting MPs to hold a hearing on the failure.

"The trust is extremely concerned by the way the project has been managed and reported to us and we intend to act quickly ensure that there can be no repeat of a failure on this scale."

The project was originally approved in 2008 supposed to be completed in 2017 at a total cost of £133.6m on the most recent forecast. Some £98.4m has already been spent.

"Ambitious technology projects like this always carry a risk of failure," Lord Hall said.
"It does not mean we should not attempt them but we have a responsibility to keep them under much greater control than we did here."

Mr Linwood, who grew up in Zimbabwe, joined the BBC in 2009 from Yahoo! and had previously worked for more than a decade at Microsoft. In 2011 the BBC paid him a £70,000 bonus, taking his total package for the year to £358,000.

On his personal website Mr Linwood described himself as "a global technology leader with an unparalleled track record for successfully delivering global scale technology and services for the biggest names in the world".

"A founder of three successful startups and having been a key and valued senior leader in three of the world's largest players in the technology space (Microsoft, Yahoo and BBC), John has a high degree of technology, commercial and leadership ability on a global scale that has proven itself repeatedly throughout his impressive and distinguished career," the website said.

The website has been deleted but copies are stored on the Wayback Machine archive.

His annual budget of more than half a billion pounds and staff of 1,200 will be taken over by Peter Coles, the BBC's technology controller.

martin2500
32 minutes ago
Don't be surprised here. There was probably wasn't a single person involved in management who had a clue what was going on. Remember how someone was allowed to sell fake bomb detectors to half the world and no one noticed they were just full of rubbish.

The problem is the political elite who run this Country are all from an arts/politics background. Not only does this make then stupid by default, it also means they have NO understanding of technology.

I refer people to the brainless Jeremy Paxman making unpleasant comments to our new astronaut about what he'd be doing in space. Not only did Paxman not have a clue he clearly had no interest.

You only have to look at the BBC how it bigs up lefty politicians or artists or bloody dull Shakespeare, yet the likes of say Newton, Dirac, Maxwell, Hawking etc. are ignored. Some of the greatest engineers and scientists are from these shores yet the BBC continually runs arty stuff on pointless painters and useless book writers.

Were it not for those men none of the technology the BBC use today would probably exist.

It should be a requirement that 80% of BBC staff should have a science or engineering background and all MUST have worked in the private sector for several years.

The BBC have appointed another political lefty tosser in James Purnell right into the heart of the BBC. What does this moron know?

fiona999
54 minutes ago
Reduce this to "real" terms to get the full picture--and it's even worse.

It took about 701,000 license fee payers (if you think of it in terms of one year) to pay for this failed program that wasted the equivalent of nearly three-quarters of a million license fees down the pan.

Then it took another 2,000 license fee payers to support this man's salary--ANNUALLY.

Think of it that way, and the full aspect of this waste of space program and man are fully realized....

ganef_returns
Today 10:26 AM
If I have read this article properly AND all the facts are correct, I have some concerns. As a retired Systems Analyst, who later taught SA at a university, I believe there is nothing wrong with the underlying reasons for starting this project.

I believe the BBC store old programmes on Betamax and this is costly in space and will, eventually, deteriorate and be lost. I, myself, am in the process of transferring my VHS tapes, collected from the 80s onwards and transferring them to digital.

This is neither difficult nor expensive and my outlay on equipment was around £250. So where does this huge sum of money come from? Yes they will need many transfer machines and many personnel. I can only transfer in real time but once the process of transfer starts, I can go and do something else; in the case of the BBC, move on to the next machine so that an individual can make multiple transfers at the same time.

And, if they are really abandoning the project, how are they going to store old material in the future? Plus, digital retrieval is so much easier, and faster. This is really typical of BBC and many other large companies. They try to solve the "problem" in house, instead of bringing in a professional without the closed minds of the company. I know I worked best when I knew absolutely nothing of the business I was asked to work on. I would love to see the start-up paperwork. The first meeting to discuss this, or any other project, should last about 20 minutes and the two ears, one mouth, rule should apply, that is the analyst should listen for two thirds of the time.

girlregionlondon8sector94
Today 09:02 AM
Another massive waste of our money by the BBC.

In 2007, the BBC bought 75% of the Lonely Planet and the final 25% in 2011.

Total purchase price £130 million.

In March 2013, it was sold on for £51 million.

I make it £79 million of our money down the drain.

I expect they were doing what any socialist organisation would do - wasting other peoples' money.

[Teddy Bear]

Somebody who has looked into just how much money was ploughed into this failed initiative, comes up with a MUCH higher figure than the BBC claims.

It shows they KNOWINGLY deceive, to counter the opinions of those that think BBC output is an unconscious bias.

(Many links available on webpage)

We may never know the true cost of the BBC's latest disaster – but it'll be a lot more than £100 million
By Willard Foxton

DMI was intended to bring all of the BBC's archives into one place
Last Friday, the BBC scrapped a huge technology project – the so-called Digital Media Initiative (DMI). The BBC admitted it had wasted £100 million worth of licence payers' money on a system that has never worked.

Profuse apologies have appeared, investigations have been ordered. There was predictable outrage from many quarters at this titanic waste of money, not least from James Delingpole in these pages. However shocking it may seem, admitting a £100 million loss is the BBC's attempt at damage control. I've spent the past few days talking to BBC insiders, to try to work out how this tech project that was supposed to transform the BBC went wrong.

The first thing that came out was that the £100 million figure as a total cost for DMI – known in the BBC as "Don't Mention It" – is seen as a low estimate. I heard that, over the five years of its life, factoring in staff costs, consulting fees and the money paid to Siemens, the contractors fired for failing to deliver the project by 2009, £150 million had been dumped into DMI. It's always been the tradition at the BBC to calculate the value of a project in terms of how many licence fees it costs; to put this into context, £150 million is more than a million licence fees wasted.

Siemens were paid £80 million by the BBC from January 2008 until July 2009. When Siemens failed to deliver, DMI the project was taken in house. The Public Accounts Committee later determined Siemens had only achieved the results expected for three months of work over two years. The BBC clawed back about £27.5 million as part of a "no-fault" settlement with Siemens, but was still left nursing a huge loss.

DMI was supposed to enable the BBC to make better use of the film and radio it creates. The intention was to put the entire BBC archive – 52 petabytes of recordings, everything from wartime radio broadcasts to yesterday's BBC News – on every staffer's desktop. When the project was launched, it was estimated that DMI could save 2.5 per cent in TV production costs, allegedly worth £100m to the BBC by 2015. "The estimate of a 2.5 per cent cost saving on all productions was pathetically optimistic. It was based on some kind of Deloitte time and motion study, I believe," said a source. "They never talked to anyone at the sharp end about what we wanted, just decided that all those seconds of changing tapes added up." Of course, that time-saving, and thus cost-saving, would only accrue if DMI worked – but it didn't. A system designed to shave a fraction off the costs of production ended up costing a fortune.

The BBC claims it didn't lose more than £10 million on the Siemens deal – in its accounts, it says it paid the extra costs of the Siemen's failure by extra "savings" (cuts) across other departments. The titanic waste on the DMI, at a time when every department has seen their budgets cut – when everyone knows a person who has lost a job, or a great show that can't be made because the money isn't there – has left a feeling of deep gloom across the parts of the BBC that actually make shows or report the news. An old foreign correspondent friend once told me "morale at the BBC is always at an all-time low", but coming on the heels of the Newsnight and Savile scandals, the mood is genuinely the lowest I've ever known it.

What's even more astonishing is that the project was allowed to continue after Siemens were fired for failing to deliver it. This was in mid-2009; by then there were commercial systems available off the shelf, for around a million pounds, that would do what DMI was supposed to do. "You couldn't have used those systems out of the box – these systems were designed for American network affiliate channels and the amount of material is just too big for that. But it wouldn't have taken much modification to use them. It's mostly just data storage," said one person close to the project, who left the BBC in 2011.

The commercial systems were discussed, and rejected: BBC management had fallen victim to a classic sunk-costs fallacy. Instead of burying the bespoke project and buying a commercial alternative, they decided to press on with their dog of a system, which never worked. The man who took this decision was John Linwood, the BBC's chief technology officer. It's hard to put yourself in Linwood's shoes, and imagine yourself choosing to build your own technology when commercial systems were available at a fraction of the cost. I can't think of a rational explanation; no one I spoke to was able to explain it. The bulk of the £100 million the BBC admits losing happened after the commercial systems were available, so the overwhelming majority of the loss was completely avoidable. These commercial systems are now so cheap that most independent production companies have a version in their offices.

In a letter to the Public Accounts Committee, BBC trustee Anthony Fry said the project had created "little or no assets" under Linwood. "It is of utmost concern to us that a project which had already failed to deliver value for money in its early stages has now spent so much more of licence fee payers' money," he said, inviting MPs to hold a hearing on the failure. "The trust is extremely concerned by the way the project has been managed and reported to us and we intend to act quickly ensure that there can be no repeat of a failure on this scale."

Linwood, a former vice-president of Yahoo!, is one of the most lavishly paid staff at the BBC – I say "is" because he's been suspended on full pay. His remuneration peaked at £358,000 in 2011, when you factor in a £70,000 bonus he received that year – despite ongoing concerns about DMI at the time. This payout is seen within the BBC as an enormous reward for one of the BBC's most abject failures. It's indicative of how the salaries of the management class have gone out of control.

One of the quirks of BBC pay is that the frontline editors – the people who make the tough calls on shows like Newsnight or Today – are not paid anything like those salaries, despite their jobs being perhaps the most demanding of all. The failure of DMI and the abject refusal of Linwood to buy a commercial system in place of it, has already lead to serious problems for those people at the sharp end. For example, during Margaret Thatcher's funeral, the BBC was reduced to transferring taped material on the tube, and paying small commercial companies a fortune (as much as £300 for an hour of material) to use their off-the-shelf digital facilities, leading to even more wasted money.

Almost every time you see footage from before 2012, when digital footage became common, the BBC has paid a third party to convert the material. That cost should rightly be laid at the door of Deloitte, Siemens and Linwood, all the people involved with creating the mess. They, of course, have walked away from the ruin, trousering huge piles of cash. We may never know the full cost of the failure of the DMI. Whatever the final cost is, you can be sure it will be much more than the already appalling £100 million quoted in the BBC's apology.

[Teddy Bear]

This article by Simon Miller in the Commentator makes it clear from the headline what it's about.

Auntie’s misbehaving: Make the BBC accountable
Eyes will be on the north west of London next week when the Bilderberg party comes to town. But a greater conspiracy is how we allow behemoths like the BBC to be so unaccountable

Simon Miller

There is a party in Hertfordshire next week, for all the great and good, that will have conspiracy theorists salivating. Personally, I am not one for conspiracies; incompetence, mission creeps, cock-ups, the law of unintended consequences – yes. But deliberate conspiracies? Not for me.

Oh sure, there are probably agreements made away from pesky prying eyes and such things like accountability, but, pedantic though it may be, if you know about it then there cannot be a conspiracy.

For a conspiracy to work, especially in this day and age, the state broadcaster has to be fit for purpose – unfortunately for the NWO the UK has the BBC.

The BBC is a powerful beast with a lot of money coming into its coffers thanks to the law. In its latest available figures, licence fee income grew by £93m in 2012 to £3.6bn, with other income bringing in £1.5bn for a total income of £5.09bn. Take away pension reforms and the sale of BBC Worldwide’s magazine business and the BBC saw an operating surplus of £249m.

The breakdown per channel shows £1.3bn spent on BBC 1 and £537.1m on BBC2. Switching to the digital channels, taste permits me to say that a shocking £112.9m was spent on that wasteland of dreadful ‘yoof’ content on BBC3. Meanwhile, the channel I would like BBC 2 to be more like, BBC4, gets a relatively paltry £67.8m. As an aside, BBC Alba, which is watched by no one, gets £8m.

And then there’s staff and ‘talent’.

Despite 384 less members of staff, the BBC still employs 16,858 individuals. And despite recognising that many licence fee payers are subject to pay freezes and job losses, staff earning less than £60,000 at the BBC still got pay rises of 2 percent in the 2011 pay deal.

Actually, the BBC is quite good compared to other public organisations in that it looks like it is genuinely trying to get rid of expensive staff, with 156 senior members of staff gone and another 70 posts planned to be gone by 2015 – although how many will set up companies to be ‘consulted’ by the Beeb remains to be seen.

That said, it still has 306 senior members of staff being paid between £70,000 and £129,000 a year and 47 being paid up to £219,999.

And like most public organisations, I have a sneaking suspicion that those that are really needed – the frontline – are underrepresented in the pay stakes. Like the MoD – which has forgotten that you need soldiers and equipment not generals, admirals and policy wonks – or the NHS – where the concept of nurses seem to escape the management – it would be interesting to see a full breakdown of where staff are employed by the BBC. I suspect production, make-up, cameras etc. may be outnumbered by diversity, human resources and, of course, legal.

You may be surprised to hear that I actually have a lot of time for the BBC.

Despite its Guardianistic, yoghurt-weaving view of the world, the work down on digital, its iPlayer platform, and the occasional output is fantastic. But considering whose money it is spending, its incompetence can really take the biscuit.

In its rush to embrace the future, the BBC did what most public organisations did and listened to consultants pitching for its digital handover project. The resulting chaos has been clear to see with £100m – basically the cost of local radio that has seen its budget slashed over the last few years - washed down the drain for nothing.

The problem with this behemoth, like the NHS, is that money is guaranteed. As it grew into this monster that pervades most walks of our lives, online and off, accountability disappeared. Granted the chief technology officer has been suspended (on full pay) but when has the BBC genuinely ever been accountable to those that pay for it – us?

Cameramen who work at the BBC have told me that it has HD and 3D-ready studios at White City, which it is trying to sell. As a result, when it moves back in to rent studios there, it will have to spend yet more money putting back what was already in place. Madness.

Last week I pointed out (once again) that politicians fail to understand that it is our money that they are playing with, not theirs. And the same applies to the BBC.

Thanks to the dominance it has built up, aided and abetted by a state through the TV tax, the BBC has grown to such an extent that it can throw away £100m in failed IT projects with relative disdain. In a commercial organisation, the heads would roll. But, like the Civil Service, accountability can be shortcoming at the BBC.

How and why was that allowed to happen? Perhaps that’s where the conspiracy really lies.

[steevo]

With due respect to mister Miller the problem I have here is a lessening of the sinister as incompetence or "misbehaving", with an emphasis of why he's not a nut. I think it can be argued it's worse than conspiracy because of audacious arrogance. They really don't feel they have to hide nor explain behavior largely unaccountable, corrupt to the bone. Who's gonna hold them to it and why should they care when they're so right anyway.

[Teddy Bear]

You know you won't get any argument on that here.

My comment on this article:
I'm just waiting for the BBC 'analysis' article by one of its 'experts' to tell the public that it wasn't really a loss, as the money 'invested' generated a lot more spending and really helped raise the economy for the benefit of everybody.

No doubt the licence fee payers, as well as the thousands of people who have been criminalised and fined for not paying their licence fee, will be reassured that their money helped support it.

A cancer on our society.

[Teddy Bear]

MPs have accused Lord Patten of ‘lurching from one crisis to another’ and being ‘asleep at the wheel’.

More revelations of crass ineptitude and irresponsibility.

BBC bosses knew THREE YEARS AGO that £100million IT project was doomed to failure

• Whistleblower says BBC's costly IT project failure raised three years ago
  
• The Digital Media Initiative wasted £100million of licence-fee payers' money
  
• It was only scrapped by the new Director General last month

By Paul Revoir

Bosses at the BBC were told three years ago that a doomed IT project – axed only after wasting £100million - was heading for trouble.

It emerged yesterday that a whistle-blower warned managers in 2010 that the supposed £95.4million ‘benefit’ from the project was ‘hugely overoptimistic and difficult to deliver’.

The Digital Media Initiative (DMI) was meant to allow BBC staff to access everything in the archive from their computers doing away with the need for video or audio tapes.

But the corporation announced that they were dropping the failed technology project nearly two weeks ago after frittering away almost £100 million of licence-fee payers money.

Reports have also suggested it had delivered no savings at all to the corporation.

The BBC’s chief finance officer Zarin Patel and a member of the BBC Trust Anthony Fry are to face the Public Accounts Committee on Monday, where they are expected to be grilled about the debacle.

Earlier this week it was revealed that BBC chairman Lord Patten was warned a year ago about problems by former senior BBC manager, Bill Garrett, who was head of technology in the corporation’s programme-making department until 2010.

He wrote to Lord Patten in May last year to warn him about ‘serious concerns’ over the cost of the DMI and that there was a risk that the National Audit Office – the government’s spending watchdog - may have been misled about the project.

But further details of Mr Garrett’s correspondence with Lord Patten reveal he raised his concerns about the project to BBC management back in 2010.

In particular he questioned the financial projections the BBC was making to back the continuation of the project, after the corporation took over running of it after previous deal with technology company Siemens was brought to an end in 2009.

When Mr Garrett looked at the figures, he told Patten in his letter, it had been ‘professionally difficult for me not to question the value proposition of the revised investment case.

‘I believed the stated benefits to be hugely overoptimistic and difficult to deliver, accordingly I made my concerns clear to BBC management.’

Lord Patten is said to have passed the concerns on to a colleague at the corporation’s governing body, who had responded by saying there were ‘no plans to carry out a further review’ of the project.

However trustee Mr Fry did write to Public Accounts Committee chair Margaret Hodge last year to tell her he was ‘not content’ with progress on the project.

There is growing concern that elements at the broadcaster had failed to make clear the scale of the trouble the project was in.
A trustee wrote to the Public Accounts Committee chair Margaret Hodge about trouble with the project

Complaint: A trustee wrote to the Public Accounts Committee chair Margaret Hodge about trouble with the DMI

The BBC Trust is thought to be very interested in discovering why it was not told by executives earlier about the problems.

The governing body was said to have been ‘shocked’ when it learned about the scale of the disaster, following a report last month.

Hearing that Mr Garrett had raised the matter with bosses back in 2010 will no doubt be of interest to them.

Politicians branded the wasted money an ‘outrage’ when the corporation announced its closure about two weeks ago. It’s chief technology officer, John Linwood, has been suspended as a review is conducted into what went wrong.

At the end of last month new director general Lord Hall finally abandoned the technological overhaul.

He had admitted that the initiative ‘wasted a huge amount of licence-fee payers money.’ He said he had concerns about how the project had been run and a review had been ordered to find out what went wrong.

Lord Patten was said to have personally replied to Mr Garrett earlier this week, apparently after the trust was informed the former BBC man had let MPs know about his letters.

The BBC chairman is thought to have told him that his concerns, along with others, had led the Trust to ‘seek further information’ from the corporation’s management in the summer last year.

[Teddy Bear]

The headline tells it all and shows the complete disregard and irresponsibility in managing the licence fee funding. If only our own government would follow Greece
Greece shuts down its bloated 'BBC' state broadcaster, cutting off reporters mid-sentence, 'because it had eight times too many staff and was too wasteful with money'

Sound familiar?

Mark Thompson 'misled Parliament' over bungled £100m tech project
The former head of the BBC misled parliament by giving "untrue" evidence about the success of a £100million technology project which ended in "complete catastrophe", MPs have said.

By Steven Swinford

Members of the Public Accounts Committee have asked for Mark Thompson, the corporation's former Director General, to return from the US to face further questioning.

Anthony Fry, a member of the BBC Trust, told the Public Accounts Committee that the corporation's evidence was "the most embarrassing thing I have ever seen".

Both the National Audit Office and PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the consultants, are investigating the failure of the project.

At a meeting of the Public Accounts Committee in Salford, Greater Manchester, Mr Fry said: "It is extraordinarily worrying. At a personal level it is probably the most serious, embarrassing thing I have ever seen.
"PWC will be looking at how on earth in governance terms what it's fair to describe as a 'complete catastrophe' from the licence fee payers viewpoint happen.

"If I was sitting in your shoes I would feel not just furious on behalf of licence fee payers, which I do very strongly indeed, but I'd feel how on earth did I get to this position?"

The Digital Media Initiative, which was meant to allow BBC staff to access everything in the corporation's archives from the computers, was axed last month.

Tony Hall, the new Director-General, said it had wasted a "huge amount of licence fee payer's money" and the corporation's £287,000-a-year chief technology officer has been suspended on full pay.

However, in February 2011, Mr Thompson told the committee that DMI was already "out in the business" and that some programmes had already gone out on air using the technology.

He said at the time: "Is it on course now to deliver over the course of the year for BBC North and Salford? Yes it is. Are there going to be any significant further delays in benefit from the way we are delivering? No there won't."

The committee subsequently put out a report lauding the technology. Stewart Jackson, a Tory member of the committee, highlighted a line in its press release which praise the "BBC's success".

He said yesterday: "It is unbelievable that we are now in this position. That shows the extent to which we were misled and really have no confidence."
In May 2012 Bill Garrett, who was head of technology in the corporation's programme-making department until 2010, wrote to the BBC Trust to raise "serious concerns" about the project.
He warned that MPs and the National Audit Office may have been misled about the success of the project.

Margaret Hodge, the Labour chairman of the committee, said: "The thing that really shook me [about this letter] was we were told there were bits of the system working, you were using and running programmes with them, that wasn't true. It just wasn't true."
She suggested that more than one member of staff should face disciplinary action.

Caroline Thomson, the BBC's former chief operating officer who was given a £670,000 pay-off, will be giving evidence about the failure of the project. It is not yet known whether Mr Thompson, who is now chief executive of the New York Times, will give evidence

Mr Fry said the BBC's former head of Future Media & Technology Erik Huggers, who now works for Google, had left the corporation feeling like it could "walk on water" following the success of iPlayer.

A spokesman for the BBC said: "BBC takes seriously its responsibility to provide the NAO and Public Accounts Committee with the most accurate information at all times.

"As has been made clear the BBC will now be doing all it can to assist the independent review of the DMI project."

Mr Fry also said he sympathised with licence fee payers who were angry that the corporation has spent more than £1million moving 11 staff to Salford

He said: "From a licence fee payers' viewpoint any numbers of this sort of scale regarding individuals is going to cause raised eyebrows and aggravation."

[Teddy Bear]

To comprehend the import of the following article consider this:
The BBC invested well over a £100 Million on this digital media technology. They hire a man on a salary of £280,000 a year to oversee its development. Yet a year before Tony Hall, the incoming director general, scraps the failed system and suspends this head of technology, the BBC had been allowing him to also work part time for a private technology firm.

Does that show that they already knew then that this project wasn't going anywhere, and he might as well be involved with something worthwhile?
I think so!

BBC man suspended over £100million digital fiasco has second job with technology firm

By Mail On Sunday Reporter

The BBC executive responsible for an IT debacle which has ‘wasted’ more than £100 million of licence fee-payers’ money has been allowed to hold down a second job while working for the corporation.

John Linwood, currently suspended from his £280,000-a-year post as BBC head of technology, became a non executive director of a private technology firm called DRS in January last year. He was paid £28,000 by the firm in 2012.

The BBC, which is probing Mr Linwood’s handling of the now defunct Digital Media Initiative (DMI), last night admitted it had allowed him to work for the private firm while carrying out his duties for the corporation.

MPs are demanding to know whether it could have been a distraction and contributed to the collapse of the DMI project.

Steve Barclay, a Tory MP and member of the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee said: ‘This appears to be another example of the BBC bending over backwards to accommodate the wishes of senior executives. The BBC should clarify when Mr Linwood was working for this second company and whether it was during BBC time.

‘Perhaps he should have spent a bit more time in the office.’

Mr Linwood was suspended in May shortly after the BBC announced it was scrapping the DMI project, which had been intended to revolutionise the way it stored and retrieved archive film footage.

It was abandoned after the BBC’s coverage of the death and funeral of Margaret Thatcher in April highlighted serious flaws with the new technology. The corporation was ridiculed when it emerged that its journalists had been unable to transfer film footage on to new digital equipment and instead had to transport videotapes via taxis.

A spokesman for the BBC said last night the corporation was fully aware of Mr Linwood’s second job and insisted he had worked for DRS only in his spare time. Mr Linwood was unavailable for comment

[Teddy Bear]

Though the recent report indicated below tells us nothing that we didn't know already, question is will the government take any action, especially in light of the other transgressions.

Notice this 'lessons have been learned' statement from BBC Trust:

In response Diane Coyle, Vice Chairman of the BBC Trust, blasted:‘The failure of the DMI project came at an unacceptable cost to licence fee payers and PwC found serious weaknesses in the governance of the project.’

She said that in future the Trust would be ‘more rigorous and transparent about assessing BBC performance’.

Funny how they've said nothing about the BBC proposal to spend another £half million on revamping 2 floors of their brand new headquarters, for what they say 'will make them more creative'.

And as far as 'transparent' goes, you can judge by just how much from the news that head of BBC Trust Patten tried to block release of the report.
But their statements sound good for Joe public.

BBC condemned for not moving in to halt huge IT project which wasted £100million of licence fee for money

• Digital Media Initiative (DMI) was supposed to give staff archive access
  
• New PwC report says BBC was slow to act after it ran into trouble
  
• Management systems supposed to spot problems were 'not fit for purpose'

By Matt Chorley

The BBC faced fresh criticism today for failing to spot that a botched £100million IT project had run into serious trouble.

The Digital Media Initiative, which was supposed to allow staff to share and manage videos from their desks, was axed in May after MPs branded its collapse an ‘outrage’.

A new report today accused the Corporation of being too slow to act and having a management system which was ‘not fit for purpose’.

The report by PricewaterhouseCoopers found key controls on spending failed and the project was allowed to slip further into problems.

In response Diane Coyle, Vice Chairman of the BBC Trust, blasted:‘The failure of the DMI project came at an unacceptable cost to licence fee payers and PwC found serious weaknesses in the governance of the project.’

She said that in future the Trust would be ‘more rigorous and transparent about assessing BBC performance’.

THE 'DON'T MENTION IT' PROJECT

When the Digital Media Initiative (DMI) was launched in 2008, it was hailed by BBC chiefs as 'the single most important initiative we are working on'.

But before a year had elapsed, it was floundering so badly insiders referred to it as 'Don't Mention It.' The BBC originally appointed IT firm Siemens to implement the scheme. But it ditched the company in 2009 as the project floundered and took it back in house.

By then, £26million had already been wasted but it is understood the BBC later recouped the cost from Siemens.

In February 2011, the National Audit Office condemned the corporation over its handling of the DMI after it ran 21 months behind schedule.

The public spending watchdog found the expected gains had been overstated and the difficulty of delivering it was underestimated.

The Public Accounts Committee criticised the BBC for awarding the contract to Siemens without putting it out to open tender.

The project was meant to allow production staff to access all video and audio material - for example last year's Olympics coverage - on their computers.

As hundreds of staff moved to the corporation's new headquarters in Salford, this would prevent them having to transport tapes of archive material by road from London, reducing production costs.

But the costs of the project continued to spiral to £98.4million until it was finally halted in May.

The PwC report compiled at a cost of more than a quarter of a million pounds, found numerous areas were ‘not fit for purpose’ including governance of the project, arrangements for reporting progress to BBC bosses and risk management.

The report lays down a number of recommendations for management of future major projects at the corporation.

The corporation’s chief technology officer John Linwood, who was paid £280,000 a year, was suspended on full pay pending the outcome of investigations.

The DMI was supposed to allow BBC staff to access the entire archive from their computers, doing away with the need for audio and video tapes.

It was expected to save the corporation £18million in production costs because staff could share and download material remotely instead of transporting tapes between headquarters.

First the original contractor, Siemens, was dropped in 2009 after months of costly delays.

Control of the project was handed to Mr Linwood, hired as the BBC’s chief technology officer from Yahoo! on a salary of £280,000 per year.

But alarm bells continued to ring over the way the DMI was being handled, and it was the subject of a damning National Audit Office report in 2011.

Dominic Coles, the BBC’s Director of Operations, said: ‘While the BBC has a strong history of delivering complex projects such as BBC iPlayer, the digital Olympics or major property moves, we got this one wrong which we regret.

‘We know it is vital to spot problems early, which is why we have overhauled how these projects are run to ensure this doesn’t happen again.’

The report says that if tighter controls were in place, difficulties could have been identified far sooner, although it is not possible to predict what would have happened.

It said: 'We are of the view that had appropriate governance, risk management and reporting arrangements been established from the outset, then the process of preparing a revised Business Case for DMI could have been commenced as early as July 2011.

'It is not possible to predict how long this process would have taken or what the outcome would have been, but in retrospect it is clear that the project would have benefited from this greater scrutiny at this earlier stage.'

[Teddy Bear]

Anybody who has followed this story till now, as evidenced by the articles above, will be familiar with what the various individual involved have claimed in order to shirk responsibility for this colossal waste of money and mismanagement.

Like this statement from Thompson in the post above from June 2013
However, in February 2011, Mr Thompson told the committee that DMI was already "out in the business" and that some programmes had already gone out on air using the technology.

He said at the time: "Is it on course now to deliver over the course of the year for BBC North and Salford? Yes it is. Are there going to be any significant further delays in benefit from the way we are delivering? No there won't."

As Judge Judy often points out, 'if you're going to lie you need a good memory to keep your story together'. Clearly Thompson's sucks, all he does he state whatever he thinks will absolve him from criticism at the time. For this incompetence and lack of ethics he took over £800,000 a year from the licence fee.

I hope these MPs are going to challenge him and Patten about what was also reported back in June last year:
Earlier this week it was revealed that BBC chairman Lord Patten was warned a year ago about problems by former senior BBC manager, Bill Garrett, who was head of technology in the corporation’s programme-making department until 2010.
He wrote to Lord Patten in May last year to warn him about ‘serious concerns’ over the cost of the DMI and that there was a risk that the National Audit Office – the government’s spending watchdog - may have been misled about the project.
But further details of Mr Garrett’s correspondence with Lord Patten reveal he raised his concerns about the project to BBC management back in 2010.

Ex-BBC Boss Defends Role Over £100m Waste
Sky News

Former BBC chief Mark Thompson has denied misleading MPs over a scheme that was scrapped at a cost of around £100m.
Mr Thompson, who was previously the corporation's director-general, told the Public Accounts Committee the Digital Media Initiative "failed as a project" and that he "wanted to say sorry".

But asked about previous evidence where he said DMI was working well, Mr Thompson told the committee: "I don't believe I have misled you on any other matter and I don't believe I misled you knowingly on this one".
He told the committee his evidence was "faithful and accurate account of my understanding of the project at that point".

The BBC's former chief technology officer, John Linwood, was earlier accused of "avoiding key meetings" in an effort to dodge blame over the doomed initiative.
Committee member Richard Bacon MP told Mr Linwood: "You were known inside the BBC for avoiding key meetings so you could say you weren't there."
Mr Linwood told the panel he was "not responsible" for drawing up "the business case" for the project which he said was already "behind track" when he started work on it.

"When I joined the BBC the project was running 18 months to two years behind track," he said.
The DMI - an effort to create an integrated digital production and archiving system - was scrapped by current director-general Tony Hall in his first weeks in the job having cost £100m of licence fee-payer's cash.

A report by the National Audit Office (NAO) blasted the scheme and said the BBC Executive "did not have sufficient grip" on the project and did not properly assess the system to see whether it was "technically sound".
DMI was meant to allow staff to handle all aspects of video and audio content from their desks, but after years of difficulties - during which £125.9m was spent on it - it was axed last year leaving a net cost of £98.4m.

It emerged last week that Mr Linwood - who was paid a salary of £280,000 - was sacked weeks after being suspended over the multi- million-pound failure last May.
Mr Linwood said Mr Hall had been too hasty in writing off "tens of millions" of pounds of IT equipment.
"They wrote off software that was working and they wrote off infrastructure that was working," he said.
"They were written off because the business decided not to use them."

MPs also asked Caroline Thomson, the BBC's former chief operating officer, about her pay-off, which saw her leave the corporation with around £700,000 and a £2m pension pot.
Asked if she would return some of that money, she said: "No."
"I was made redundant, I was made redundant, I didn't want to be made redundant," she said.
"I wanted to stay and work. I was paid a lot of money, I completely accept that, but it was my contractual entitlement and no more."

[Teddy Bear]

Quentin Letts puts it into humorous context, but no less sarcastic.

QUENTIN LETTS: She really hated being asked about her mega-spondoolicks

By Quentin Letts

Great times here on the parapets of the flaming citadel. Establishment trusties keep being bunged overboard – toss another one to the baying mob, Bert! – and there seems no good reason to stop.

In recent days we have had two stodgy old-stager Tory MPs de-selected by mutinous local associations. Pantomime villain Tim Yeo (Suffolk S) yesterday followed sometime MEP Anne McIntosh (Thirsk & Malton) in being given the heave-ho by local activists.

Some observers say Miss McIntosh, being a woman, should have been spared. But female politicians are surely just as capable of being useless as male ones.

To argue otherwise is sexist.

John Bercow, supposedly apolitical Speaker, yesterday went out of his way to praise Miss McIntosh, calling her at Defence Questions with a pointed: ‘It is my pleasure to call Miss Anne McIntosh.’

He spoke up for her last Thursday, too. Will he now be similarly sugary towards Mr Yeo? The last Speaker, Michael Martin, was similarly ostrich-like when it came to MPs being criticised.

There was more meat for the sans-culottes over the weekend. Quango-queen Lady Morgan is furious about not having her chairmanship of Ofsted renewed. Chopped by the Gover.

Well played, sir. Did you hear the BBC’s reporting of this overdue bog-washing? You’d have thought Lady Morgan was Mother Teresa. The Beeb hates it when the status quo is overturned and members of the Blob are bundled into the sharp end of a catapult and whizzed towards oblivion.

Yesterday the batting collapse continued. A bunch of former Beeb executives, suave magnificoes of consensus Britain, was given a wonderful seeing-to by the Public Accounts Committee.

This committee may be run by high-handed Lady Hodge (Lab, Barking), herself a bejewelled princess of privilege, but she has enough feral instinct to scent the breeze and kill her social equals in order to survive.

The committee was looking at the BBC’s Digital Media Initiative, a computer balls-up which has cost licence-fee payers £100million.

Those hauled before Ma Hodge yesterday included former BBC director general Mark Thompson (no knighthood for him yet, if ever) and Caroline Thomson, former chief operating officer. Miss Thomson should really be called Lady Liddle, hubby being Lord (Roger) Liddle, a Labour frontbencher who used to be Peter Mandelson’s handbag carrier. Liddle was last month prominent among Labour peers who blocked an EU Referendum Bill.

Lady Hodge called her prey ‘Caroline’, presumably because they go to the same drinks parties. She asked her why she had accepted a £700,000 pay-off and a £2million pension pot from the BBC when she had made such a mess of the digital programme.

Lady Liddle, great socialist that she is, replied that it had been her entitlement, natch. Ooh, it was lovely. She really did not like being asked about her mega-spondoolicks. She is now running English National Ballet. Bad luck, Lady Morgan, that plum’s been bagged.

Mr Thompson, for his part, is these days running the New York Times. Heaven knows what Manhattan makes of his mumbling and stammering. This is not the first time he has been obliged to return to London to answer tricky questions about his time at the Beeb.

He YESTERDAY tried to dump the blame for the digital mess on a wretched little IT bloke, name of Linwood, who had given evidence earlier and had started most of his answers with the word ‘so’. That is almost always a giveaway of a low-achieving clunker.

The other BBC supremo who took a pasting yesterday was Zarin Patel, former chief financial officer. She was exceedingly grumpy and obstreperous – pouting like David Mellor’s less photogenic sister – when being interrogated by Tory MP Richard Bacon.

She kept talking about how the decision to press ahead with the digital initiative had been ‘our collective judgment’. What a coward.

Working at the BBC is said to be a hellish steeplechase of committee meetings, but all those committees do have their uses. They can help embarrassed executives dodge responsibility.

[Teddy Bear]

It appears that John Linwood, the man who headed the failed digital project and was subsequently terminated, yet still received a substantial payoff in addition to his massive salary, has appealed to an employment tribunal for unfair dismissal.

Apparently the tribunal concur and also find that he might have been used as a scapegoat. Certainly many things seem to be rotten in this 'state of Denmark'. The BBC response thus far, as they always do when they've been caught out over something and they can't bluff their way through, reply with 'lessons have been learned'.

(Stinking) Business as usual!

BBC 'culture and climate' attacked

By Press Association

The "culture and climate" at the top of the BBC has been criticised by an employment tribunal that found the corporation's former technology chief was unfairly dismissed in the fallout from a failed IT project that cost licence-fee payers almost £100 million.

John Linwood, who was paid a salary of £280,000, was sacked weeks after being suspended over the multimillion-pound failure of the digital media initiative (DMI).

The BBC ploughed £125.9 million into the scheme - an attempt to create an integrated digital production and archiving system - before it was scrapped by current director-general Tony Hall in his first weeks in the job, leaving a net cost of £98.4 million.

The central London tribunal said Mr Linwood's claim he was unfairly dismissed was "well-founded", but added that he had "contributed" to his dismissal. It rejected two other complaints he made against the corporation.

Mr Linwood told the hearing that after leaving one meeting about his future, he was told by the BBC's head of strategy, John Tate, that the procedure was "a stitch up".

It also heard from the BBC's then head of communications Gavin Dawson that Mr Linwood was "arguably" a scapegoat, but he added that "is not the way I would characterise it".

The tribunal said there was a culture of "sacrificial responsibility" at the BBC when something went wrong and it quoted from emails between Pat Younge, the BBC's then chief creative officer, and Mr Linwood's boss Dominic Coles which it described as "extraordinarily unattractive".

In one, Mr Younge said Mr Linwood could "just spin in the wind" while Mr Coles could "position yourself as the man who took it over, reviewed it and called time".

The tribunal said: " This culture and climate also gave rise to avoidance strategies, no doubt including, on occasion, the steering of the spotlight of blame in other directions, on the part of those who felt themselves to be in danger of association with a sinking ship".

It also said some HR staff behaved at times with "a cavalier disregard for any of the accepted norms of a fair disciplinary process" by not giving Mr Linwood enough time to study some of the evidence against him.

Speaking after the ruling, Mr Linwood said: "Serious allegations of misconduct were made against me out of the blue and without any foundation or prior investigation. I was told to resign or be put through a disciplinary process and face dismissal. I refused to resign because I had not committed any act of misconduct."

He added: " I believe I was made a scapegoat by the BBC. I am profoundly grateful to the employment tribunal for getting to the heart of this whole sorry episode."

His solicitor, Louise Hobbs, of Signet Partners LLP, said: "The judgment gives an unedifying insight into the inner workings of the BBC at senior management level."

A BBC spokesman said it had been " a very difficult set of circumstances" for the corporation.

He said: " We had a major failure of a significant project, and we had lost confidence - as the tribunal acknowledges - in John Linwood. At the time we believed we acted appropriately. The tribunal has taken a different view - we are disappointed with the outcome, but nevertheless we will learn lessons from the judgment and we're grateful to staff who were involved in dealing with a very difficult case."

[Teddy Bear]

Well this story just about sums up the wasteful attitude of the BBC, and their complete lack of integrity and care about how they spend the licence fee, particularly if they think they have to conceal just how inept and out of their depth they truly are.
No private company could operate in such a way and expect to carry on business. But the BBC knows there is nothing the public can do about it and the shameful excuse of a government matches the mindset of those operating the BBC.

Complete and utter ****** - insert your own adjectives after you read this story.

BBC bosses spent £500,000 of licence fee payers' cash defending their sacking of the Corporation's technology chief – and STILL lost

• John Linwood was sacked from £240k role as Chief Technology Officer
• Came after director-general Tony Hall scrapped IT project he managed
• He took BBC to employment tribunal and won claim of unfair dismissal
• Corporation today revealed it spent nearly £500,000 on failed legal defence

By Stephanie Linning for MailOnline

BBC bosses spent nearly £500,000 on a failed legal defence of their decision to sack a former technology chief, it has emerged.

John Linwood, who was paid £240,000-a-year, was dismissed in July 2013 after a major IT project he managed was scrapped.

The BBC had ploughed £125.9million into the digital archive project but it was cut by Tony Hall in his first weeks as director-general, leaving a net cost of £98.4 million.

Mr Linwood took the Corporation to an employment tribunal, where his claim of unfair dismissal was won.

The tribunal panel criticised the BBC's 'culture and climate' that involved 'the steering of the spotlight of blame in other directions'.

Responding to a Freedom of Information request, the BBC admitted it spent £415,000 on its legal case - the equivalent of more than 2,850 annual licence fee payments - plus £83,000 in VAT.

But it refused to reveal how much money it has subsequently given Mr Linwood as compensation.

A spokesman wrote: 'We are withholding information regarding payments to Mr Linwood.

The individuals concerned would not expect their personal data to be disclosed to a third party.'

He continued: 'The BBC's legal fees in relation to Mr Linwood's case were £415k (plus VAT).'

The Digital Media Initiative aimed to make the BBC 'tapeless' by creating an integrated digital production and archiving system.

It was abandoned in 2013 and Mr Linwood was dismissed from his job as Chief Technology Officer.

The BBC had ploughed £125.9million into the digital archive project but it was cut by Tony Hall (right) in his first weeks as director-general, leaving a net cost of £98.4 million. Left, former employee John Linwood

The tribunal said a culture of 'sacrificial responsibility' at the BBC gave rise to 'avoidance strategies' and 'the steering of the spotlight of blame in other directions' by those who feared they would be associated with a 'sinking ship'.

It added staff had 'a cavalier disregard for any of the accepted norms of a fair disciplinary process'.

The tribunal rejected two other claims by Mr Linwood and found that he had contributed 15 per cent to his own dismissal.

A BBC spokesperson said: 'Over a year ago we sought to settle this without having to incur the legal costs of a tribunal, but we were not successful.'