Post by Teddy Bear on Jun 23, 2011 16:28:02 GMT
Besides overall disgust, there is a very strong link between the BBC and this story concerning the people who run OFCOM, the supposed media 'watchdog'. How much money they award themselves from the public purse both in salary and expenses, their world view and political allegiance, and their arrogant disdainful attitude towards the general public.
Snouts in the trough: 'Independent' media regulator costs taxpayer millions and holds Middle England in contempt
By STEPHEN ROBINSON and ZOE BRENNAN
Last updated at 11:26 AM on 23rd June 2011
Talk to anyone in the insular, self-regarding, oh-so-liberal London media world about Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards and they will say he’s brainy, self-assured and carries a vast amount of information around in his head.
True, he is slick, articulate and plausible, dressed in dark, well-cut suits with fashionable narrow lapels.
But more than anything, Ed Richards is a leading member of the New Labour political establishment, an interconnected, back-scratching mafia that, while bankrupting Britain, made its own members seriously rich.
For Richards has done extremely well for himself — the total amount of his salary and pension benefits since he took the helm of Ofcom in 2006 is heading towards the £2 million mark.
When asked to justify his own captain-of-industry salary or his watchdog’s £115 million budget, he does not talk of anything so vulgar as ‘value for taxpayers’ money’. Rather, he speaks of ‘delivering objectives for the least possible resource’.
And, in typical bureaucrat’s gobbledegook, he once told a committee of MPs that budget forward planning is a matter of setting ‘multi-year horizons’.
As well as being a master of New Labour management lingo, Ed Richards has impeccable connections.
Greg Dyke, the BBC director-general brought down after his run-in with the Blair government over Iraq weapons expert David Kelly, described Richards as ‘a jumped-up Millbank oik’.
But that is to grossly underestimate his smooth political skills. Perhaps his greatest political achievement has been to persuade David Cameron to break yet another of his pre-election pledges.
As part of his promised ‘Bonfire of the Quangos’, Cameron vowed that under a Conservative government the vast, politically correct Ofcom empire would ‘cease to exist as we know it’.
Today, the truth is that this citadel of New Labour remains, under a Tory- dominated Government, utterly unreformed. If David Cameron thinks Ofcom is going to show respect for the family values he espouses or do something about properly policing the 9pm watershed, he is deluding himself.
As one industry insider puts it: ‘Ed Richards cannot understand public anger about a row over decency because he views the world entirely through a Left-wing prism. He simply doesn’t get what all the fuss is about.’
Richards is protective about his personal privacy, and Ofcom declines to provide any details about his life or career beyond the barest details.
Edward Charles Richards is 45, a graduate of the London School of Economics, and lives in South-West London. He seems to share Ed Miliband’s ambivalence towards marriage, for though he has two children with his long-standing partner Delyth Evans, he has not married her.
Evans, seven years older than Richards, is a well-connected member of the media-political establishment in her own right as a communications consultant. She was a speechwriter for Labour leader John Smith and a Labour member of the Welsh Assembly from 2000 to 2003.
Her business of consulting on media policy must be greatly assisted, one assumes, by sharing a roof with the most important media regulator in the land.
But how has a man who has never held an executive position in the real world risen so quickly to a job with a salary of £381,713 (though it was revealed recently that he had taken a 10 per cent cut)?
The answer, it turns out, is all down to football.
During the late Nineties, a group of young Labour activists and Labour-supporting media people had kickabouts on a pitch in a scrubby area of North London near King’s Cross railway station. They named their team Demon Eyes, an ironic homage to the Tories’ depiction of Tony Blair as satan in their 1997 general election posters.
It was through Demon Eyes that Richards got to know future Labour Cabinet ministers Andy Burnham, James Purnell, David Miliband and Ed Balls, the last-named an aggressive centre-forward who frequently shouted abuse at the referee as well as his team-mates.
So connections, rather than executive performance, explain Richards’s rise. Indeed, his curriculum vitae is strikingly thin.
In the late Eighties, he worked briefly as a researcher for a TV company that made programmes for Channel 4, which may explain his apparent profound reluctance today to criticise any of the broadcaster’s output. For a brief time he was political adviser to the then National Communications Union, before working for two years for Gordon Brown in the early Nineties.
He later joined the BBC in the key corporate role of Controller of Corporate Strategy, before being chosen by Tony Blair in 1999 as senior adviser for media, telecoms, internet and e-government. He worked on the 2001 Labour election manifesto and together with two key Blair loyalists (and Demon Eyes team-mates), Andy Burnham and James Purnell, Richards drafted the Communications Act that set up Ofcom.
He proceeded to rise yearly up the ranks of the Guardian newspaper’s list of media movers and shakers, reaching number eight, and was described by the paper as a ‘quintessential New Labour man’.
Richards moved from Downing Street to the number two role at Ofcom. When the watchdog’s chief executive Stephen Carter left in 2005, Richards got the top job.
The fact that few objected to the blatantly politically partisan Richards’s appointment to head what was meant to be a totally independent regulator speaks volumes for the moral ambiguity of the New Labour years.
Incidentally, to further demonstrate the incestuous relationship between No 10 and that same supposedly independent media regulator, Carter later went back to Downing Street in a doomed attempt to rejuvenate Gordon Brown’s media profile.
Previously, Carter had been a senior executive at NTL, the cable TV company that went bankrupt with debts of £12 billion.
According to an allegation contained in court documents at the time, he told a fellow executive who feared he had misled shareholders: ‘What I tell them is nine-tenths bull**** and one-tenth selected facts.’ Soon after these alleged remarks, the firm collapsed in one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in U.S. history.
He defends the media industry, not the public
No one suggested he was responsible for the state of NTL’s finances, but U.S. court documents filed by aggrieved investors accused him and three other directors of ‘deceit’ and making ‘materially false and misleading statements’ to the media about the company’s true financial status.
Carter — who denied the allegations — walked off with £1.7 million in compensation, including a £600,000 bonus.
The other key figure at Ofcom is Colette Bowe. She became non-executive chairman in March 2009, replacing Lord Currie, who also happened to be a Labour donor and adviser and was ennobled by Labour as Baron Currie of Marylebone.
Bowe is a career economist, a former board member of the Left-leaning think-tank the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and a board member of the Camden People’s Theatre.
She earns £180,000 a year — for working ‘up to three days a week’ for Ofcom. Her pay triggered criticism from MPs, who asked why a part-time employee should earn more than the prime minister.
Bowe (whose appointment was championed by Labour’s Peter Mandelson) recently agreed to a 10 per cent pay cut, like Ed Richards.
She also holds several other lucrative posts, saying she’s ‘well able to give 60 per cent of my time to Ofcom’.
She had previously been head of the investors’ watchdog, the Personal Investment Authority, where she was criticised in 1998 for slow progress in clearing up a £15 billion pension mis-selling scandal. She left with a pay-and-compensation package of nearly £500,000.
As for the rest of Ofcom’s executive, the majority of members are on six-figure salaries.
Latest figures show that Jill Ainscough, the chief operating officer, received an annual package worth £261,858, including pensions, benefits and £25,000 performance pay; and Stuart McIntosh, head of the Competition Policy Group, took home £282,139 in pay, pensions and benefits.
Polly Weitzman, head of Ofcom’s Legal Group, enjoyed a package worth £250,971; and Christopher Woolard, head of Content, International and Regulatory Development, got £214,125 in pay, pension and benefits.
Six individuals were listed as earning between £150,000 and £164,999, including the grandly titled Director of Spectrum Policy (Olympics), whose job it is to ensure there are adequate wireless communication channels for international broadcasters at the 2012 Games.
The perks aren’t bad either. Over the past five years, individual expenses bills have included up to £5,278 for overseas accommodation and up to £13,766 a year on air fares.
One executive — former Left-wing newspaper editor Ian Hargreaves, who was Ofcom’s international director — claimed £22,726 for travel costs during the year 2007/8 while on a total pay package of £247,896.
In 2008/09, seven members of the executive board put in expenses totalling £58,388. The previous year, they claimed £63,754.
So incestuous is the world of think-tanks, government and media policy that Professor Philip Schlesinger of Glasgow University has written an academic paper on the subject, tracing how ‘a New Labour policy generation has emerged’.
This was enshrined in the thinking that went into the legislation that set up Ofcom — through a government Bill drafted by Ed Richards.
Under Richards and New Labour, criticism of anyone working in their beloved ‘creative industries’ was tantamount to sabotaging the very branding and performance of UK plc. With this mindset, it would be unsurprising if Richards saw his role as defending the industry — rather than the viewer.
For example, after 4,500 complaints about the lewd final of The X Factor last Christmas, when Rihanna and Christina Aguilera appeared in soft porn performances on prime-time Saturday evening TV, Ofcom cleared the programme of wrongdoing, saying merely that the scenes were ‘at the limit’ of acceptability for broadcast before 9pm for a family audience.
This didn’t stop the recent review on the sexualising of the young singling out the offending X Factor show for special criticism.
One media executive explained: ‘It is not a question of Ed Richards being out of step with middle England values — he would see it as an insult if you suggested he was in step with them.’
So there was no surprise that when Ofcom censured Channel 4 — albeit in a rather mealy-mouthed way — after Glaswegian comedian Frankie Boyle made unrepeatable ‘jokes’ about Katie Price’s disabled son, it failed to fine the channel.
Richards himself is, according to one media executive, a grey, technocratic figure, and Ofcom’s fashionably appointed £90 million HQ on the Thames is a dreary place in its boss’s own image.
Technically, Ofcom is a non- ministerial department, but is subject to parliamentary scrutiny, which means Richards must present himself before the Public Accounts Committee. Perhaps he got complacent during the loose-touch years of New Labour, but when he went before the committee last December he took quite a bashing.
According to someone who witnessed the encounter, it was ‘a train wreck’ as he stammered and obfuscated, unable to explain how his empire spent millions and millions of public money.
Steve Barclay, the Conservative MP for North East Cambridgeshire, a former soldier who worked in the private sector until winning his seat last year, was scathing about the state of Ofcom’s accounts.
In effect, it was accused of burying millions of pounds of unspent money in various ‘contingency funds’, while rewarding its own staff. In one year, £14 million (10 per cent of the total budget) was used to top up the staff pension fund.
Until the wind changed with a new government and the need for austerity measures, with lavish public sector salaries coming under scrutiny, Richards even employed an assistant, grandly styled as Director of the Chief Executive’s Office, on a salary of £213,000.
‘Ofcom has spent £2.7 million on something called ‘‘thought leadership’’ and they employ 180 consulting providers,’ says Mr Barclay.
‘So you can imagine who’s scratching whose back. The accounts would certainly not pass muster in the private sector.’
Richards, one observer concedes, was quick to realise after such criticism that bodies such as Ofcom needed at least to make a gesture of tightening their belts. He froze executives’ vast salaries.
Though he is known to respond furiously to any criticism, he reluctantly bent to pressure to reduce the size of Ofcom, which had increased its staff numbers every year of his tenure.
Whole aspects of the empire, notably its media literacy unit, which produced reports such as one that found children were often better on the internet than their parents, have been pruned, and the number of staff reduced by 153 in the past 12 months to the still bountiful level of 720.
But many Tory MPs remain frustrated at the way the media remains in the firm grip of Ofcom, which continues to function according to Blairite-Brownite nostrums, despite the fact Britain has a Conservative-dominated government.
It’s rather like an incoming Labour government finding an important department being run by alumni of the Bullingdon dining club and opting to keep them all in position.
Indeed, there are signs that Jeremy Hunt, the lambada-dancing Culture Secretary who is not entirely trusted by the Tory Right, is as comfortable with Richards as were his Labour predecessors.
Meanwhile, the lesson gleaned from Ed Richards’s survival from Labour to Coalition rule is that we shouldn’t expect any tougher control of the more distasteful programmes screened by our main TV broadcasters.
That, and the fact that once New Labour snouts are in the trough, it’s very difficult to get them out.
By STEPHEN ROBINSON and ZOE BRENNAN
Last updated at 11:26 AM on 23rd June 2011
Talk to anyone in the insular, self-regarding, oh-so-liberal London media world about Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards and they will say he’s brainy, self-assured and carries a vast amount of information around in his head.
True, he is slick, articulate and plausible, dressed in dark, well-cut suits with fashionable narrow lapels.
But more than anything, Ed Richards is a leading member of the New Labour political establishment, an interconnected, back-scratching mafia that, while bankrupting Britain, made its own members seriously rich.
For Richards has done extremely well for himself — the total amount of his salary and pension benefits since he took the helm of Ofcom in 2006 is heading towards the £2 million mark.
When asked to justify his own captain-of-industry salary or his watchdog’s £115 million budget, he does not talk of anything so vulgar as ‘value for taxpayers’ money’. Rather, he speaks of ‘delivering objectives for the least possible resource’.
And, in typical bureaucrat’s gobbledegook, he once told a committee of MPs that budget forward planning is a matter of setting ‘multi-year horizons’.
As well as being a master of New Labour management lingo, Ed Richards has impeccable connections.
Greg Dyke, the BBC director-general brought down after his run-in with the Blair government over Iraq weapons expert David Kelly, described Richards as ‘a jumped-up Millbank oik’.
But that is to grossly underestimate his smooth political skills. Perhaps his greatest political achievement has been to persuade David Cameron to break yet another of his pre-election pledges.
As part of his promised ‘Bonfire of the Quangos’, Cameron vowed that under a Conservative government the vast, politically correct Ofcom empire would ‘cease to exist as we know it’.
Today, the truth is that this citadel of New Labour remains, under a Tory- dominated Government, utterly unreformed. If David Cameron thinks Ofcom is going to show respect for the family values he espouses or do something about properly policing the 9pm watershed, he is deluding himself.
As one industry insider puts it: ‘Ed Richards cannot understand public anger about a row over decency because he views the world entirely through a Left-wing prism. He simply doesn’t get what all the fuss is about.’
Richards is protective about his personal privacy, and Ofcom declines to provide any details about his life or career beyond the barest details.
Edward Charles Richards is 45, a graduate of the London School of Economics, and lives in South-West London. He seems to share Ed Miliband’s ambivalence towards marriage, for though he has two children with his long-standing partner Delyth Evans, he has not married her.
Evans, seven years older than Richards, is a well-connected member of the media-political establishment in her own right as a communications consultant. She was a speechwriter for Labour leader John Smith and a Labour member of the Welsh Assembly from 2000 to 2003.
Her business of consulting on media policy must be greatly assisted, one assumes, by sharing a roof with the most important media regulator in the land.
But how has a man who has never held an executive position in the real world risen so quickly to a job with a salary of £381,713 (though it was revealed recently that he had taken a 10 per cent cut)?
The answer, it turns out, is all down to football.
During the late Nineties, a group of young Labour activists and Labour-supporting media people had kickabouts on a pitch in a scrubby area of North London near King’s Cross railway station. They named their team Demon Eyes, an ironic homage to the Tories’ depiction of Tony Blair as satan in their 1997 general election posters.
It was through Demon Eyes that Richards got to know future Labour Cabinet ministers Andy Burnham, James Purnell, David Miliband and Ed Balls, the last-named an aggressive centre-forward who frequently shouted abuse at the referee as well as his team-mates.
So connections, rather than executive performance, explain Richards’s rise. Indeed, his curriculum vitae is strikingly thin.
In the late Eighties, he worked briefly as a researcher for a TV company that made programmes for Channel 4, which may explain his apparent profound reluctance today to criticise any of the broadcaster’s output. For a brief time he was political adviser to the then National Communications Union, before working for two years for Gordon Brown in the early Nineties.
He later joined the BBC in the key corporate role of Controller of Corporate Strategy, before being chosen by Tony Blair in 1999 as senior adviser for media, telecoms, internet and e-government. He worked on the 2001 Labour election manifesto and together with two key Blair loyalists (and Demon Eyes team-mates), Andy Burnham and James Purnell, Richards drafted the Communications Act that set up Ofcom.
He proceeded to rise yearly up the ranks of the Guardian newspaper’s list of media movers and shakers, reaching number eight, and was described by the paper as a ‘quintessential New Labour man’.
Richards moved from Downing Street to the number two role at Ofcom. When the watchdog’s chief executive Stephen Carter left in 2005, Richards got the top job.
The fact that few objected to the blatantly politically partisan Richards’s appointment to head what was meant to be a totally independent regulator speaks volumes for the moral ambiguity of the New Labour years.
Incidentally, to further demonstrate the incestuous relationship between No 10 and that same supposedly independent media regulator, Carter later went back to Downing Street in a doomed attempt to rejuvenate Gordon Brown’s media profile.
Previously, Carter had been a senior executive at NTL, the cable TV company that went bankrupt with debts of £12 billion.
According to an allegation contained in court documents at the time, he told a fellow executive who feared he had misled shareholders: ‘What I tell them is nine-tenths bull**** and one-tenth selected facts.’ Soon after these alleged remarks, the firm collapsed in one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in U.S. history.
He defends the media industry, not the public
No one suggested he was responsible for the state of NTL’s finances, but U.S. court documents filed by aggrieved investors accused him and three other directors of ‘deceit’ and making ‘materially false and misleading statements’ to the media about the company’s true financial status.
Carter — who denied the allegations — walked off with £1.7 million in compensation, including a £600,000 bonus.
The other key figure at Ofcom is Colette Bowe. She became non-executive chairman in March 2009, replacing Lord Currie, who also happened to be a Labour donor and adviser and was ennobled by Labour as Baron Currie of Marylebone.
Bowe is a career economist, a former board member of the Left-leaning think-tank the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and a board member of the Camden People’s Theatre.
She earns £180,000 a year — for working ‘up to three days a week’ for Ofcom. Her pay triggered criticism from MPs, who asked why a part-time employee should earn more than the prime minister.
Bowe (whose appointment was championed by Labour’s Peter Mandelson) recently agreed to a 10 per cent pay cut, like Ed Richards.
She also holds several other lucrative posts, saying she’s ‘well able to give 60 per cent of my time to Ofcom’.
She had previously been head of the investors’ watchdog, the Personal Investment Authority, where she was criticised in 1998 for slow progress in clearing up a £15 billion pension mis-selling scandal. She left with a pay-and-compensation package of nearly £500,000.
As for the rest of Ofcom’s executive, the majority of members are on six-figure salaries.
Latest figures show that Jill Ainscough, the chief operating officer, received an annual package worth £261,858, including pensions, benefits and £25,000 performance pay; and Stuart McIntosh, head of the Competition Policy Group, took home £282,139 in pay, pensions and benefits.
Polly Weitzman, head of Ofcom’s Legal Group, enjoyed a package worth £250,971; and Christopher Woolard, head of Content, International and Regulatory Development, got £214,125 in pay, pension and benefits.
Six individuals were listed as earning between £150,000 and £164,999, including the grandly titled Director of Spectrum Policy (Olympics), whose job it is to ensure there are adequate wireless communication channels for international broadcasters at the 2012 Games.
The perks aren’t bad either. Over the past five years, individual expenses bills have included up to £5,278 for overseas accommodation and up to £13,766 a year on air fares.
One executive — former Left-wing newspaper editor Ian Hargreaves, who was Ofcom’s international director — claimed £22,726 for travel costs during the year 2007/8 while on a total pay package of £247,896.
In 2008/09, seven members of the executive board put in expenses totalling £58,388. The previous year, they claimed £63,754.
So incestuous is the world of think-tanks, government and media policy that Professor Philip Schlesinger of Glasgow University has written an academic paper on the subject, tracing how ‘a New Labour policy generation has emerged’.
This was enshrined in the thinking that went into the legislation that set up Ofcom — through a government Bill drafted by Ed Richards.
Under Richards and New Labour, criticism of anyone working in their beloved ‘creative industries’ was tantamount to sabotaging the very branding and performance of UK plc. With this mindset, it would be unsurprising if Richards saw his role as defending the industry — rather than the viewer.
For example, after 4,500 complaints about the lewd final of The X Factor last Christmas, when Rihanna and Christina Aguilera appeared in soft porn performances on prime-time Saturday evening TV, Ofcom cleared the programme of wrongdoing, saying merely that the scenes were ‘at the limit’ of acceptability for broadcast before 9pm for a family audience.
This didn’t stop the recent review on the sexualising of the young singling out the offending X Factor show for special criticism.
One media executive explained: ‘It is not a question of Ed Richards being out of step with middle England values — he would see it as an insult if you suggested he was in step with them.’
So there was no surprise that when Ofcom censured Channel 4 — albeit in a rather mealy-mouthed way — after Glaswegian comedian Frankie Boyle made unrepeatable ‘jokes’ about Katie Price’s disabled son, it failed to fine the channel.
Richards himself is, according to one media executive, a grey, technocratic figure, and Ofcom’s fashionably appointed £90 million HQ on the Thames is a dreary place in its boss’s own image.
Technically, Ofcom is a non- ministerial department, but is subject to parliamentary scrutiny, which means Richards must present himself before the Public Accounts Committee. Perhaps he got complacent during the loose-touch years of New Labour, but when he went before the committee last December he took quite a bashing.
According to someone who witnessed the encounter, it was ‘a train wreck’ as he stammered and obfuscated, unable to explain how his empire spent millions and millions of public money.
Steve Barclay, the Conservative MP for North East Cambridgeshire, a former soldier who worked in the private sector until winning his seat last year, was scathing about the state of Ofcom’s accounts.
In effect, it was accused of burying millions of pounds of unspent money in various ‘contingency funds’, while rewarding its own staff. In one year, £14 million (10 per cent of the total budget) was used to top up the staff pension fund.
Until the wind changed with a new government and the need for austerity measures, with lavish public sector salaries coming under scrutiny, Richards even employed an assistant, grandly styled as Director of the Chief Executive’s Office, on a salary of £213,000.
‘Ofcom has spent £2.7 million on something called ‘‘thought leadership’’ and they employ 180 consulting providers,’ says Mr Barclay.
‘So you can imagine who’s scratching whose back. The accounts would certainly not pass muster in the private sector.’
Richards, one observer concedes, was quick to realise after such criticism that bodies such as Ofcom needed at least to make a gesture of tightening their belts. He froze executives’ vast salaries.
Though he is known to respond furiously to any criticism, he reluctantly bent to pressure to reduce the size of Ofcom, which had increased its staff numbers every year of his tenure.
Whole aspects of the empire, notably its media literacy unit, which produced reports such as one that found children were often better on the internet than their parents, have been pruned, and the number of staff reduced by 153 in the past 12 months to the still bountiful level of 720.
But many Tory MPs remain frustrated at the way the media remains in the firm grip of Ofcom, which continues to function according to Blairite-Brownite nostrums, despite the fact Britain has a Conservative-dominated government.
It’s rather like an incoming Labour government finding an important department being run by alumni of the Bullingdon dining club and opting to keep them all in position.
Indeed, there are signs that Jeremy Hunt, the lambada-dancing Culture Secretary who is not entirely trusted by the Tory Right, is as comfortable with Richards as were his Labour predecessors.
Meanwhile, the lesson gleaned from Ed Richards’s survival from Labour to Coalition rule is that we shouldn’t expect any tougher control of the more distasteful programmes screened by our main TV broadcasters.
That, and the fact that once New Labour snouts are in the trough, it’s very difficult to get them out.