'Dodgy' Prospect to Replace Dodgy Thompson

[Teddy Bear]

Reading this piece in the mail, it looks as if the likely replacement for the Director General Mark Thompson will be just as corrupt and biased, if not more so. For the government not to prevent this shows how gormless and spineless they are.

BBC wannabe and a CV that doesn’t add up

By Andrew Pierce

Serious questions are being raised about the way Ed Richards (the Labour stooge who’s favourite to be the next director-general of the BBC) controls the purse strings of media regulator Ofcom, which he heads.

A well-placed mole at the BBC encouraged me to dig out last year’s Commons public accounts committee report into Ofcom.

My research suggests a certain amount of ‘double-counting’ — that technique much loved by the last Labour government, which always tried to put a good gloss on its policy initiatives and the state of the country’s economy.

Perhaps Mr Richards has learnt at the feet of Gordon Brown, for whom ‘double-counting’ was a trademark. For the Ofcom chief once worked in Tony Blair’s policy unit at 10 Downing Street, and alongside Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. According to the Commons committee report: ‘Some of Ofcom’s claimed efficiency savings have been double-counted, as the same savings have been counted across a number of years. Ofcom appears to intend to keep counting indefinitely the savings from the disposal of surplus properties.’

The committee report concluded that Ofcom should change the way it reported its financial savings so they were ‘in keeping with the principles set out by the Treasury, as used by other public sector bodies’.

At Ofcom, Mr Richards presides over nearly 1,000 staff, magnificent offices overlooking the Thames and an annual budget of more than £140 million.

The MPs’ committee also had a sharp observation about wages at Ofcom. ‘The total wage bill is higher than its predecessors, allowing for inflation, though staff numbers have fallen by over 18 per cent.’

One unnamed executive claimed £35,000 in expenses last year. Surely that wasn’t Mr Richards, who’s on a salary of £381,000?

[Teddy Bear]

Whoever will be appointed to be the next Director General of the BBC will indicate just how much arrogance and perception of their own power the BBC has. The height will be for them to give the job to this guy - for obvious reasons.

'Arrogance and dubious accounts' of quangocrat who is frontrunner to run BBC

By Sam Greenhill

The frontrunner to be the next boss of the BBC was yesterday accused of treating taxpayers with ‘disdain’ over his lavish spending of public money.

Ed Richards, favourite to become director-general after Mark Thompson steps down, was described as arrogant and regarding himself as ‘above scrutiny’ in his job as head of the media regulator Ofcom.

Mr Richards, once an aide to Tony Blair, presided over a confusing set of accounts at Ofcom which involved ‘double counting’, according to a damning report by the influential Public Accounts Committee.

Double-counting was the technique used by New Labour to put a gloss on its policy initiatives and the state of the economy.

The MPs accused Mr Richards of claiming to have made savings every year on such things as rent and business rates. In reality, he had made them only once, but had kept repeating the same ‘saving’ in the accounts for subsequent years.

With the licence fee frozen and the BBC facing supposedly savage cuts, MPs expressed serious doubts last night as to whether Mr Richards was the man for the job.

The 46-year-old has run Ofcom since 2006 and before that worked in Mr Blair’s policy unit in 10 Downing Street alongside Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. He was also an adviser to Gordon Brown.

As chief of Ofcom – which has an annual budget of more than £140million – he was challenged on the honesty of his accounts by the Public Accounts Committee last year.

One MP on the committee said yesterday: ‘He treated the committee with absolute disdain and clearly felt he was above parliamentary scrutiny. He was the most arrogant witness in a long time.

‘He didn’t want to answer questions, and became more and more aggressive.

The £140m-a-year Ofcom empire


How they fixed the figures

‘There were a lot of odd things in Ofcom’s accounts – such as £2.7million for a “Thought Partner” – which were never adequately explained. The double-counting went to the issue of honesty.

‘Ofcom was not a tight ship, it was not being well run. The wage bill went up as the number of staff went down.

‘At the BBC it would be even harder to work out what he was doing.’

In its report, the committee called Ofcom’s accounting practices ‘confusing’ and said: ‘Some of Ofcom’s claimed efficiency savings have been double-counted, as the same savings have been counted across a number of years.’

Although the report was published last year, it has come into sharp relief with Mr Richards being tipped to take over as BBC director-general.

He is already under attack for being a ‘networking Labour stooge’ and critics claim he would be the last man to introduce financial restraint at the BBC. At Ofcom, he is paid nearly £400,000 a year.

A Portsmouth Grammar School boy, he studied economics at the London School of Economics before joining the BBC in the 1990s and rising to the post of Controller of Corporate Strategy. He left to work for New Labour’s aristocracy and helped write the 2001 Labour Party manifesto.

Greg Dyke, a former BBC director-general, once described him as a ‘jumped-up Millbank oik’.

Last night Philip Davies MP said: ‘The last thing the BBC needs is another New Labour stooge at the helm.

‘We all know the BBC has an institutional left-wing bias and it doesn’t seem to me Ed Richards is the right person to tackle that, given that he is part of the liberal left.’ Lord Tebbitt said: ‘We should be looking for someone who is not politically spoken for who has a sound management reputation who might bring some order to the finances of the corporation and its tendency to political favouritism.’

Mr Richards will be competing with BBC insiders including chief operating officer Caroline Thomson, head of news Helen Boaden, and director of BBC Vision George Entwistle to take over from Mr Thompson, who steps down after the Olympics.

Mr Richards remains Ofcom’s chief executive but announced he had ‘stepped aside’ from its work on media plurality and phone hacking after applying for the BBC job.

Ofcom responded to the PAC criticisms by arguing it had delivered ‘substantial efficiency savings’ since its creation in 2003. Friends of Mr Richards claim that in his time at Ofcom, there has been no sign of political bias in his work.