BBC Admits Receiving £M's in Grants from EU

[Teddy Bear]

Well you can figure out from the topic title what this is about, and we've covered this subject before. It's the fact that the BBC responds with this disingenuous statement:-
"This loan was obtained on a fully commercial basis and has no editorial impact on the BBC’s output.”

Then how would they explain that we've been noting bias on this issue by them long before we were even aware of the loans and grants they were getting? Why should any organisation give grant money to media without getting something they want in return?

If it looks like shit, and smells like shit, don't eat it!

BBC admits receiving millions in grants from EU and councils
The BBC received millions of pounds from the European Union and local authorities over the past four years, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

The news prompted MPs to raise questions about the BBC’s impartiality when its journalists report on events in the EU.

The BBC admitted in a letter to a Tory MP that it has received nearly £3million in grant money from the European Union over the past four years.
Other grants totalling £16million came from local authorities across the UK. The money was spent on "research and development projects".

The broadcaster also disclosed that its commercial arm BBC Worldwide borrowed over £141million from the European Investment Bank since 2003. Of that figure £30million is still due to be repaid by the end of May this year.

These figures are disclosed in the commercial arm’s annual report, while the BBC's annual report does not make clear where the grant money comes from.

BBC viewers 'face new licence fee to watch huge TV archive' 13 Jan 2012
Conservative MP Karl McCartney, who obtained the information through a Parliamentary Question, said he was concerned that receiving the money could affect the way the BBC covers events in the European Union.

He said: “People will quite rightly continue to question what influence the EU exerts over the BBC, particularly in the light of EU loans and grants, and the BBC's often one-sided coverage of matters relating to Europe.
“This and other examples of BBC bias and left wing leaning politicised reporting worry and concern both me and my colleagues.”

Conservative MP Dominic Raab said that this “financial dependence of the BBC on the EU casts a shadow over its editorial independence”.
He added: “The BBC covers EU issues on a daily basis, so people will understandably - and legitimately - question whether there is a link between the money it receives and the reporting it broadcasts.
"Whether or not there is an actual conflict of interest, it risks undermining their perceived impartiality.”

Priti Patel, a Tory MP, said that the figures “explains much of their subjective, pro-European commentary and hostility to those who critic the EU”. She asked: “How can a public service broadcaster demonstrate genuine impartially on European issues if it in receipt of EU funds?”

The news comes after questions have been raised about the uncritical tone of the BBC’s coverage of the EU. In 2010, Jonathan Charles, the BBC’s former Brussels correspondent, admitted he and the BBC had got carried away by the launch of the Euro currency in 2002.

He said: ‘Even now, I can remember the great air of excitement. It did seem like the start of a new era... for a few brief days, I suppose I and everyone else suspended their scepticism and got caught up in that euphoria.”

An analysis by Eurosceptic thinktank Global Britain found that over the past six years, just 0.04 per cent of the coverage on Radio Four’s flagship Today programme was devoted to the potential benefits of withdrawing from the EU.

A BBC spokesman said: "Each year in our Annual Report we disclose the total income received from a variety of grants. Grants from the EU make up a relatively small proportion of the total figure. The vast majority of EU grants are used for research and development projects.

“BBC News does not receive any grant funding from the EU. Impartiality and balanced reporting is and always will be of paramount importance for the BBC.”

BBC Worldwide, which buys programmes from the BBC and markets them around the world, said there were "no editorial conditions of any sort" attached to the loans it had received from the European Investment Bank.
The BBC borrowed money from the EIB because it was able to lend at a cheaper rate than other commercial institutions.

A BBC Worldwide spokesman said: "It represents funding for BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, which is self-financing and has absolutely no access to licence fee funds.
"This loan was obtained on a fully commercial basis and has no editorial impact on the BBC’s output.”

[Teddy Bear]

Another article on the subject which also includes additional aspects highlighting the appalling mindset of those running the BBC.

Hansen's pay cut shows the BBC is in need of radical surgery

By Steve Doughty

Poor old Alan Hansen. Another victim of the BBC’s Saturday night slaughter. First Brucie has to take a pay cut, and now the gravel-voiced scourge of slack defending has to sacrifice a third of his income, in the name of austerity.

He’ll still have a million a year to scrape by on, which is probably rather more, even allowing for inflation, than he pulled down in the days when he used to get paid for actually playing football.

He has a good act, it has to be said. Alan looks serious, talks in a doomy way about the failures of players who feature in unflattering replays, and sits next to the clowny one – that’s Mark Lawrenson.

Then we have Alan Shearer, who seems a bit embarrassed to be there at all, and that Lineker bloke. They’re all taking pay cuts.

It could be that Mr Hansen is partly paying for a little public relations error back in December, when he twice referred to black footballers as ‘coloured’. You can’t use that language. It might have been good enough for Martin Luther King but it’s not all right on Match of the Day.

Probably the Corporation has come to the conclusion that some people might think £1.5 million a year a bit much to pay for a sports pundit who can’t sing, can’t dance and can’t tell jokes. He can’t even do smut like Jonathan Ross. There is also the outside possibility that some viewers watch Match of the Day for the football rather than for Mr Hansen’s wisdom.

I’ve always wondered why the BBC, which is not short of sports journalists, doesn’t put some of them on Match of the Day in the hope they might occasionally be at least just a little bit more questioning about the football establishment and its stars. They would certainly be a lot cheaper.

On the other hand, listening to the output of most BBC sports journalists, perhaps not. Yes, I know Sir Alex Ferguson refused to speak to the BBC for seven years after it broadcast something disobliging about him, but that was Panorama, silly.

The BBC, which has a record of jealously guarding the secret of how much it pays its presenters, doesn’t appear to be unhappy that we know about the pay squeeze on the Match of the Day pundits. Perhaps it wants to give us an impression of good housekeeping.

The Corporation needs you to understand it has to be just as careful with its cash as everybody else in these hard times. It only spent £200 million on moving all those people and programmes, including Match of the Day, to Salford, a move necessary to demonstrate how much it cares for the north of England. At least it’s handy for Sir Alex.

Licence fee income went up, you will be sad to hear, by less than two per cent in the financial year to March 2011. It amounted to a paltry £3.5 billion.

Then there was the ‘other income’, which went up a bit more, by over 10 per cent, to around £1.5 billion. This includes the money the BBC gets from selling the programmes that you and I have paid for. It could be used to cut the licence fee, but it isn’t, because the BBC needs the money to maintain all its important services.

It also comes from flogging magazines based on publicly-subsidised television programmes. These magazines are very successful, sometimes more so than the offerings of commercial rivals which do not have prime time television programmes to push their product.

The BBC, however, needs still more. So, we learn, it has started to take money from Europe. It has confirmed that it has taken £3 million in grant money from the EU over the past four years.

There is also a loan, from the European Investment Bank, which is an EU institution. The BBC has borrowed £141 million from the EIB over the last nine years, and £30 million is still outstanding.

Many people might think that a public broadcaster with a duty to balanced reporting might be a bit cautious about pocketing EU money, given that the European Union has been in the news a bit lately.

The Corporation has said the grant money didn’t go to its news department, but just to ‘research and development’.

The Euro-bank money? That went to BBC Worldwide, the arm which flogs programmes abroad. Nothing to do with news or the licence fee, so that’s all right, OK?

It’s not all right at all, not by a long chalk. The BBC may not have noticed, but its coverage of European matters is regarded by a very large number of its paying customers, and by a large number of elected politicians, as a historic disgrace. Taking money from EU sources is an outrage and a betrayal of licence fee payers. Only a badly overblown organisation with spectacularly complacent management would have considered it.

If the BBC cannot survive on an income of £5 billion a year, and needs to go begging for more in Brussels, it is too big. It doesn’t need reform, it needs radical surgery.

The BBC wants you to be impressed by a cosmetic cut to a football pundit’s inflated pay. But what is required is a broadcasting version of the Beeching cuts that were once so enthusiastically deployed to halve the size of the railways.

[Teddy Bear]

The Spectator has new information obtained by a Freedom of Information request. Even so, there is till obfuscation by the BBC.

The millions in EU funding the BBC tried to hide
Miles Goslett 28 February 2014 17:41


Over the last three years the BBC has secretly obtained millions of pounds in grants from the European Union. Licence fee payers might assume that the Corporation would have been compelled to disclose the source of this money in its annual reports, but they bear no trace of it specifically. In the latest set of accounts, for example, these funds are simply referred to as ‘other grant income’.

Instead of making an open declaration, the BBC’s successful lobbying for this money had to be prised out of it using a Freedom of Information (FoI) request lodged for The Spectator, proving that there was never any danger of the state broadcaster’s bosses volunteering it willingly.

The FoI response confirms that BBC staff applied for, and accepted, about £3 million of EU funds between April 2011 and November 2013, most of which has been spent on unspecified ‘research and development’ projects, with the remaining £1 million spent on programming.

Next to the £3.65 billion tax-free income that the BBC receives each year via the licence fee, £3 million is, admittedly, a mere speck of dust – just 0.8 per cent of its annual guaranteed revenue and, obviously, even less than that when spread over 36 months.

However, the size of these EU gifts is arguably irrelevant, even though they are indicative of the BBC’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for public money. What is undeniably true is that the BBC has acted with characteristic slyness by concealing that it ever requested, let alone received, this European cash, suggesting that it is uneasy about the public being aware of its financial arrangements.

With the European elections only three months away, the timing of this disclosure is certainly unhelpful to the BBC, fuelling longstanding pro-EU bias concerns.
Rob Wilson MP, an aide to the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, says that he believes evidence of the BBC receiving any EU money leaves it open to attack because being on its payroll risks feeding the perception that is incapable of reporting objectively on European affairs. Mr Wilson also questions why the BBC needed to go ‘cap in hand’ to the EU for funds in the first place when its enviably secure financial position allows it to outgun commercial rivals in so many spheres.

He says:

‘The whole point of the licence fee is to protect the BBC’s political independence and impartiality by providing it with a source of funding that is outside the hands of governments and politicians. Thanks to this FoI response, we now learn that it has been going cap in hand to the EU for millions of pounds on the quiet over the last few years. Such outrageous flouting of the principles on which the BBC is based and funded will only promote cynicism about its political impartiality and lead to a loss of trust in the BBC’s independence.’

He adds that he intends to write to part-time BBC Trust chairman Chris Patten about this matter.

But despite Patten being paid £110,000 per year to represent the interests of licence payers, it is hard to imagine that the dripping wet former EU Commissioner and Euro enthusiast will pay much attention.

In view of the fact that he stands to benefit from a fantastically generous EU pension – which Ukip deputy leader Paul Nuttall estimates to be worth £100,000 per year for the rest of his life – thanks to his 47 months on the gravy train, Patten is surely part of the problem when it comes to questions about the BBC and Europe.

Indeed, his slippery and unaccountable nature reflects rather neatly all that is wrong with it. With trademark arrogance, Patten is currently refusing to appear in front of the House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee to answer questions about the BBC’s coverage of Europe. He has rebuffed three invitations to do so knowing that, under parliamentary rules, his status as a member of the Lords means he cannot be forced to appear in front of an MPs’ committee. Could there be a more perfect illustration of the BBC – and portly Patten – having their cake and eating it?

In the FoI response, the BBC refuses to name any of the ‘research and development’ projects or television programmes on which it spent the EU grant money.
This, apparently, is information that’s far too sensitive for mere licence payers to be told about.

All it says by way of explanation is that the funds come from two separate sources – the EU Framework Programme for Research and Development; and the European Regional Development Fund. It admits that during the financial year 2010/11 it accepted £956,000 from the first of these funds and that during the following financial year it was given a further £435,000 for the same purpose.

During the first half of the current financial year, between April and November 2013, it was awarded a third EU research and development grant worth £812,000.
More money – none of which is given without a formal application – is expected before April 2014 but the running total for these three tranches stands at £2.2 million.

A BBC spokesman says the money was used for ‘technology-based projects based on existing BBC R&D priorities and business needs’ but would elaborate no further.
The BBC’s response then reveals that it has also received EU grants for programme-making from the European Regional Development Fund.

Although it claims such funding is commonplace among Europe’s public service broadcasters, it has declined to provide a breakdown of the grants beyond insisting that none of the money was spent on news programmes. A helpful BBC insider has worked out that the total amount of EU money spent on programmes over the last three years is likely to have been £1 million.

However, with a straight face, the BBC does explain in its response that Channel 4 has in the past received funding from the same source, and that it used its EU prize money to make the 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire.

When the BBC is prepared to use an FoI response to state how a rival organisation spent its EU booty, but refuses to explain how it spent its own, its standards of transparency are surely broken.

Eurosceptic Labour MP Kate Hoey, now part of an unofficial coalition of politicians overseeing the privately-funded organisation Newswatch, which monitors the BBC for EU bias at a cost of £60,000 per year, says the FoI disclosure is ‘shocking’. She says:

‘I have grave concerns about the bias of the BBC when it comes to EU matters. I find the whole thing shocking. The lack of transparency is unjustified. Why does it seem so worried about people knowing where it gets its money? What has the BBC got to hide other than knowing that many of us don’t trust them on EU matters and the need for a referendum on Britain’s EU membership?’

Ms Hoey adds that she has concerns that the BBC ‘very rarely’ reports Labour MPs’ views on Europe. She says:

‘Even Today in Parliament [on Radio 4] always tries to convey Tory splits on Europe, and this doesn’t help the perception of an EU bias. There are Labour MPs with strong views on Europe as well. It doesn’t help that the BBC very rarely reports these views.’

The evidence contained in this FoI response is the latest in a series of examples shining some light on the BBC’s relationship with the EU.

Last autumn we learned that its charity arm, BBC Media Action, part of its Global News division, was given almost £4 million of EU money in 2012 for a project to train hundreds of journalists from countries which share volatile borders with EU member states, an initiative known as the European Neighbourhood Policy. This acceptance of EU money, not volunteered by the BBC, was condemned in some quarters as proof that it was effectively being paid to help encourage the enlargement of the European project, promoting the EU’s political agenda.

Viewers also had to watch as BBC news bulletins last October lapped up in the most excruciating fashion a European Commission-funded report denying the existence of ‘benefits tourism’, a phenomenon in which non-contributory benefits are available for the unemployed, thereby allowing those who have not paid into our system to make welfare claims in Britain even though unemployed Britons living in, for example, France or Spain, which are not party to this skewed arrangement, cannot make similar claims.

It was depressing to watch the BBC’s unquestioning, lazy reporting, which failed to make the point that Britain is one of only five European countries (along with Ireland, Germany, Finland and Estonia) stupid enough to have allowed itself to be in this situation.

But when the BBC is the recipient of secret EU funds, and is not compelled by any law to disclose its sources of income, what else should licence payers expect? Commenting on the FoI response, a BBC spokesman said:

‘BBC News does not receive any grant funding from the EU. Impartiality and balanced reporting is and always will be of paramount importance for the BBC. Each year in our Annual Report we disclose the total income received from a variety of grants, of which and grants from the EU make up a relatively small proportion of the total figure. The vast majority of EU grants are used for research and development projects. The notion that millions of pounds of EU money goes into our programming is untrue.’

[Teddy Bear]

Turns out that the £3.5 Million that the BBC had reluctantly admitted to receiving in funding from the EU is actually £20 Million.
Perhaps this is why Patten had to agree finally to be grilled by MP's on the subject if BBC pro-EU bias.

The BBC and the truth about the millions it gets from Brussels

By Christopher Booker

When The Spectator failed to get an answer from either the BBC press office or its annual accounts as to how much funding it gets from the EU, it resorted to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request. The BBC finally admitted that between 2011 and 2013 the EU paid it £3million for various unspecified projects. This prompted my friend Richard North, who has a good deal of experience in digging out information about the EU, to go to the “Financial Transparency” page of its Commission’s budget website.

Just a few clicks soon revealed that between 2007 and 2012 the BBC in fact received some £20 million, including more than £4 million in 2012 alone; in other words, very much more than the BBC had admitted under that FOI request. Furthermore, the EU itself makes no secret of the purposes for which these grants were given. For instance, €914,000 (£758,000) went to the BBC World Service for “mobilising the media in support of women and children’s rights in Central Asia”.

Another €600,000 went to help Somali radio stations in promoting “human rights, peace and governance”; €300,000 on “an integrated media project to improve media access for Afghan women” to the political process; and €2  million to provide “media capacity in the area of European integration”, whatever that might mean.

To any good little BBC or Brussels bureaucrat, these are doubtless worthy causes for EU taxpayers’ money to be spent on. But why is the BBC so shy about telling us? We cannot expect such a trifling issue to concern Lord Patten who, in addition to earning £110,000 a year to ensure the BBC’s impartiality as chairman of its Trust, received a retirement package worth £1 million for his years as an EU commissioner.

But if the BBC can’t even tell the truth about a little matter like this, how much else might they wish to hide from us about the EU?

[Teddy Bear]

When the BBC Speak of regaining trust and being transparent, and declare themselves impartial, they are only talking about to the ignorant among us.

REVEALED: EU HANDS OUT MULTI-MILLIONS TO THE BBC AND GREEN LOBBY

by M.E. SYNON

Figures are just out disclosing the millions of taxpayers' money the European Union paid in 2013 to unelected, unaccountable non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other special interest groups, especially to the "global warming" lobby.
One of the most disturbing figures is the amount the EU paid the BBC -- €6,100,987 (£4,854,039) a sum in addition to the €24.4m (£19.4) in grants the EU paid the BBC between 2007-2012.

Grants to the green anti-industrial lobby included multi-millions to Friends of the Earth €4,188,230 (£3,332,220), WWF €5,344,641 (£4,252,279) and the RSPB €3,802,544 (£3,024,327).

More, the European Commission has taken taxpayers' money from across the EU member states to subsidise United Nations institutions to the tune of nearly €140 million (£111m), despite UN staff indulging "“in corruption, waste and abuse that carries no real penalty," according to Claudia Rosett, UN expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington public policy institute.

Despite the tens of millions in taxpayer-funded grants to these special interest groups and public policy lobbyists, the European Commission has not publicised the figures, merely slipped out a database of figures under the so-called Financial Transparency System.

The multi-millions in hand-outs have come to light because of the sharp-eyed research of EU historian and blogger Dr Richard North, who says "the database is a goldmine of information…once again it brings to light the huge amount of taxpayer funding going to unaccountable NGOs, and especially (but not exclusively) climate change advocacy groups."

He calls particular attention to a new entrant on the listing, an organisation which has not received money from the European Commission before, the World Resources Institute (WRI), which has been given €1,500,000 (£1,192,527) for "designing the 2015 global climate change agreement."

Dr North's research follows the WRI, an American organisation, through its establishment in Delaware, the state most favoured by corporations for its light taxes, to its lobbying in Washington, and through its vast international funding from government institutions across Europe, including $2,041,246 (£1,192,291) from Britain's aid ministry, the Department for International Development.

His research goes on through a list of the WRI's top 43 donors, including governments, corporates, charities and NGOS. Altogether these contribute $43,688,366 (£2,738,474), amounting to 85 per cent of the WRI's 2013 revenue – yet the WRI is a private US charity.

Dr North writes: "The question is, of course, is why these bodies, with so many governments involved, are giving money to a private US charity, for activities which include preparing the ground for an inter-governmental agreement in 2015, fronted by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat."

"Accountable to no-one but the US tax authorities, established under Delaware state law, this 'charity' should have no role whatsoever in framing agreements between governments the nature of which potentially cost taxpayers billions, the beneficiaries of which are charities of this nature."

"Our government and the EU have no business funding such organisations, their very existence representing the darker side of globalisation, where our collective fates are increasingly determined by such unaccountable, faceless bodies, exerting more power and influence than even governments themselves."