Post by Teddy Bear on Apr 8, 2013 18:10:49 GMT
I wish the following story gave me some sort of optimism that anything really threatening to the continuance of the BBC by the government was about to take place, but all I see is 'same ol' same ol'.
Open up the books, Tories tell BBC boss
By Andrew Pierce
One week into his job as director general of the BBC and Lord Hall’s problems are mounting.
Industrial action is threatened over compulsory redundancies at the bloated corporation; the Jimmy Savile scandal refuses to die down; and Tories are increasingly angry at the continuing Left-wing bias in the Corporation’s news coverage.
The party was appalled that one of Hall’s first acts was to appoint former Labour Cabinet minister James Purnell as the £295,000 director of strategy. Now they are out for revenge.
Backbench Tory Alun Cairns has drafted a Bill that would require the BBC to make public online any expenditure of more than £500 in the way that town halls, who already make such information available, were forced to by Communities Secretary Eric Pickles.
Cairns, the Vale of Glamorgan MP, believes the BBC should be more open about how it spends licence-payers’ money, not least on ‘stars’ with highly inflated salaries.
Bizarrely, the National Audit Office, the public-spending watchdog, has to request permission from the BBC Trust before it can investigate specific areas of BBC spending, a privilege denied to all other publicly funded bodies.
Cairns says: ‘The licence fee is the most regressive tax in Britain so the BBC should be subject to the same scrutiny as other public bodies. We should have the same transparency for expenditure across all public organisations.’
By Andrew Pierce
One week into his job as director general of the BBC and Lord Hall’s problems are mounting.
Industrial action is threatened over compulsory redundancies at the bloated corporation; the Jimmy Savile scandal refuses to die down; and Tories are increasingly angry at the continuing Left-wing bias in the Corporation’s news coverage.
The party was appalled that one of Hall’s first acts was to appoint former Labour Cabinet minister James Purnell as the £295,000 director of strategy. Now they are out for revenge.
Backbench Tory Alun Cairns has drafted a Bill that would require the BBC to make public online any expenditure of more than £500 in the way that town halls, who already make such information available, were forced to by Communities Secretary Eric Pickles.
Cairns, the Vale of Glamorgan MP, believes the BBC should be more open about how it spends licence-payers’ money, not least on ‘stars’ with highly inflated salaries.
Bizarrely, the National Audit Office, the public-spending watchdog, has to request permission from the BBC Trust before it can investigate specific areas of BBC spending, a privilege denied to all other publicly funded bodies.
Cairns says: ‘The licence fee is the most regressive tax in Britain so the BBC should be subject to the same scrutiny as other public bodies. We should have the same transparency for expenditure across all public organisations.’