The BBC Inflated Pay-Off Scandal

[Teddy Bear]

Mark Thompson says that the reason he gave his mate Mark Byford £949,000 as a pay-off was to 'keep him focussed. The £500,000 that he would have been due, which is still insanely excessive for these clowns, was not enough.

Apparently Lucy Adams, the woman on a £320,000 salary, who decided it was 'time to move on' from the BBC after only 5 years, was deemed to be a liar by MP Margaret Hodge, staff at the BBC cheered.

Shows just how popular she is, among even her co-workers.

The BBC's £1.6m not-so-magnificent seven: Shame of the corporation's highly-paid top brass who blamed each for scandal of using taxpayers' money to pay off executives

• Seven BBC bosses with salaries worth a total of £1.6million grilled by MPs
  
• Committee struggling to get to the bottom of over-generous pay-offs
  
• Blame game rumbles on with all sides insisting they are not at fault
  
• MP Margaret Hodge accused Lucy Adams of changing her evidence
  
• At one point Mrs Hodge said: 'I'm not having any more lies this afternoon'.
  
• BBC's media correspondent tweeted: 'There was an audible cheer'

By Sam Greenhill and Matt Chorley

Between them they earned £1.6million-a-year from the BBC and yet not one could help MPs get to the truth about who signed off huge pay-outs to senior managers.

The not-so magnificent seven, including ex-Director-General Mark Thompson BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten squabbled and contradicted each other during a three-hour grilling in Parliament.

Cheers even rang out in the BBC newsroom yesterday as the corporation’s personnel chief Lucy Adams was branded a liar by MPs.



Miss Adams protested the verdict on her was unfair, but committee chairman Margaret Hodge declared: ‘You’re developing a habit of changing your evidence.’

Miss Adams, with her glasses perched on her head in what critics dubbed an ‘Ab Fab’ look - was accused of completely contradicting herself.

At one point, Mrs Hodge told her: ‘I’m not having any more lies this afternoon.’

This outburst apparently sparked a wave of disloyal jubilation within the Corporation as staff watched the exchange on live television.

The BBC’s own media correspondent, the respected Nick Higham, tweeted: ‘There was an audible cheer in the BBC newsroom when Margaret Hodge accused BBC HR director Lucy Adams of lying to the PAC.’
Margaret Hodge warned the BBC bosses that she wanted no more lies
Lucy Adams insisted it was not fair to be accused of repeatedly changing her evidence to MPs

The under-fire Miss Adams has already announced she is quitting the BBC after weeks of criticism of her role in signing off lucrative severance payments to senior managers.

She was reduced to a stuttering apology yesterday when the MPs took her task for admitting she had made a mistake in her previous evidence to the committee on July 10.

On that date, she had claimed to have no knowledge of a crucial email about Mark Byford’s £1million payoff.

But earlier this week, she admitted to having helped write it.

Yesterday she apologised to the committee and said she ‘immediately’ clarified the issue, but then admitted not doing so until September 2.

Mrs Hodge said this was a ‘very funny interpretation’ of ‘immediate’. Another MP said Miss Adams’ evidence should be taken with ‘a pinch of salt’.

The HR chief was accused of treating licence payers’ money as ‘sweetners’ to lavish on departing staff more money than they were entitled to.

At first, Miss Adams suggested she would never have used such a ‘strange’ word, but MP Stephen Barclay told her she had done so in an email, and said: ‘I find it very odd that the head of HR is saying “use the licence payers money as sweetners”.’

The Daily Mail has seen the leaked email in question, in which Miss Adams asks a colleague in HR: ‘What would the typical redundancy payment be so I can get a sense of the scale of this sweetner?’

In the committee, she said the BBC always tried to ‘manage people out the door’, taking into account the broadcaster’s ‘duty of care’.

She said the payment was part of a plan to cut numbers of senior staff without causing too much disruption - leading Mrs Hodge to tell her: ‘This attitude that the top cadre of people at the BBC faced greater difficulty when they faced redundancy rather than a receptionist or someone lower down is offensive, just offensive.’

CRISIS EXPOSES INABILITY OF BBC TRUST TO PROTECT LICENCE FEE

The utter confusion over who knew what about the payouts has exposed major failures in the ability of the BBC Trust to hold senior executives to account.

Trust chairman Lord Patten pleaded with MPs for more time to prove that the governance system set up by the last Labour government could work.

But PAC chairman Margaret Hodge said: 'We all around the table feel it's broke.'

Downing Street played down reports that ministers were preparing to scrap the Trust.

Lord Patten also cast doubt on a proposal that communications watchdog Ofcom should regulate the corporation, saying: 'I can't imagine handing the regulatory power to Ofcom and Ofcom wanting to be involved in remuneration.'

While Miss Adams floundered, the bitter BBC civil war deepened as Mark Thompson, Lord Patten other serving and former executives sought to shift the blame over who knew about over-generous pay-offs to managers.

Also called to give evidence were Marcus Agius, the former chairman of the BBC Executive Board Remuneration Committee, BBC director Nicholas Kroll, BBC Trustee Anthony Fry and former BBC Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons.

Between them the seven had BBC salaries worth a total of £1.6million.

Some claimed the 'eye-watering' pay-offs were part of a culture of extravagance at the Corporation while others insisted they presented 'value for money'.

During almost three hours of furious questioning in Parliament, former Director-General Mr Thompson and BBC Trust Lord Patten repeatedly contradicted each other, notably over a £1million settlement for ex-deputy Director-General Mark Byford.

Mr Thompson insisted he told the BBC Trust about the details of the pay-offs.

But sitting just feet away, BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten hit back, saying he was repeatedly told the huge deal for Mr Byford was 'contractual' and 'standard'.

As the Public Accounts Committee struggled to get to the bottom of the utter mess at the Corporation, Tory MP Chris Heaton-Harris said the saga was 'the most bizarre game of whack-a-mole I've ever seen in my life where you hit something down and it throws up another load of questions'.

To the astonishment of MPs on the powerful PAC, BBC bosses repeatedly claimed the £949,000 paid to Mr Byford in a 2010 deal represented ‘value for money’.

With no-one emerging victorious and the BBC's reputation suffering another hammering, the executives will be braced for a damning report from MPs.

Mr Thompson denied 'losing the plot' in agreeing the over-generous deals, but the row now threatens the continued existence of the BBC Trust itself.

Ms Hodge said under Mr Byford's contract he could have been paid off with £500,000.

She said: 'Why was half a million pounds, which to most people is mega bucks, why was that not enough?'

But Mr Thompson said it was part of getting the ‘complete pay bill down’ and suggested he would sign off the same deal again because it represented ‘value for money’.

'Why was half a million pounds, which to most people is mega bucks, why was that not enough?'
PAC chairman Margaret Hodge

Defiantly he declared: ‘I do not think we lost the plot.’ He said he had achieved a lot to cut the number of managers and reduce the pay bill.

He denied that BBC rules on payouts were 'lax' but conceded: 'Not all of the paperwork was done perfectly.'

Bizarrely Mr Thompson said the pay-off to his friend Mr Byford was needed to make sure he remained 'focused' on his job and not be distracted.

Mr Thompson told the committee that in his view Mr Byford's severance package represented 'value for money' and he explained that he had been under 'ferocious pressure' from the Trust to make savings.

Ex-Director-General Mark Thompson claimed his friend and deputy Mark Byford needed to be paid £949,000 to remain 'focused' on his job at the BBC.

MPs demanded to know why the huge sum was agreed, when contractually Mr Byford was only entitled to £500,000.

Mr Thompson denied there was any 'favouritism' in his decision to agree the deal.

Mr Thompson told the committee that in his view Mr Byford's severance package represented 'value for money' and he explained that he had been under 'ferocious pressure' from the Trust to make savings.

As part of the extraordinary deal, it was decided in October 2010 that Mr Byford would not be told formally that he was being made redundant until April the following year, allowing him to continue drawing on his salary.

Mr Thompson said the huge sum was needed because the BBC wanted Mr Byford to be 'fully focused' on his work during his last months in the job and not 'worried about his future'.

But former Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons agreed with the MPs that payments like Mr Byford's 'look eye-watering' and he warned the Trust had been 'damaged' but the crisis.

Lord Patten said he had been repeatedly told the £949,000 deal for Mark Byford to leave the BBC was 'contractual' and 'standard'.

The BBC Trust chairman told the committee: 'I am in a slightly difficult position because I became chairman of the Trust six months after the Byford payment.

'I'm accused of having misled the committee on something that I never knew and couldn't have been expected to know.'

He said he had been through his induction pack from May 2011 and subsequent briefings, and there was no mention of the controversial severance payments.

One briefing ahead of a press conference stated: 'These were contractual payments which were essential in order to slim down the executive board.'

Lord Patten complained that it is 'Mark's contention' that he should somehow have deduced that the payment to Mr Byford was in excess of his contractual minimum.

He blamed a 'cultural issue' for the slate of payouts at the Corporation which 'we do have to recognise and apologise for and deal with very robustly'.

He said one of his first jobs was a meeting to discuss executive pay where he made 'a very simple point that the best cultural director in the world, Neil MacGregor, got £180,000 a year for running the British Museum. How many people at the BBC get paid more than that and how can we justify that?'.

Lord Patten cast doubt on a proposal that communications watchdog Ofcom should regulate the corporation, saying: 'I can't imagine handing the regulatory power to Ofcom and Ofcom wanting to be involved in remuneration.'

Peter Fincham, the former BBC1 controller walked away in 2007 with £500,000 because the Corporation could not sack him, it has emerged.

He resigned over the so-called Crowngate scandal in which he wrongly told the Press at a screening that the Queen walked out of a photoshoot featured in a royal documentary ‘in a huff’.

It later emerged that a promotional trailer for the programme had been misleadingly edited and that his account was untrue.

Mark Thompson said there had been an ‘editorial disaster’ which involved many people both insides the BBC and at the independent production company which made the programme.

But he added: ‘I felt it would be appropriate for Peter to go. The clear advice however was we didn’t have grounds for dismissal.

‘We decided to go for a consensual termination. I absolutely remember briefing the chairman [of the BBC Trust]. Not on every detail but we were going through a difficult negotiation, a lawyer-to-lawyer negotiation’.

[Teddy Bear]

Well it's a start, but in light of all that's come out about the BBC in the last 12 months, even without extensive research, it doesn't go nearly far enough.

Government auditors to get unlimited access to BBC accounts after pay-off scandal, says Maria Miller
Official Government auditors will get unlimited access to the BBC’s accounts in the wake of the executive pay-off scandal, Maria Miller has said.

Christopher Hope

The Culture secretary said in a speech on Wednesday night that she had decided to let the National Audit Office run a rule over the BBC’s books whenever it liked.

She specifically linked the changes to the BBC Trust’s inability to get to grips with an apparent policy to over pay staff leaving the broadcaster going back to 2006.

The changes could lead to more controversial disclosures about BBC spending, such as the more details about the salaries paid to the BBC’s stars and celebrities.

On Monday seven current and former executives appeared in front of the Public Accounts Committee and squabbled in public about who was to blame for paying out-going executives millions more than they were entitled to.

Mrs Miller said that the past 12 months had “undoubtedly been one of the most challenging years in its history. Monday was a grim day for its senior management.”

Mrs Miller told an audience at the Royal Television Society in Cambridge that “serious questions were raised about that judgement by the scale of the severance payments made”.
Part of the problem was the NAO, which scrutinises spending across Whitehall, had not been allowed to vet the payments whenever it liked.

This was because of a deal struck in 2010 under which accountants from the NAO can access the BBC’s accounts once a quarter and only with the agreement of the Trust.

This had meant NAO auditors had had to wait months before being able to scrutinise the payoff to former director general George Entwistle.

The BBC had initially said Mr Entwistle was due to be paid a year’s salary of £450,000 after just 54 days work, twice as much as he was entitled to. However the NAO later found that he was actually paid £25,000 more.

Mrs Miller said: “The NAO’s work has been pivotal in bringing issues to light so I want us to strengthen its role further.

“It simply wasn’t right that the NAO was prevented from immediately looking at the details of George Entwistle’s severance package. I want a system where the NAO can look at any area of concern without hindrance or delay.”

The changes were welcomed by Margaret Hodge MP, the chairman of Public Accounts Committee which oversees the work of the NAO. She said: “It is really important that there is full access but is important the BBC can maintain editorial integrity and independence.”Steve Barclay MP, a member of the committee, added: “I very much welcome this positive announcement which will improve transparency and accountability at the BBC.”

Mrs Miller said last night certain the NAO would be prevented from rooting out waste if it fell under "editorial" budgets.
The BBC has been accused of duplicating work between its channels and of sending more staff than necessary to events such as Glastonbury.

Asked whether the watchdog would be able to investigate a scenario where three crews were sent to China while a commercial rival sent just one, Mrs Miller said: "That is not something that will be at all appropriate. The NAO have a role but it's important to define what that role is."

Mrs Miller also said that the way executive pay and perks was monitored by the Trust would be set out clearly for the first time.
She said: “There is on-going confusion over where the roles and responsibilities of the Executive stop and the Trust start. This must be addressed. It will come as no surprise to anyone here that governance arrangements are kept under review.”

She said that there was clearly an unresolved “tension in the Trust being ‘both regulator and cheerleader’" and made clear that if there were any other scandals then it was possible that the BBC Trust could be scrapped altogether.
She said: “I will continue to keep the BBC’s structures and effectiveness under review.”

A BBC Trust spokesman said: “We value the work done by the NAO and have had an increasingly good working relationship with them. We will look forward to talking about this further.”
Lord Hall, the director general, and Lord Patten, the chairman of the Trust, said: "We are confident that there is space within the current Charter to make an improvement in the way that the BBC is run and managed, and to ensure a primary focus on what audiences want and need and how we spend their money.”

[Teddy Bear]

Now this is what I would like to see happen.
An excellent article, and entirely relevant.

How to save the BBC? Privatise it

Three years ago, our columnist and former editor Charles Moore was summoned to Hastings Magistrates’ Court to pay £807 for refusing to pay his television licence. He was protesting against the BBC’s ‘gross violation of its charter’ by broadcasting obscene phone calls made by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand to the former Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs. The court did not have much time to hear his case, or anyone else’s. That day, 560 others would have been prosecuted for not paying their dues to the BBC. Now it has risen to 700 a day, accounting for an extraordinary one in ten of English court cases.

We now know why the Beeb needs the money: it has paid some £60 million in severance payments to various senior managers in the last eight years. When seven BBC executives were asked to explain this to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee this week, they exuded a sense of collective bewilderment that they should be brought to account. This is what happens if you can rely on the taxman to raise the money you spend. Michael Grade, former BBC chairman, put the problem succinctly. ‘Like the very wealthy son of a rich family,’ he said, ‘you don’t learn the value of money.’

The BBC’s problems do not stem from its recent payoffs: they are a symptom of a deeper malaise. It is a bureaucracy, designed for the 1930s, which has somehow made it to the 21st century. Listening to its executives waffle this week, it’s horribly clear that the BBC does not have leadership or even a hierarchy. It simply has a corporate culture in which success comes from keeping your head down. And its money is guaranteed, because people who don’t pay up are taken to court.

In the press, the hierarchy is a pyramid topped by the editor, with whom the buck stops. If a mistake is big enough the editor walks the plank — and rightly so. The BBC is structured in a very different way. Its hierarchy ends in a plateau, in which power is diffused across management teams. If all goes well, everybody takes the credit. If all goes wrong, you can never work out who was responsible and everybody blames somebody else. And if any heads do roll, the fall is cushioned by an eye-watering windfall collected from the people who fill magistrate’s courts across the country.

When justifying huge salaries, the BBC pretends that it is a business competing in a commercial market. But its funding system is justified on the basis that it is a public service devoted to Lord Reith’s mission to inform. This claim never been harder to sustain. It is now using its unfair funding advantage to try to compete with its rivals. Take, for example, its new online ‘magazine’ which this week has a feature about karate-kicking ‘teen exorcists’. Highly entertaining, no doubt, but is this really a public service that no one else would provide?

Then take BBC iPlayer, a highly popular innovation. But it comes free — or, rather, the costs are collected by the taxman and the magistrates. It’s far easier than asking people to stump up cash. Its website also provides daunting competition for local newspapers, many of which are going out of business. All told, the BBC is the most glaring example of anti-competitive practice in the British economy, yet one which none of the government’s competition quangos has ever seen fit to investigate.

Why does the BBC expand? Because this is what bureaucracies do. Like old imperial armies, they conquer because they feel the only alternative is defeat. The result is a sprawling portfolio of interests, which are very far removed from Lord Reith’s values.

A reckoning is long overdue. The BBC may not know the value of money, but those prosecuted for not paying its fines certainly do. Many of them struggle to make ends meet and would not dream of paying £145.50 for BBC services that they could happily go without. Sky now produces some of the best arts coverage in Britain. The market for drama is now global, and British living rooms are filled with American (and even Danish) DVD box sets.

The BBC can easily compete in such a market, its programmes have a global appeal. It could easily find people willing to pay to watch or listen. But if it wants to be tax-funded, it should restrict itself to a public service remit and focus on reducing the license fee — and the fancy salaries must go for good. There is no possible excuse for paying the head of the state broadcasting service more than the Prime Minister.

The pointless BBC Trust should be abolished, but this will not guarantee the corporation a stable future. On current trends, the BBC’s enforcers will soon end up prosecuting more people than read the Guardian. This is simply not sustainable. An organisation of such quality and global reputation has the potential to become a great, truly independent British institution — and one that does not need to rely on magistrates’ courts for funding. It is odd in many ways that in 30 years of privatisations, many of them very successful, the BBC has hardly been mentioned as a candidate. It is high time this option was properly discussed.

[Teddy Bear]

Well 'the start' that I indicated above seems to be a non-starter in any practical terms.

I always thought the government had the power to decide what was for the public good - not the BBC.

Auditors banned from scrutinising BBC pay deals
Government auditors will be banned from looking at pay of BBC stars, despite promises by the Culture Secretary to open the Corporation’s books.

Matthew Holehouse

Hundreds of millions of pounds of BBC spending will remain exempt from National Audit Office (NAO) investigations, despite a vow by Maria Miller to subject the BBC to “an unprecedented level of scrutiny” in the wake of the row over pay-offs to senior executives.
The Culture Secretary told television executives on Wednesday night that the NAO would be able to look at “any area of concern without hindrance or delay”.

But a clause to protect the BBC’s editorial independence means the auditors will be banned from looking at any areas relating to programme making, or from making criticisms that could result in star presenters being forced out the corporation.

The NAO will be forbidden from questioning “the merits of any editorial or creative judgement” made by bosses.

Programming amounts to £2.4bn of the corporation’s £3.3bn budget, meaning the lion’s share of spending is likely to go unexamined.

It means the deals that saw a more than a dozen BBC stars receive salaries worth between £500,000 and £5m last year will not be subject to scrutiny.

The names, precise salary bands or terms of the contracts have never been released by the BBC. But the top earners are thought to include Jeremy Clarkson, who is paid £1m for presenting Top Gear,

The ruling also means the auditors will be unable to challenge BBC executives on how many staff they send to events such as the World Cup or Glastonbury festivals. The BBC has been criticised for sending far more staff than its commercial competitors to high-profile events.

Mrs Miller told the Royal Television Society gathering in Cambridge such probes would be “not be at all appropriate.”

Instead, the NAO’s new powers amount only to being able to see the BBC’s commercial accounts immediately, rather than having to wait for quarterly publications

Stephen Barclay MP, who sits on the Public Accounts Committee, said it was “a fiction” that having the full BBC accounts audited would place the broadcaster under political control.

The NAO’s Comptroller and Auditor General is politically independent and the body already audits the BBC World Service, which is funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Mr Barclay said.

“What is unique about the about the BBC that doesn’t apply to the Ministry of Defence, the Royal Family or HM Revenue and Customs?” he said. “One of the lessons of corporate scandals of recent years is the importantce of executive not having their own way when it comes to auditors."

A Culture Department spokesman said: “The Government has rightly opened up the BBC to an unprecedented degree of scrutiny by the NAO to help provide transparency for license fee payers.

"However, whilst we will insist on intensive scrutiny for things like executive pay it is also important that the BBC retains its independence and it would not be appropriate for the NAO to in effect determine who and what is shown on the BBC.”

The BBC referred to a letter from Lord Hall, the BBC director general, to Maria Miller. He said: “We believe we have done a great deal in the last two years to strengthen our relationship with the NAO and to make the current arrangements work to the benefit of licence fee payers. However, we would be interested in discussing further any proposals you have in this area.”

[Teddy Bear]

Though not telling us anything particularly new, this article focusses on 2 of the main figures identified in this scandal. An insight into the corrupt world they occupy/occupied taking full advantage over the licence fee payer.

High life of the BBC fatcats: The ex-Deputy DG enjoying his £3.4million pension aged just 55 and the designer-clad payoff queen accused of lying to MPs

By Christian Gysin and Alasdair Glennie

Strolling down the road in his pink canvas shoes, he may look a little young to be enjoying a life of retired ease.

But as a beneficiary of the BBC’s extraordinary largesse, Mark Byford can count himself luckier than the most well-heeled of pensioners.

The corporation’s former deputy director general – whose £1million golden handshake was at the heart of the severance pay scandal – is now claiming an extra £163,400 a year of the licence fee as his pension, the Daily Mail can reveal.

The former executive became a ‘deferred pensioner’ at the age of just 55 when he celebrated his birthday on June 13 this year, meaning he is now able to claim 76 per cent of his full BBC entitlement just two years after receiving his enormous payoff.

At £3.4million, Byford’s pension pot is one of the largest seen in the public sector and far exceeds the £1.75million amassed by former prime ministers. Yesterday, Tory MP Steve Barclay said the sum was ‘extraordinary’, adding: ‘It is further evidence of just how out of touch those at the top of the BBC have become from both their own staff and the licence-fee payer. It drives a coach and horses through the BBC’s argument that he needed a payoff. He can expect to claim this pension for a very long time to come, draining the licence fee for years.’

Byford – who lives with his wife in a sprawling £1.2million five-bedroom home in Winchester, Hampshire – was handed a windfall of £1,022,000 when he left the BBC in 2011 after 31 years’ service.

It included a £474,500 ‘contractual redundancy payment, a further £474,500 ‘pay in lieu of notice’ and £73,000 for ‘accrued leave’ – or holidays he had not taken.

The sum was criticised by the National Audit Office’s devastating report into the payoff fiasco in July. The watchdog found Byford had worked eight months of his 12-month notice period, meaning he was paid at least £316,333 more than he was contractually owed.

The deal was signed off by his close friend Mark Thompson, who was the BBC’s director general at the time.

A recently uncovered memo entitled ‘Project Silver’ shows Thompson personally drew up plans to pay him more than his contractual entitlement.

It showed that one motivation for handing Byford a giant severance payoff was to compensate him for not being able to take his full £215,000-a-year pension, because he would have to leave before his 55th birthday.

Grilled over the issue by the Public Accounts Committee on Monday, Thompson admitted he had known Byford for more than 30 years and still socialises with him.

It is thought the pair were so close at the BBC they were described as ‘brothers’, but Thompson denied he made the payment because they were friends.

Insisting it was ‘value for money’, he said he made it to keep Byford ‘fully focused’ on his job.

During his tenure at the corporation, Byford – formerly chief of the BBC World Service – attracted controversy because of his £474,500 salary and his large expenses claims. In 2010, it he spent £5,000 on flights to the World Cup in South Africa. In June 2010, the BBC disclosed that it had a £2billion ‘black hole’ in its pension fund.

The corporation announced it was closing its final salary pension scheme for new staff and warned that existing staff would see their benefits sharply reduced.

Byford has spent the past few months completing a book called A Name on a Wall, which will be published next in November by Random House. It tells the story of an American soldier in Vietnam named Larry Byford.

Now he is retired from public life and earns £13,000 a month from his pension, Byford can enjoy the interests he lists in his Who’s Who entry.

These include ‘family, football, cricket, travel, rock music, the seaside, cathedrals, fell walking and swimming’.

'Lipgloss Lucy': The £332,900-a-year HR director accused of changing evidence'

BY MILES GOSLETT

To staffers at the BBC, she is ‘Lipgloss Lucy’, because in four years at the corporation she has never been seen without a layer of immaculately applied make-up.

And appearing before MPs this week, Lucy Adams, the £332,900-a-year director of human resources, cut her usual, fragrant figure in a well-tailored suit, with a pair of glasses, perched Jackie O-style, on her head.

Sipping cups of mineral water, and fiddling with her expensive jewellery, the lofty 48-year-old had come to give evidence about millions of pounds of unnecessary payoffs made to departing BBC executives on her watch.

Perhaps, as with so many of the meetings she has breezed through in her long and successful career, the strikingly attractive Adams expected her televised exchange with the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee to be a walk in the park.

If so, she was rapidly disabused of that notion. For unlike so many of the men in suits who have helped Adams’s climb up the greasy pole, Labour MP Margaret Hodge, the committee’s tenacious chairman, was strangely immune to her charms.

‘I’m not having any more lies this afternoon,’ chided Hodge, during one heated exchange. ‘You’re developing a habit of changing your evidence.’

The changing evidence in question revolved around a previous appearance before the committee in which Adams claimed to know nothing about an email discussing a massive £1million redundancy payment to former BBC executive Mark Byford. But Adams had helped draft that very email, a fact she rather sheepishly decided to ‘clarify’ last month.

In another heated exchange about this staggering abuse of licence fee payers’ money, Adams was told that her evidence should be taken by MPs with ‘a pinch of salt’.

She replied, brusquely: ‘That’s grossly unfair.’ But the damage was done. It was a televised monstering. And worse still for Adams, it prompted no rallying defence at BBC headquarters. Instead, boorish cheering erupted in the sprawling central newsroom at New Broadcasting House, where many hard-working staff resent having to scrape by on a fraction of the vast salary earned by ‘Lipgloss Lucy’.

They will have gained at least a crumb of comfort from the fact that Adams’s lucrative BBC career, which has put her at the centre of the payoff scandal, will soon come to an end. Though her departure was announced in August, she actually leaves next April. This gives her seven months, at full pay, to find new work.
BBC employees sit before the Commons Public Accounts Committee

Meanwhile, the BBC’s many galley-slaves may also be pleased to discover that Adams’s ordeal at the hands of the ferocious Mrs Hodge may not yet be over. ‘We are currently investigating whether there is any evidence that demonstrates whether Lucy Adams did mislead us,’ she told the Mail yesterday.

‘A whistle-blower sent an email suggesting that she had used the term “sweetener” to describe severance payments to departing staff. If we find that she misled us, we would have to recall her.’ A BBC spokesman, however, said the corporation is ‘completely satisfied with the information provided by Miss Adams to the committee’.

One area MPs may also want to investigate is the nature of the relationship between Adams and some of the former senior executives who benefited from her largesse. Take Sharon Baylay, the BBC’s ‘marketing chief’, who left in 2011 after less than two years in the post. She was granted a bafflingly generous payoff of £390,000. Intriguingly, Adams’s Facebook page lists Baylay as one of her ‘friends’.

Another area that MPs may wish to investigate is Adams’s extensive use of her BBC expense account to travel the world during her time in office. In April 2011, she visited India, Afghanistan and Pakistan, at licence fee payers’ expense.
Adams was told that her evidence should be taken by MPs with 'a pinch of salt'

Adams was told that her evidence should be taken by MPs with 'a pinch of salt'

In March 2012, she was in Jerusalem. ‘Adams works in personnel,’ notes one observer. ‘What the hell was she doing in all these exotic places that she couldn’t have been doing behind her desk in London?’

Yesterday the corporation spokesman said: ‘The BBC’s director of HR is required to visit employees based outside the UK. All these travel costs comply with the BBC’s expenses policy.’

But for a woman earning £332,900 a year, Adams has certainly not shown herself to be shy about burdening licence fee payers with costs. For example, in November 2010 she claimed £23.50 on expenses for an Apple iPad charger.

Last August, she submitted a £586 expense claim to cover a return trip from her summer holiday, after being called into the office at short notice. This, the BBC says, is also in line with policy.
To say Adams divides opinion at the corporation hopelessly understates matters.

After a long career in human resources, she joined the BBC in 2009. Initially, she was regarded as a breath of fresh air. No one had even heard of her predecessor. She, by contrast, set about touring every department and letting everyone know who she was.

But then redundancies started coming, in large numbers. Adams became the very public face of the job loss programme, making her, as one journalist put it, ‘the lightning rod for everyone’s grievances’. One – surely apocryphal – piece of newsroom gossip has it that she was overheard discussing her new £1,200 handbag outside a meeting with the unions over job cuts.

Little wonder that some in the news division refer to her, with a striking lack of originality, as the ‘wicked witch’. Others make unkind remarks about her expensive wardrobe. ‘She’s very tall, she’s very thin, and loves to wear tight jeans and lacy white tops,’ says one female reporter.

‘She is also famously monochrome, colourless in the way she dresses – it’s always black, grey, white, and she likes silver jewellery. She is always styled to perfection, invariably tanned.’ One reason for her unpopularity revolves around the ‘grunts’: the technicians, producers and camera personnel, the researchers on whose meticulousness the BBC’s reputation for accuracy rests. They have endured years of pay freezes and pension cuts.
Yentob
Abramsky

In the old days this would not have mattered, for no one joined the BBC to get rich. But when executive salaries started matching, then outstripping, the private sector, resentments boiled over. ‘Lucy swooped down from HQ and was brought in to make the workforce “agile”,’ complains one journalist. ‘That was the word that was used.’

While junior staff were sacked in vast quantities, and subjected to pay freezes, bloated senior executives were given over-generous payoffs. Some £25million was paid to 150 top staffers – at least £2million more than contractual obligations.

Adams was born Lucy Kate Germanda Hollis – her father worked for the BBC as an actor and writer, her mother as a secretary. She has two failed marriages behind her.

The first was to Kevin Adams in August 1986, when she was 21. The pair had a daughter, now in her mid-20s. The second, to Sean Keogh, also ended and since 2007 she has lived with PR director Andrew Powell, known as Bob, in a £1.5million terrace house in Fulham, West London.

Adams says the key to her success is her utter lack of ‘airs or graces’. ‘I deal with people exactly the same, whether they are the chairman or someone who is cleaning the office.’ Maybe so. But the true measure of how colleagues view the ‘authentic’ Lucy Adams was perhaps felt this week in the cheers that her humiliation sparked at New Broadcasting House.

[Teddy Bear]

Ex BBC presenter Peter Sissons gives an insider look at what is going on inside the BBC as revealed by the various scandals in the last year.

Why I despair of the suits running the BBC
Despite the high salaries, the BBC is now woefully short of outstanding managerial talent
The BBC should stop being so smug about public support, says Peter Sissons

If some evil genius had sat down to devise a sequence of events to discredit and destabilise the BBC, he couldn’t have done better than the damage the corporation has inflicted upon itself in recent months. Last week, Maria Miller, the Culture Secretary, said this had been the BBC’s “annus horribilis”. When the Queen used the phrase in 1992, she was referring to royal scandals, marriage breakdowns and the Great Fire at Windsor Castle. Arguably, there wasn’t much she could have done about any of it.

But in the past 12 months, all the harm done to the BBC was avoidable, had anyone been up to the job.

The Jimmy Savile scandal was mishandled from the start. George Entwistle became the shortest-serving director-general in the broadcaster’s history, but was rewarded with a severance package worth more than £1.3 million. BBC Two’s flagship news programme Newsnight falsely implicated the Conservative peer Lord McAlpine in a child-abuse scandal. Channel 4 News ran journalistic rings around the BBC over the Andrew Mitchell “Plebgate” affair. And a technology project designed to make the corporation “tapeless” was scrapped after five years, but only after £100 million had been wasted on it.

If you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did last week, when some of the biggest chiefs were called before MPs to explain why the corporation had handed £369 million of licence-fee-payers’ money to staff in severance deals.

As I watched the BBC’s past and present panjandrums lined up before the Public Accounts Committee last Monday, my curiosity gave way to despair.

Had these people really been trusted to be the custodians of one of our greatest national treasures? Were they really discussing the hundreds of thousands of pounds they dished out among old chums and colleagues, as though the money grew on trees? Who was the champion of the licence fee-payers, by all accounts growing increasingly resentful of these goings-on?

The chairman of the BBC Trust, Lord Patten, had a platform to speak up for the people who put up the money, but instead spoke up for himself.

It used to be a matter merely of occasional public curiosity about what went on in the management cocoons of Television Centre or Broadcasting House. Now, I believe, it has become a matter not of public interest, but of public concern.

When I joined the BBC in 1989, I got to know the then director-general, Michael Checkland. He was paid £100,000 a year — in today’s money about £210,000. He told me years later that he was offered a £10,000 pay rise, which he initially refused, but then reluctantly accepted

When Mark Thompson left the job a year ago, he was being paid nearly four times as much, and Mark Byford, his deputy, was on two-and-a-half times the Checkland benchmark.

They weren’t alone: inflated salaries had spread throughout the BBC’s top layers. Among the foot soldiers, it generated enormous resentment, deepening the already low morale of BBC staffers whose job security is permanently under threat.

Before he went, Thompson carried out a cull, earmarking 150 senior managers for redundancy — including his old chum, Byford.
In my book, being redundant means no longer needed at work. But the question, which no one on the Public Accounts Committee asked, is: why were these executives, if they were surplus to requirements, being paid an arm and a leg in the first place?

To make his friend feel better about it, Thompson gifted Byford an extra half-a-million pounds. Thompson said it was to keep Byford “focused” while he was working out his notice. In any other firm, employees are expected to remain “focused” as a basic condition of their employment. And it was not as though Byford faced a future on the breadline, not with a pension pot of more than £3 million to focus on.

By any standards, if the chairman of a parliamentary select committee has to say “I’m not having any more lies this afternoon”, in the company of such elevated former or present BBC managers, it represents a new low-water mark for the corporation

Putting aside the question of who was paid off with how much, and who knew, I was disturbed by other aspects of the Public Accounts Committee proceedings. Were these the sort of people to whom we look to lead, inspire and protect the world’s greatest broadcasting organisation?

I was fortunate, during my 25 years at ITN, to work for some inspirational leaders. I was hired by Geoffrey Cox, who was described by Sir Robin Day as “the greatest television journalist we have known”. Cox was on £4,000 a year at ITN — worth £68,000 today.

On the ITN board at various times were John Freeman, David Plowright, Denis Forman, Sidney Bernstein, Paul Fox and other great names of programme- making. When I launched Channel 4 News in 1982, I was privileged to see a lot of Jeremy Isaacs, the first chief executive of Channel 4. At ITN, I worked for a string of other superb editors, including the great Sir David Nicholas. They were all leaders who rose through talent and who promoted talent, and their doors were always open.

The BBC today, for all its high salaries, is woefully short of great managerial and editorial talent, the sort of leadership you’d follow over the top or into the jungle. Why is this?

Success on the BBC promotion ladder — the stairway to the rich rewards of the executive floors — usually means performing well at interview. Accordingly, many people who are advanced are not necessarily the most talented, but those judged to fit the prevailing culture. It’s an organisation practically designed to perpetuate its own weaknesses.

Mr Entwistle, a lacklustre director-general — who was responsible for the BBC’s much-ridiculed coverage of the Diamond Jubilee Pageant (so Lord Patten told us) and who lasted just 54 days in the post — could have saved the current intake a lot of bother if only they’d remembered Aneurin Bevan’s dictum: “Why look into the crystal ball when you can read the book?”

What keeps the BBC afloat is the dedication of the hundreds of producers and reporters who give their best despite their leaders, and whose reward is often no more than being asked to reapply for their jobs.

In the present crisis, perhaps the most perceptive comment came from Lord Grade, when he said: “I think the BBC suffers more and more from a lack of understanding of the value of money.” Anyone who goes to MediaCity, the BBC’s complex in Salford that cost more than £200 million and is home to Radio 5 Live, BBC Breakfast and Match of the Day, or the new Broadcasting House headquarters in central London, recently rebuilt at a cost of £1  billion (£55 million over budget and four years late), can see how licence-fee payers’ hard-earned cash has been thrown at these projects. When I saw inside the Salford building this year, I was shocked at the extravagance — the best of everything.

Office chairs and desks are not the mere functional sorts you see in other workplaces, but top-of-the-range designer stuff. And thousands must have been wasted on rows of space-age, face-to-face “meeting pods”, used mainly, it appeared, by staff eating their sandwiches.

These billion-pound projects could not have been built in the commercial sector by any firms other than Britain’s most wealthy and successful.

And this attitude to money takes other forms — executives claiming relatively trivial sums on expenses when they are paid huge salaries. The latest expenses figures show that John Tate, the BBC’s director of policy and strategy, claimed £3.16 for “soft drink in room during working trip to Brussels”, while Bal Samra, the head of business affairs, spent more than £1,500 on 59 cabs. Surely, given the sort of money they earn, the BBC top brass could afford to put their hands in their own pockets occasionally for things such as fizzy water, bus tickets and leaving cards for departing colleagues?

Apart from managers no longer treating your money as if it were theirs, there needs to be another change at the BBC. They should stop being so smug about public support. The BBC may still be the most trusted news organisation in Britain, but it does not seem to realise that the public’s trust is increasingly fragile. Whenever I speak to audiences about my years in broadcasting, increasing numbers of people buttonhole me afterwards to tell of their unhappiness about what they get for their money, and the BBC’s Left-wing agenda. These are invariably men and women who were once — and still should be — the BBC’s most loyal supporters.

Earlier this year, I recorded a Radio 4 appeal. As I left Broadcasting House, my friends from the charity stopped to have a photograph taken in the grand foyer. Immediately, they were barked at by an official who ordered that pictures were not allowed. That’s no way to treat the people who pay your wages.

I wish Lord Hall, the director-general — who, when he was head of news, was one reason that I joined the BBC — all the best in the massive job he has taken on.

He will have received a lot of advice this past week about how changing the BBC Charter or abolishing the Trust will improve the way the corporation is run and ensure money is better spent. But the Culture Secretary was right when she said that individuals, not just structures, were to blame for the latest fiasco.

As long as the BBC goes on rewarding failure, changing the structures will achieve nothing. It needs a change in the culture, the emergence of a new generation of managers who are not held in contempt, and who are doing the job for something other than the money.

[Teddy Bear]

A half a million pound 'mistake' narrowly averted. Yet those who make this kind of mistake at the BBC are considered worthy of their astronomical salaries.

BBC got sums wrong over £1m pay-off: Bungling executives calculated extra £474,500 for Mark Byford - now MP demands fresh inquiry

• Administrative error added to former BBC director generals' £1million-plus pay-off
  
• Lucy Adams, HR boss, described the mistake as 'a complete and utter f*** up'
  
• Tory MP called for an inquiry citing doubts 'the BBC was even capable of calculating the proper sums'

By Paul Cahalan

The BBC added an extra £500,000 to a former deputy director-general’s massive £1 million-plus pay-off – thanks to a ‘miscalculation’.

Lucy Adams, the BBC’s embattled human resources boss, was said to have described an administrative error that added a further £474,500 of licence fee payers’ money to Mark Byford’s redundancy package as a ‘complete and utter f*** up’.

Last night Tory MP Rob Wilson called for an inquiry and said the latest development in the scandal surrounding BBC executive pay-offs ‘raises doubts about whether the BBC was even capable of calculating the proper sums.’

Ms Adams’s former husband Steve Vear revealed that Mr Byford’s bungled payment caused chaos within the Corporation, although the error was spotted in time to avoid paying the extra money.

Mr Vear told The Mail on Sunday that his former wife said the BBC’s reward manager Robert Johnston was fired after he drew up a draft agreement giving Mr Byford a further year’s salary by mistake. The BBC refuses to comment on the reasons behind Mr Johnston’s departure. Even without the extra payment, Mr Byford’s redundancy deal, agreed in October 2010, was £1,022,000 – made up of £474,500 contractual redundancy payment, £474,500 pay in lieu of notice and £73,000 for accrued holiday.

It is said to be one of the biggest payouts in public sector history. Mr Byford also benefited from a £3.4 million pension pot.

But a National Audit Office report revealed Mr Byford’s £1 million deal was at least £316,333 more than he was contractually owed.

While top BBC executives appeared before a Commons Public Accounts Committee to answer claims of wasting public money, none have left their jobs following the scandal.

‘I distinctly remember Lucy using the expression “he [Johnston] no longer had my confidence” when she talked about why she had fired him,’ Mr Vear said. ‘Lucy was aware of it and the then director-general Mark Thompson was too. She had to tell him. It was bad enough for someone to lose their job over.’

One BBC insider said the mistake came as the HR department was under enormous pressure to reduce staff numbers. He said: ‘There was chaos in HR. I don’t think they could cope.’
Former Deputy Director General of the BBC Mark Byford's payment caused chaos within the Corporation although the error was spotted before any extra money was paid

Former Deputy Director General of the BBC Mark Byford's payment caused chaos within the Corporation although the error was spotted before any extra money was paid

Mr Vear added: ‘I remember we were on holiday on [Costa del Sol’s] Estepona beach and Lucy was taking calls all the time. I got really annoyed and said, “That’s it, pack your bags and I’ll take you back to the airport.”

She ended up apologising and we stayed.She was more angry with the guy she got rid of than with herself, although she admitted she’d never checked the figures Robert provided her with.’

Weeks after the error was spotted, Mr Johnston, whose own salary was £196,550, left the BBC. On October 7, 2010, Ms Adams – dubbed Lipgloss Lucy by some colleagues for her expensive fashion tastes – sent staff a note saying: ‘Robert ... has decided it is time to move to a less high profile and demanding role. He will leave at the end of this week.’

Mr Thompson raised the issue of the near over-payment to Mr Byford in evidence to the Public Accounts Committee. Last night MP Mr Wilson said: ‘The BBC must urgently disclose the details surrounding the error. The fact HR miscalculated Mark Byford’s pension entitlement by nearly half a million pounds raises serious questions about that department’s competence.

‘We are asked to believe the pay-offs to Byford and others were only what they were contractually entitled to, but this raises doubts about whether the BBC was even capable of calculating the proper sums.’

A BBC spokesman said: ‘It is not true to say that Mark Byford received an inflated severance payment as a result of any miscalculation or prior offer.’ He would not comment on Mr Johnston, who also did not comment.

Ms Adams announced earlier this year that she is leaving the BBC next April.

[Teddy Bear]

Statements including terms like 'regain trust', 'open and accountable', 'transparent', 'mindful of public trust', 'responsible', are those the BBC like to tell their public, to show they are concerned and care.

Their diminishing ignorant public just suck it up, happy to believe that the trust they have vested in this body is well founded, and 'their world' will continue in the way they want to believe it is.

It would take very little for anybody with an open mind to see just how traitorous, insidious, greedy, and self serving this organisation truly is.

The Mail on Sunday has found out that between January 2010 and June 2013, 9 out of 91 BBC executives who had been earning over £100,000 a year, and had their contracts terminated, all receiving huge payoffs, were subsequently secretly rehired.

The BBC responded to this 'revelation' by stating ‘In three and a half years, nine individuals have returned to work for the BBC and been engaged on short-term or freelance contracts – none have returned to full-time employment at the BBC.’

However they refuse to reveal the names of any the 91 individuals who received a payoff or to say how much each received on leaving the BBC or in what departments they are now working. So much for transparency.

So the BBC have exaggerated the figures showing how it has trimmed the various departments, and some will have been rewarded with a higher earning than before. As we have previously seen, by being reinstated as a freelancer, they can also avoid paying the normal rate of tax.

No doubt their faithful brainwashed flock will see it as a positive bit of news.

BBC secretly rehires NINE top earners after handing them huge payoffs when they left

• 91 high earners received payoffs between January 2010 and June 2013
  
• Nine now work for the corporation as freelances or on short-term contracts

By Miles Goslett and Paul Cahalan

The BBC secretly rehired some of its biggest earners months after giving them thousands of pounds in severance payments, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Nine of 91 staff who earned £100,000 or more, and received a payoff between January 2010 and June 2013, are now back working for the corporation as freelances or on short-term contracts, a Freedom of Information request has revealed.

As freelancers often enjoy higher rates of pay than full-time staff because of a potential lack of job security, some of those re-engaged may have even been paid the equivalent of more than the six-figure salary they drew before they left.

Last night Tory MP Steve Barclay, a member of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), criticised the BBC for not volunteering this information to Parliament months ago.

Mr Barclay said: ‘It’s staggering the BBC has been so cavalier with licence fee money that it has not only given generous payoffs to its top managers but has then rehired some of them at further expense.

We need to be told which have been rehired, the reason why, and at what level this was authorised.’

Despite requests by this paper, the BBC has refused to name any of the 91 individuals who received a payoff or to say how much each received on leaving the BBC or in what departments they are now working.

A spokesman said: ‘In three and a half years, nine individuals have returned to work for the BBC and been engaged on short-term or freelance contracts – none have returned to full-time employment at the BBC.’

[Teddy Bear]

Mark Byford appeared today on the Radio5 Live Victoria Derbyshire show. He was apparently invited to promote his new book. For anybody who doesn't know, Byford was the deputy director general at the BBC earning a salary of £475,000 a year, and received one of the highest pay-offs ever in the public sphere to the tune of £950,000.

Derbyshire questioned his taking the pay-off, details which you can read below, and a clip can be heard here for the next 7 days. Needless to say, Byford sees nothing wrong in what he was offered, or in accepting it.

One would hope that after working for 30 years in the publicly funded organisation and attaining the position of second in command that Byford would have understood his responsibility to the public and the remit of the BBC. Instead this self-serving clown, says he accepted the pay-off because 'it's what the BBC gave him'. Almost like it was a natural phenomenon that showered him with riches.

The BBC is an organisation that he had shared responsibility in running, and if he and the rest of them would have had the morals and ethics for which they were entrusted, he/they wouldn't have been milking the public teat as they did and continue to do.

Remember the BBC are paid for by our society, forced to do so under penalty of prison, to support and enrich us.
Instead they follow their own self-serving agenda which can be seen has already done much to ruin a once great country. With their snouts in the trough they also pocket all they can without any real justification other than they can.

Then they have the hypocrisy to do a documentary about benefit cheats who also milk the system. Is it any wonder our national 'educator' has helped create these cheats? No doubt the irony is lost on the BBC.

The BBC don't want you to do as they do - but as they tell you.

Despicable, and just one of the demonstrations of the vile mindset there for which the licence fee should be terminated.

THE BIG BBC PAY OFF DEBATE

The BBC has faced repeated criticism over huge salaries for stars and payouts to managers beyond what their contracts demanded.

It is thought stars like Graham Norton and Gary Lineker both earn about £1.5million a year at the BBC.

Earlier this year it emerged that the BBC had paid out £369million in golden goodbyes over eight years, including £60million to senior managers.

Severance payments included £470,000 to former director general George Entwistle after only 54 days in the job and £680,000 to ex-chief operating officer Caroline Thomson.

The National Audit Office said the BBC paid £1.4 million more than it was contractually obliged to pay to 22 senior managers in the three years to December 2012 and that it paid £60 million to 401 senior managers over an eight-year period.

'I'm not greedy': Sacked BBC deputy director general Mark Byford defends his £950,000 pay-off and insists he's done NOTHING wrong

• Byford - whose salary was £475,000 - given £949,000 when made redundant
  
• He has denied he was being greedy in accepting the redundancy package
  
• In a BBC Radio Five Live interview he said: 'I have done nothing wrong'

By Amanda Williams

The former BBC deputy director-general has defended his near £1 million corporation pay off - denying that he had been 'greedy' in accepting it.

Mark Byford, whose salary was £475,000, received a total of £949,000 when he was made redundant by the BBC.

He has also suggested he will not pay back any of the sum in the wake of the BBC pay controversy - insisting he has 'done nothing wrong'.
The former BBC deputy director-general, Mark Byford, has defended his near £1 million corporation pay off - denying that he had been 'greedy'

The former BBC deputy director-general, Mark Byford, has defended his near £1 million corporation pay off - denying that he had been 'greedy'

Mr Byford's payment is one of several large payouts from the BBC which have drawn widespread criticism.

In an interview on BBC Radio 5 Live, when asked whether he would pay back some of the sum, Mr Byford responded: 'I have done nothing wrong.'

He told Victoria Derbyshire’s show: 'I appreciate obviously and understand that it was a lot of money. I appreciate the concern and criticism about the executive payoffs.'

But he added: 'I absolutely don’t think it was greed on my part at all.'

Mr Byford, who was on the radio show to talk about his new book, a war story, said: 'I lost my job. I was made redundant. I was given the terms I was given by the BBC. I left when I was told to leave by the BBC.

'After 32 years of working there, where I was devoted to the corporation, the last thing that I would ever think or feel was that I would want to have greed.'

Former director-general Mark Thompson told the Public Accounts Committee that the pay-off to Mr Byford, who left in 2011, was needed so he would remain 'focused' on his job and not be distracted.

But when asked whether he really needed an extra £500,000 to stay focused on his job, Mr Byford replied: 'That's his word... I wanted to do what the BBC wanted me to do.'

Thompson told the Public Accounts Committee that the pay-off to Mr Byford, who left in 2011, was needed so he would remain 'focused' on his job

Asked how it sounded to licence fee-payers, he replied: 'I didn't say that I needed it in order to focus.'

But he defended his former boss over the remark, saying he was 'not insulted by those words at all'.

He added: 'I think what was meant there was that there was a huge task of ensuring that the largest broadcast news organisation in the world, which I was leading, that the transition of the responsibilities of duties were effectively done...'

'That, when I did leave, editorial policy issues, Olympics issues and journalism issues were absolutely clearly documented of who was responsible and how it would run now that my post had been closed.'

Asked whether he would pay the extra money back following the controversy, he said: 'It was properly approved and it was the terms I was given. In that context I absolutely think I have done no wrong.'

Pressed on the issue, he responded: 'I have just said to you, I'm not saying any more than that.

'Because I think I've made it absolutely clear and I don't think I should comment any further on it.

'I've come to talk about something that in the week of Remembrance is a very different subject matter. I've answered your questions.'

Former BBC2 controller Roly Keating was given a £375,000 pay-off but returned the money after learning it had not been properly authorised

Mr Byford said that although he had received a 'lot of money', he was 'number two at the BBC', had served more than 30 years and that it was in the context of 'a big cull of the senior management'.

He added: 'I didn't want to go. I loved my job.'

Mr Byford said he was asked to stay until June 2011 but the BBC 'wanted to announce it immediately in October 2010 to create momentum for that overall savings programme... both internally and externally that in reducing the senior management it was going to go right to the very top.'

He said his payment was 'approved by the appropriate body... I took no part in it... I lost my job. I was given what I was given and agreed to do what the BBC wanted.'

Asked whether he deserved the payment, he added: 'I have never negotiated my salary from the day I joined the BBC, aged 20.'

Asked whether he thought twice about the payment, he said: '"All I wanted was for the BBC to feel that the terms that they were giving me were the terms that they felt were fair and correct... and I accepted them.'

On damage to the broadcaster's reputation, he said: 'I absolutely understood and understand today that it was a considerable amount of money... It's the terms that the BBC said I should have. It was appropriately approved.'

Mr Byford said he could not say whether controversies which engulfed the BBC - the aborted Newsnight programme into sexual abuse by Jimmy Savile and an episode of Newsnight which led to Lord McAlpine being wrongly implicated in child sex abuse allegations - would have been averted if he had kept his post.

But he said that 'as part of my responsibilities the most complex and sensitive editorial issues would land on my desk and I would handle them'.

He said he had never heard rumours about Savile.

'I started at the BBC in 1979 at BBC Leeds, his home city... I stayed at the BBC for 32 years. I never heard any of those rumours, anecdotes or claims about sexual abuse on BBC premises.'

The Savile scandal was 'a horrific moment for the BBC', he said, adding that he was 'horrified and disgusted' by what happened and that the BBC had lessons to learn.

Earlier this year, former director-general Mr Thompson was forced to deny a charge that the BBC had 'lost the plot' when MP Margaret Hodge, who chairs the Public Accounts Committee, asked why Mr Byford needed an extra payment when he was contractually due around half a million pounds.

Other payments which have caused controversy include £470,000 to former BBC director-general George Entwistle, after only 54 days in the job.

He resigned after BBC2's Newsnight wrongly implicated Lord McAlpine in the child abuse scandal.

The National Audit Office said the BBC paid £1.4 million more than it was contractually obliged to pay to 22 senior managers in the three years to December 2012 and that it paid £60 million to 401 senior managers over an eight-year period.

Lord Hall announced moves to cap BBC payments at £150,000 after taking over as director-general earlier this year.

[Teddy Bear]

This Telegraph View pretty much expresses my own on the subject of Byford.

The great BBC rip-off
The idea that Mark Byford, the former deputy director-general who received an extraordinary redundancy payment worth £949,000, had no choice but to accept the money is an insult to licence-fee payers
Mark Byford: ''I was given what I was given, and in the context [that] it was what the BBC thought I should have, I took it. It was not greed on my part.”

By Telegraph View
In 2011, Mark Byford, then the deputy director-general of the BBC, was made redundant as part of a drive to reduce the number of highly paid senior executives at the corporation. The BBC gave him an extraordinary redundancy payment worth £949,000. Yesterday, Mr Byford told an interviewer that he saw no reason to say “no” to the money: “I was given what I was given, and in the context [that] it was what the BBC thought I should have, I took it. It was not greed on my part.”

The idea that Mr Byford had no choice but to take the money is a reflection on a payoff culture within the corporation that is an insult to licence-fee payers. In July, a report released by the National Audit Office found that £25 million had been paid in severance to 150 outgoing senior BBC managers – about £2 million more than their contracts stipulated.

Unfortunately, largesse at the public’s expense is not limited to the BBC. Last week it was discovered that, following a restructuring of the NHS, 50 senior managers were made redundant and given payoffs of more than £100,000. One married couple received almost £1 million between them, only to be re-employed by the health service a few months later. The irony is that in many cases, public-sector bodies have been forced to cut staff because of the wider austerity drive – yet in the process have actually handed out millions of pounds. It is a display of generosity that would probably, and rightly, be regarded as foolhardy and self-defeating if it happened in the private sector.

In the public sector, unfortunately, the attitude hitherto has been to be kind to those leaving, in the hope that, when your own time comes, the institution will be kind to you in return. Despite what Mr Byford says, that sounds a lot like greed.

A couple of comments posted under the article that I think also worthy of inclusion. One shares my own view, based on years of monitoring the various deceptions perpetrated by the BBC, and the other, who is aware of the same bias, but thinks the motive is benign. I'll include my response after theirs.

• VanLimburg • 15 hours ago
  BBC funded by EU agents blood money to destroy free Nation-States (demographically through mass foreign colonization,socially through freudian sexualization, marxist materialism):
  
  ''EU should 'undermine national homogeneity' says UN migration chief''
  www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-p...
  
  ''BBC admits receiving millions in grants from EU''
  www.telegraph.co.uk/cul...
  
  ''The BBC is facing questions over the impartiality of its coverage of the European Union after its charity arm received millions of pounds to promote the EU’s political agenda.''
  www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
  
  After WW2, the insidious Frankfurt School of cultural revolution ,planned the meticulous take over of organisations like the BBC in order to control the political output in a way beneficial to its cause. This is the way marxist internationalism takes hold, by stealth. Having been comfortably in place in schools,kindergartens,universities,state sector, financial elite, for some considerable time now, they have long enjoyed a free hand in indoctrinating a gullible viewing (and listening) public into sharing their dangerous and destructive dogma.
  
  The only way to excise this ideological malignance is to use the equivalent of a fungicide. What the UK needs is its own Joseph McCarthy-type figure to rid the BBC of all those practising (in this case) what are tantamount to un-British activities. While ever the organisation continues to exist in its present form, with a seemingly free mandate to control political output in its own favour, it remains nothing more than an organ for the subversion of the traditional British way of life.
  
  It's far worse than that, I think if you dug deep enough you'd find the BBC is being used as psychological warfare against the indigenous British people.
  
  I don't mean a slight bias, or reporting out of preference as we're all apt to do, I mean a deliberate agenda, headed by psychologists / psychiatrists creating or altering imagery specifically designed to destroy us as a nation and a people.
  
  I suppose I'm saying the same as you except I believe it's far more sinister and extreme than a slight bias.Their intention is to destroy us, eradicate and ultimately exterminate us as a nation and a people, it 's not about some trendy BBC execs happening to quite like the EU.
  
  Even Radek, Trotsky,Bela Kun,Rosa Luxemburg ,Stern Gang couldn't dream of a better propaganda tool over the lemmings, children's , creating a specific indoctrination of multiculturalism anti-white anti-British anti-Christian , anti-natural family , homoziohalal mafia.
  
  
• Cassandra > VanLimburg • 11 hours ago
  I believe there is a conspiracy of a kind. It isn 't though an organised or spoken one, or for many, even a conscious one.
  
  It is more a coming together of the like minded in a natural sort of way, since arty types tend to be left wing and arty, left-wing people of the kind that read the Guardian tend naturally to gravitate towards a publicly owned medium like the BBC. Once there, they operate within the prevailing liberal / left groupthink of 'unchallenged liberal assumptions' .
  
  Non-arty types in nitty-gritty occupations like Engineering tend to be more right wing, because they have a firmer grasp on the realities of life.
  
  
• Teddy Bear > VanLimburg • 29 minutes ago
  I agree Van - and this is one time I have to disagree with Cassie. When I think about the deaths and suffering the BBC has knowingly caused by their lies and deception in the way they portray events in order to support their clear agenda, there is a conscious and sinister drive to bring certain things about - which to my mind is pure evil.
  
  That they use left wing ideology to get everybody working for them 'into the fold' is quite probable, so I wouldn't say that EVERYBODY at the BBC is on the same level, but the hypocrisy they eventually have to display that belies any left wing ideology is readily apparent.
  
  It's not about Right and Left - but right and wrong. The BBC is WRONG.

[Teddy Bear]

Somebody works as a highly paid executive within a company (£320,000pa). Other employees within the company have accused her of certain unethical practices which she denies.

Does anybody know of a company that will also pay that executive's legal advice to counter the accusations?

But as we know, the BBC is a VERY generous company, particularly as it doesn't actually have to earn the money it uses. So they are happy to pay for her legal advice.

Here's a reminder about this executive involved, - Lucy Adams, from the thread at the top of this page.

Miss Adams, with her glasses perched on her head in what critics dubbed an ‘Ab Fab’ look - was accused of completely contradicting herself.

At one point, Mrs Hodge told her: ‘I’m not having any more lies this afternoon.’

This outburst apparently sparked a wave of disloyal jubilation within the Corporation as staff watched the exchange on live television.

The BBC’s own media correspondent, the respected Nick Higham, tweeted: ‘There was an audible cheer in the BBC newsroom when Margaret Hodge accused BBC HR director Lucy Adams of lying to the PAC.’
Margaret Hodge warned the BBC bosses that she wanted no more lies
Lucy Adams insisted it was not fair to be accused of repeatedly changing her evidence to MPs

The under-fire Miss Adams has already announced she is quitting the BBC after weeks of criticism of her role in signing off lucrative severance payments to senior managers.

She was reduced to a stuttering apology yesterday when the MPs took her task for admitting she had made a mistake in her previous evidence to the committee on July 10.

On that date, she had claimed to have no knowledge of a crucial email about Mark Byford’s £1million payoff.

But earlier this week, she admitted to having helped write it.

Yesterday she apologised to the committee and said she ‘immediately’ clarified the issue, but then admitted not doing so until September 2.

Mrs Hodge said this was a ‘very funny interpretation’ of ‘immediate’. Another MP said Miss Adams’ evidence should be taken with ‘a pinch of salt’.

The HR chief was accused of treating licence payers’ money as ‘sweetners’ to lavish on departing staff more money than they were entitled to.

At first, Miss Adams suggested she would never have used such a ‘strange’ word, but MP Stephen Barclay told her she had done so in an email, and said: ‘I find it very odd that the head of HR is saying “use the licence payers money as sweetners”.’

The Daily Mail has seen the leaked email in question, in which Miss Adams asks a colleague in HR: ‘What would the typical redundancy payment be so I can get a sense of the scale of this sweetner?’

For the BBC she's been worth £320,000 a year, and any money it takes to protect her. Can you understand why?

While the article tells us the BBC is paying out of licence fee money, which makes it sound like an inanimate corporation made this decision.
It has to be a decision by somebody overseeing the BBC - like Tony Hall.
The same Tony Hall that tells us all the time that 'we need to treat the licence fee payers money as our own'. Bad choice of words since that's exactly what they've been doing, but he meant it to sound like they're really going to respect it.

So never mind that Adams was found to have lied to MPs over her culpability in the pay-off scandal, she's not lying about the accusations levelled about her by fellow BBC employees. So Hall thinks that licence fee payers should cough up for her defence as her £320,000 pa is not enough for her to pay it herself.

If the government doesn't sell off or close this insidious organisation after all that's come out in the last year, it makes them just as complicit and corrupt.

BBC uses licence fee money to pay the legal bills of human resources boss suing journalists' union for libel

• Lucy Adams suing National Union of Journalists over hacking allegations
  
• She earns £320,000 a year - yet the BBC has agreed to pay her legal bills
  
• It is not the first time the broadcaster has funded legal costs of executives

By Alasdair Glennie

The BBC has admitted spending the licence fee on lawyers to defend the reputation of its controversial human resources head.

Lucy Adams, who earns £320,000 a year, is taking legal action against a trade union which accused her of running a ‘dirty tricks’ campaign at the corporation.

She is set to leave the BBC in the spring after being accused of ‘corporate fraud and cronyism’ in the severance payoff scandal.

But she said accusations by the National Union of Journalists that she hacked into staff emails and bullied employees into spying on employees were ‘highly defamatory’ and ‘false and without foundation’.

She later revealed she had instructed libel lawyers to ‘take matters further’ and seek damages for defamation from the NUJ.

Last night, it emerged the BBC had agreed to pay her legal bills, prompting fury from MPs.

In a response to a Freedom of Information request, the BBC told the Independent newspaper: ‘As the NUJ article made serious and damaging allegations against Lucy Adams in her role as the BBC’s director of human resources, the BBC has agreed to fund the reasonable costs of Miss Adams seeking external legal advice.’

The BBC said Miss Adams could receive further financial support if she decided to proceed further with any legal action.

It said: ‘The funding currently covers the provision of legal advice to Miss Adams prior to the issue of proceedings and her lawyer’s costs must be approved by the BBC in advance in incremental caps, with an explanation of the work that needs to be undertaken.’

Tory MP Stewart Jackson, a member of the Commons public accounts committee, said: ‘The BBC seems to have learned nothing from the recent exposure of its largesse and profligacy with license fee-payers cash and culture of corporate greed and cronyism.

‘If this is the case, I will press for the senior management and Trust Board to return to the public accounts committee and fully account for this inappropriate expenditure.’

It is not the first time the BBC has provided licence fee money to pay for senior executives to defend their personal reputations.

During Nick Pollard’s review of the BBC’s handling of the Jimmy Savile scandal, the corporation spent £101,000 of the total £2.4million cost on paying the ‘legal and related costs’ of embattled director of BBC News Helen Boaden, despite the fact she was heavily criticised in the report.

The BBC also paid personal lawyers and public relations advisers for its former director general, George Entwistle, when he quit his job over the Savile and Lord McAlpine scandals.

[thehighlandrebel]

With that number of porkies I can only assume she was mentored by the likes of Jeremy Bowen, Orla Guering or Yolanda Knell.

There's a wealth of talent on that score at Al Beeb.

[Teddy Bear]

The list is endless.
Every BBC presenter/journalist/executive that covers any of the areas related to the BBC agenda.

I wonder when they'll be 'outlawing' the expression 'porkies', for you know why?

[Teddy Bear]

Though this article today in the Telegraph tells us nothing that we didn't already know, I hope the fact that MPs have not let it 'slip under the carpet' means the BBC will not get away with it.

BBC Trust accused of failing to control big pay-offs
Commons public accounts committee says revelations raise "deep questions" about the way the corporation is supervised

James Kirkup

The BBC Trust “sat on its hands” while corporation executives handed out millions of pounds of “sweeteners” to former colleagues, MPs have said.
The Commons public accounts committee said that revelations about large and unjustified pay-offs to departing BBC staff raised deep questions about the way the corporation is supervised.

The MPs’ conclusions are likely to add to political debate about the future of the trust, which is already facing calls for its abolition.

The committee made the criticism after investigating pay-offs, including £470,000 given to George Entwistle who quit after only 54 days as BBC director-general, and £949,000 to Mark Byford, a former deputy director-general.

In total, the committee found that 150 senior managers between them received a total of £25million.

“We were dismayed to find that many of these individuals received 'sweeteners’ in their severance packages that were far larger than the sums to which they were contractually entitled,” the MPs said.

The trust is responsible for holding BBC executives to account on behalf of licence fee-payers, but failed to do so over the payments, the committee said.

“Those recent revelations have left us with concerns about the effectiveness of the present governance arrangements at the BBC.” Margaret Hodge, the committee chairman, said the trust had failed to do its job.

“While the executive was handing out these inflated severance payments, the BBC Trust was sitting on its hands, failing to fulfil one of its primary duties which is to ensure the rigorous stewardship of public money,” she said.

Some Conservatives want the trust to be scrapped when the BBC’s Royal Charter is renegotiated in 2017.

Maria Miller, the Culture Secretary, has said the future of the BBC Trust is under review after an “annus horribilis” for the corporation.

The MPs also raised concerns about the accuracy of evidence from witnesses, including Lucy Adams, a BBC human resources executive.
She has admitted making a mistake in her evidence, initially telling MPs she had not seen a note detailing plans for pay-offs to Mr Byford and another executive, but now admits she helped write it.

The BBC Trust admitted that licence fee-payers were “let down”, but insisted that it had resolved the problems the MPs raised.

The trust said: “We have already announced measures that address the committee’s call for more rigorous scrutiny of the BBC’s performance and clarify the charter’s requirement that the BBC executive manages the BBC while the trust represents the licence-fee payer.”

The BBC pointed out that Lord Hall of Birkenhead, the director-general, had banned pay-offs exceeding £150,000.

[Teddy Bear]

Reading the Mail version of today's story, it appears the MPs are being a little more forceful than the Telegraph suggests.

Question is, after all that has been revealed about the BBC in the past year alone, the mentality that has been exposed, can government continue to force the British public to support this insidious organisation?

'A culture of cronyism and broken leadership': The withering verdict of MPs on BBC over payoffs debacle

• Commons committee finds 'failure at the most senior levels of BBC'
  
• Margaret Hodge criticises 'liberal use of licence fee payers' money'
  
• MPs raise fears that some BBC figures may have lied to Parliament
  
• Debacle saw £369million handed to departing staff over eight years
  
• MPs fear HR chief Lucy Adams may have deliberately misled inquiry

By Alasdair Glennie

The BBC’s leadership system is ‘broken’, a damning report into the severance payoff scandal has concluded.

Publishing the findings of a five-month inquiry into the fiasco, the Commons public accounts committee said it had found ‘a failure at the most senior levels of the BBC’.

The committee’s chairman, Margaret Hodge, said she had uncovered ‘a culture of cronyism that allowed for the liberal use of licence fee payers’ money’.

MPs raised fears that some BBC figures may have lied to Parliament over the debacle – in which £369million was handed to departing staff over eight years.

Earlier this year, eight senior corporation figures – including its chairman and director general – were subjected to intense cross-examination as two parliamentary hearings sought to uncover the full extent of the payoffs.

But in today’s report, MPs said they feared some – including its £332,900-a-year human resources director Lucy Adams – may have deliberately misled the inquiry.

Miss Adams was humiliated in September when a key part of her evidence was shown to be false.

She had originally claimed to have no knowledge of an email about a £1million payment to former deputy director general Mark Byford, but later admitted she had in fact been one of its key authors.

The report said of her evidence: ‘We remain very concerned about the veracity of other parts of the oral evidence we heard. Misleading a select committee constitutes contempt of Parliament.’

In the three years to December 2012, the BBC handed £25million to 150 departing senior managers. In an internal email discovered by the PAC, Miss Adams referred to such payments as ‘sweetners’ [sic].

Asked to investigate the scandal, the National Audit Office found 22 of the 150 payments exceeded contractual limits, at a cost of £1.4million.

In his evidence to the committee, former director general Mark Thompson sought to justify a decision to hand Mr Byford £300,000 more than he was contractually owed by saying that he wanted to keep Mr Byford, a close friend, ‘fully focused’ until his departure.

But the PAC said such excessive payments were ‘unacceptable’ and identified a ‘prevailing culture in which cronyism was a factor that allowed for the liberal use of other people’s money’.

The committee also attacked the Corporation’s governing body, the BBC Trust, for failing to crack down on the scandal.

It said: ‘Our examination of severance payments exposed a dysfunctional relationship between the BBC executive and the BBC Trust that casts doubt on the effectiveness of the BBC’s governance model... at present the governance model is broken.’

It is understood, however, that several Conservative members of the committee felt the report’s conclusions should have been even more damning, but that they were watered down at the insistence of Mrs Hodge, its Labour chairman.

Steve Barclay, a Tory member of the PAC, even suggested Mrs Hodge was reluctant to antagonise the BBC further because her daughter works for the corporation.

He was angry that the report failed to criticise BBC chairman Lord Patten for refusing to name all the executives who received payoffs. Last night, Mr Barclay tweeted: ‘Sad day for Parl tomorrow as PAC publishes flawed report on BBC payoffs.’

He later explained that he was upset the report made no mention of a parliamentary order passed by the PAC, which would have required the Trust to name all 150 executives who received severance deals.

A BBC spokesman said director general Lord Hall has now capped the payments at £150,000.

The BBC Trust said: ‘We greatly regret that licence fee payers were let down by this episode. They are entitled to expect that their money is spent wisely.’

Mr Thompson said: ‘There is absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing by anyone at the BBC in relation to these payments.’

The BBC spokesman added: ‘Lucy Adams made it clear to the committee that she did not attempt to mislead them and while not immediately recognising a document that was being referred to, she clarified her position as soon as Parliament returned.’

Those huge severence deals

[Teddy Bear]

Quentin Letts at the Mail enunciates the reasons the BBC should be put out to pasture, but doubts in the scheme of things that it will really happen.

Liars! MPs say BBC bosses lied to Parliament about obscene pay-offs. There couldn't be a more serious charge, but don't expect any contrition

Even by the bracing standards of the current Commons Public Accounts Committee, the verdict on the BBC was brutal.

If it had been a kick-boxing match, someone’s bloody front teeth would have been knocked clean out of the ring.

Here are just some of the conclusions Parliament’s top watchdog reached about our national broadcaster: ‘A failure at the most senior executive levels’; ‘a prevailing culture in which cronyism was a factor that allowed for the liberal use of other people’s money’; ‘a dysfunctional relationship between the BBC Executive and the BBC Trust that casts doubt on the BBC’s governance model.’ Oh dear.
The Public Accounts Committee's charges against the BBC - about rampant pay-offs and corporate arrogance - will chill the nape of anyone who supports (as I do) the principle of independent public-interest broadcasting

The Public Accounts Committee's charges against the BBC - about rampant pay-offs and corporate arrogance - will chill the nape of anyone who supports (as I do) the principle of independent public-interest broadcasting

There was much more, including the thoroughly unhappy suggestion that at least one member of the ‘broken’ BBC leadership nakedly lied to Parliament.

As the committee’s report put it: ‘We were concerned about the veracity of other parts of the oral evidence we heard.’ Ouch, ouch, ouch.

To be criticised by the free Press is one thing. To be complained about by viewers and listeners — most recently about the absurdly overdone obsequies for Nelson Mandela — is also something that any big media organisation must expect.

But to be subjected to such denunciation as that contained in the Public Accounts Committee’s withering report is beyond problematic.

It is, for any organisation but particularly one created under Royal Charter, deadly serious. It should provoke a crisis. Don’t hold your breath, though.

The Public Accounts Committee is more than one of those rhubarbing Commons select committees you hear about from week to week.

Its full members are elected politicians, but in addition the hearings are attended by Whitehall’s top bean-counter, the Comptroller and Auditor General.

Arrogance

Its chairman, Margaret Hodge (Lab, Barking) may have developed an unhealthy taste for personal publicity, yet this is a grown-up forum, a feared scrutineer.

At Westminster and throughout the Civil Service it is regarded as the blue-riband parliamentary examiner.

It looks at the use of money — public money — and does so with that unnerving attention to detail which a dentist brings to a seeping gumboil. It gets down to the nitty-gritty of balance sheets, public-sector contracts and over-spends.

The committee looks back on things that have happened that should not have happened. To a degree unusual in modern British politics, this committee matters.

Its charges against the BBC — about rampant pay-offs and corporate arrogance — will chill the nape of anyone who supports (as I do) the principle of independent public-interest broadcasting.

I should perhaps declare an interest. Last year I applied to be director-general of the BBC. I was woefully unsuccessful. Did not even get an interview! Bien pensants laughed at my impertinence in seeking this big job. What did I — who had never been a BBC executive — know about the BBC?

Well, quite. Not having been a BBC executive, I might have known how some of these recent excesses would be seen outside the BBC.

The BBC exists, surely, to enrich the intellectual and artistic life of our kingdom. It should reach for excellence in its content, not only in light entertainment and the arts, but also in its journalism. It should (please don’t laugh) be impartial. It should be of and for and by and about the people who pay for it.

That ideal is looking horribly tattered. The Public Accounts Committee’s report uncovered a culture — no, a greasy, grimy habit — of casual self-enrichment by a coterie of self-selecting suits.

It reports that pay-outs to BBC executives were so large that only a tiny fraction of BBC licence-payers could ever dream of landing such bounties.

A former director-general, a BBC ‘lifer’, was paid £470,000 to go away after just 54 days in his job.

Bungled

Some £680,000 was presented as a lovely adieu — did they put a ribbon on it? — to a chief operating officer, Caroline Thomson, who, poor diddums, had not landed the top job.

A deputy director-general, Mark Byford, was given just a few quid short of £1 million for his pay-off as well as a £3.4 million pension pot — one of the largest ever seen in the public sector. He, too, had been at the BBC his entire working life.

These figures were ridiculous, decadent, unnecessary. They would have been wrong in a private company, but in a public organisation such as the BBC they become immoral.

What makes it all the more rum is that the people who were awarding them to one another were a tight-knit little group, of similar political views (Centre-Left mainly) and of the same social milieu.

We have heard before of jobs for the boys (and girls). This was pay-offs for the boys (and girls). It smacks of a Third World kleptocracy, not of Great Britain.

And yet the pay-offs scandal — the BBC has spent £369 million on severance pay over eight years, £60 million of which went to senior managers — is but a small part of the financial stink at the Corporation.

In the summer, the BBC quietly closed down something called the digital media initiative on which it had wasted almost £100  million.

How does this bungled IT effort help the credibility of a BBC whose current affairs programmes attack Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith for mishandling a computerised benefits scheme?

At the same time, the BBC has spent £1 billion — yes, a billion — on moving some of its staff to Salford in a plainly politically driven move to cosy up to North-West English Labour MPs.

The use of consultants has doubled in the past year, costing the Corporation £10 million.

Lord Patten’s taxi bill for just six months in 2012 came to £1,725 — hardly an indication of reining in expenses.

The Public Accounts Committee’s phrase about ‘the liberal use of other people’s money’ should perhaps read ‘the liberal abuse of licence fee payers’ money’.

Is it any wonder that this same BBC is so hysterically opposed to Government spending cuts. Of course they hate the idea of cuts! They themselves are attached to the teat of public money!
Will the committee’s report have any effect?

I doubt it. Just as underpowered torpedoes used to bounce off the armoured hull of the German warship Tirpitz, so does the BBC feel able to disregard its critics.

It will, I bet, sail on regardless, with BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten and the BBC’s director-general Lord Hall waving from the bridge at all the little people.
Scared

Alongside them on that bridge these days is James Purnell, a former Labour Cabinet minister. He was Culture Secretary at one point, minister in charge of the BBC. Now the BBC pays him a salary of £295,000 to be Director, Strategy and Digital.

The BBC has become so vast a media outlet, so wilfully political in its bending of the news agenda, that our political leaders are scared of it — far more scared than they are of the so-called ‘feral Press’.

David Cameron’s whole approach to the 2010 general election, his caution about sounding too Right-wing, was informed by his fear of the BBC.

The Corporation’s grandees talk of ever greater expansion, of their need for more staff, more studios, more airtime, more, more, more. Yet this is entirely at odds with the shrinking of officialdom and the state elsewhere in the western world.

The BBC’s received wisdom about opening up broadcasting to ‘public voices’, of holding phone-ins, of ‘reaching out’ and being ‘accessible’ is also at odds with reality.

It does not acknowledge that in the world of Twitter and social media feeds, self-expression has never been easier for citizens.

What they lack, and what our culture desperately needs, is editorial discrimination, not yet more unedited jabbering.

Technology is zooming past the BBC Canutes.

The one thing that remains unchanged is the need for excellence in broadcasting. The BBC should wrench itself away from its obsession with egalitarianism and revert instead to its core mission of quality programming.

I can see little evidence of the current management being able to make this change. But, then, one might as well moan about the Moon.

The BBC is a juggernaut. In Coalition Britain, we have no political leaders strong enough to say ‘enough’.

Parliament’s top committee may have uncovered disgrace and sweaty corruption. It may all whiff to high Heaven. But I bet nothing happens.

[Teddy Bear]

It's not any more about whether or not the BBC is greedy, corrupt, and fails to serve the society that pays for it, but how much more needs to be revealed to put an end to it.

Bombshell memo: Ex-BBC chief agreed £500k payoff to 'Queen in a huff' friend

• Ex-BBC 1 controller accused of providing misleading evidence
  
• Secret internal briefing note revealed in the wake of payoff to controller
  
• Peter Fincham agreed to leave his post in the wake of the row in 2007

By Glen Owen

Former BBC director-general Mark Thompson is at the centre of a new cronyism row following the release of a bombshell document about the ‘Crowngate’ affair.

The secret internal briefing note, written in the wake of a £500,000 payoff to ex-BBC1 controller Peter Fincham, last night prompted one Tory MP to accuse Mr Thompson of giving potentially misleading evidence to a Commons committee.

The document, marked ‘strictly private and confidential’, details the background to Mr Fincham’s dismissal, which came after he inaccurately stated that the Queen had walked out of a photoshoot featured in a Royal documentary ‘in a huff’.

It later emerged that a promotional trailer for the programme had been misleadingly edited.

Mr Fincham agreed to leave in the wake of the 2007 row – but still walked away with a half-million pound ‘golden goodbye’.

When Mr Thompson appeared before the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) in September, he was asked if such ‘eye-watering’ payoffs were part of a ‘culture of extravagance’ at the BBC.

Asked about the specific payment to Mr Fincham, Mr Thompson said he had left as part of a ‘consensual termination’, adding: ‘We were going through a difficult negotiation, a lawyer-to-lawyer negotiation.’

The secret note sent about the payoff which has been seen by the Mail on Sunday

However, the newly released document suggests that Mr Thompson played a much more direct role in setting the size of the payoff.

The briefing – prepared earlier this year for the current BBC director-general Lord Hall – states: ‘There is no documented approval for the payment; it is understood that Mark Thompson gave verbal instructions to the BBC legal team.’

The note goes on to say: ‘The lawyer who constructed the compromise agreement is no longer with the BBC; however, a team member recalls the lawyer saying that Mark Thompson gave verbal instructions to her as she drafted the compromise agreement.’

The document concludes: ‘It is essential that this note is kept strictly confidential and is not shared with anyone.’

Tory MP Rob Wilson, who has waged a long campaign to force the BBC to release the document under Freedom of Information rules, has written to the Labour chairman of the PAC to question Mr Thompson’s evidence to the committee.

‘I would like to draw your attention to the possibility that the PAC was potentially misled,’ he writes.

‘The BBC’s internal account paints a very different picture to that presented to your committee by Mr Thompson.

Far from the outcome of the payoff being essentially the result of negotiations between lawyers which the BBC was obliged to accept, the lawyer who drafted the compromise agreement which included the payoff was in fact taking her instructions directly from Mr Thompson himself.’

Mr Wilson added that this showed ‘the practice of granting payoffs at the top of the BBC in recent years owed more to a culture of cronyism than standards of good practice’, and that ‘Mr Thompson’s suggested behaviour was inappropriate’.

A spokesman for Mr Thompson did not return calls last night.

[Teddy Bear]

As if the pay-off scandal wasn't bad enough, it's now exacerbated with the Telegraph finding out that 233 staff that had been made redundant in the last decade, have been rehired. This includes one that had received a £365,000 pay-off.

It could be worse as
The true scale of the “merry-go-round” is likely to be significantly greater as the figures released by the BBC do not include those working for as freelancers, often on even higher rates of pay.

What the BBC have done is make it appear they are reducing staff by showing them go out the door. What they don't show is that it is a revolving door, where they come straight back in.

BBC 'merry go round' as 200 staff rehired
More than 200 staff made redundant by the BBC have been rehired in past decade, including one executive given a £365,000 pay-off

By Steven Swinford

The BBC has rehired more than 200 staff made redundant in the past decade including at least one executive who was given a six figure pay-off, The Telegraph has found.

The corporation revealed it has re-employed 233 staff who are now on fixed-term or permanent contracts, a practice critics have described as the BBC “merry-go-round”.

They include one executive reportedly given a £365,000 golden handshake and nine managers earning £100,000 or more who received pay-offs worth thousands of pounds.

The true scale of the “merry-go-round” is likely to be significantly greater as the figures released by the BBC do not include those working for as freelancers, often on even higher rates of pay.

Angie Bray, a Conservative member of the culture select committee, said: “There is a sense of entitlement which is just gobsmacking. You would think if you’re getting a pay-off, it would be “goodbye and “thank you for your contribution”. Not “see you in a year”.

She said the licence fee-payer was being treated as a “cash cow” and that the BBC “just boshes out money for its staff,” adding: “We absolutely need to get to grips with the whole culture,” she added.

The BBC refused to name any of the executives who have been fired then rehired by the corporation.
It said that no individual can be rehired on a contract for a year after being made redundant. Those who are working for the corporation as freelancers or casual staff need only wait three months.

However, they are known to include Michael Wakelin, the BBC’s former head of religion, said to have received a redundancy payment worth £364,000 in March 2009, only to be rehired to as a part-time producer on a religious affairs show on BBC Radio 2.
Mr Wakelin last night declined to comment on his pay-off but confirmed he is still working on the radio show, Pause for Thought.
The corporation has been heavily criticised over the scale of redundancy pay in what Culture Secretary Maria Miller has described as an annus horribilis.

A report published by the National Audit Office earlier this year found a quarter of BBC executives were given pay-offs worth much more than they were entitled to.

Over the last three years, 150 high-ranking staff were given severance payments worth £25 million – £1.4 million more than the terms of their contracts suggested.

Details of the rehiring will be put before a major inquiry into the future of the BBC next month. The culture, media and sport select committee will quiz broadcasters and executives on how the corporation is run and funded.

Grant Shapps, the Conservative Party chairman, told The Sunday Telegraph earlier this year that the corporation could lose its exclusive right to the licence fee due to its “culture” of waste and secrecy.

The latest disclosure also comes at a time when the BBC is embroiled in a row with MPs on the public accounts committee after refusing to disclose the names of 150 senior managers given pay-offs averaging £150,000 each.

Lord Hall, BBC director-general, claimed data protection prevented the corporation from disclosing the names of staff without their permission. However, the Information Commissioner’s office later appeared to contradict him, saying that data protection “is not an automatic barrier to transparency”.

Last week Greg Dyke, a former director-general, increased pressure on the corporation by describing Lord Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, as a “busted flush” adding that the organisation would be better off without him.

Mr Dyke has predicted the trust will be abolished and the BBC brought under the control of media regulator Ofcom. He said: “The BBC has a problem in the sense it’s got a busted flush as chairman. I am surprised [Lord Patten] is still there. It would probably help if he wasn’t.
“It seems to me almost certain that the regulation of the BBC will go to Ofcom, and the BBC will have a board with one person who is chairman, working alongside the director-general. It will be light-touch regulation.”

A corporation spokesman said: “BBC policy states that no individual can be rehired into the BBC on an employment contract for 12 months following a redundancy settlement and in any other temporary capacity of a genuinely short-term nature and unforeseen at the point of departure, for three months following a redundancy.

“After this time has passed any former member of staff applying for a role would have to go through the normal application and employment procedure.”

[Teddy Bear]

Another case involving a BBC employee that received a huge payoff - £200,000, and then was rehired has been uncovered by the Daily Mail.

It's good to read that at least one politician is seeing the reality going on inside the BBC

Tory MP Stephen Barclay, who sits on the Commons public accounts committee, said the latest revelations ‘drive a coach and horses’ through the BBC’s claim that payoffs helped reduce the overall salary bill by encouraging staff to leave.

He said: ‘There has been a revolving door at the BBC. You get paid to leave, then paid to come back again. The whole argument for payoffs has been that it reduces the headcount and salary bill.

‘But it is beginning to look like the senior executives approving payoffs were doing so with the expectation they would themselves benefit from similar deals.’

Radio One boss handed £200,000 golden goodbye still works for the BBC 13 years on

• Former Radio 1 boss Matthew Bannister is still on corporation's payroll
• But he was rehired by BBC two years later as Radio 5 Live presenter
• Broadcaster has re-employed 233 redundant staff in the past decade
• He received a £200,000 golden goodbye when he left the job in 2000

By Alasdair Glennie

The BBC handed one of its top executives a £200,000 golden goodbye – then rehired him two years later.

Former Radio 1 boss Matthew Bannister – once nicknamed ‘the fat controller’ by DJ Chris Evans – is still on the corporation’s payroll more than a decade after he pocketed the huge severance sum.

Details of his extraordinary payoff can be revealed by the Daily Mail as it emerged the BBC re-employed 233 staff it made redundant in the past decade, including another executive given £365,000 as he left.

It heaps further pressure on the broadcaster’s top brass to explain why millions of pounds of the licence fee has been handed to departing staff, including £25million to 150 senior employees.

Tory MP Stephen Barclay, who sits on the Commons public accounts committee, said the latest revelations ‘drive a coach and horses’ through the BBC’s claim that payoffs helped reduce the overall salary bill by encouraging staff to leave.

He said: ‘There has been a revolving door at the BBC. You get paid to leave, then paid to come back again. The whole argument for payoffs has been that it reduces the headcount and salary bill.

‘But it is beginning to look like the senior executives approving payoffs were doing so with the expectation they would themselves benefit from similar deals.’

Mr Bannister is currently employed as a presenter on Radio 4 and the World Service.

The corporation has refused to disclose his current salary, the 56-year-old earned £153,000 as controller of Radio 1, head of production and head of marketing.

He left in 2000 after narrowly losing to Greg Dyke in the race to become director- general.

Figures buried in the following year’s accounts reveal he was handed a £140,060 ‘termination payment’, plus £54,590 towards his pension.

When he was in charge of Radio 1, Mr Bannister was most famous for hiring Chris Evans. The pair later fell out spectacularly after he refused to let the DJ work a four-day week, prompting Evans to walk out.

As head of production, he was embroiled in another row when it was discovered Vanessa Feltz’s daytime talk show had featured fake guests.

But instead of leaving the corporation for good after pocketing his payoff, Mr Bannister returned in 2002 as a late-night presenter on Radio 5 Live.

He later recalled: ‘I decided to withdraw from managing things and just get on with being a broadcaster, which was lovely.’

He has since become a well-known voice on Radio 4, where he hosts the weekly obituary programme Last Word.

According to The Sunday Telegraph, the BBC also rehired its former head of religion Michael Wakelin after handing him a £364,000 redundancy payment in March 2009. He was later given a part-time job as a producer on Radio 2.

A Freedom of Information request revealed that another nine managers earning £100,000 or more were also re-employed despite receiving severance pay.

Tory MP Angie Bray said the revelation was ‘gobsmacking’, adding: ‘You would think if you’re getting a payoff, it would be “goodbye” and “thank you for your contribution”. Not “see you in a year”.’

In June, the National Audit Office revealed the BBC has paid out £369million in severance payments over eight years, including £60million to senior managers.

A BBC spokesman said: ‘BBC policy states that former full-time employees who have been made redundant may apply and be re-hired into the BBC after a minimum of 12 months, and three months on a freelance contract basis.

‘Matthew Bannister was made redundant from the role of chief executive BBC Production in 2000 making savings on an executive post. He returned two years later.’

The BBC said Michael Wakelin is employed by an independent production company that makes programmes for Radio 2, rather than directly by the corporation.

[Teddy Bear]

Jeremy Bowen has brought the attention of the public back to the issue of his corporation's waste in regard to bumper payouts, stating it has caused massive damage. For now we'll ignore the 'massive damage he has done himself with regard to total anti-Israel bias, although no doubt the Islamists will be indebted to him.

What I'm curious about is why he's suddenly brought this issue back into the public consciousness.
No doubt we'll find out his motive in due course. Something is definitely going on here.

Bumper payouts to BBC executives have caused 'massive damage' to the corporation, says Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen

• Jeremy Bowen said pay packets gave opponents reason to target BBC
• Also explained that it created a 'them and us' divide within the corporation
• Director-general Tony Hall capped on pay-offs of £150,000 when he took over
• His predecessor George Entwistle was paid £470,000 for 54 days of work
• Caroline Thomson and Mark Byford among those given huge payouts

By Stephanie Linning for MailOnline

Bumper pay packets handed out to BBC executives have caused 'massive damage' to the corporation, according to its Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen.

The journalist, one of the most familiar faces on the BBC’s news programmes, said the issue of high pay had given the corporation’s opponents 'sticks and stones to chuck at us'.

Director-general Tony Hall introduced a cap on pay-offs of £150,000 when he took over following the furore over the £470,000 paid to his predecessor George Entwistle.

Mr Entwistle was paid a year’s salary when he left the BBC’s top job - double what he was entitled to - even though he had only been in place for 54 days before resigning over his handling of the Jimmy Savile scandal.

Bowen told the Guardian: 'The over-remuneration of people was a huge mistake and it’s caused massive damage to the BBC.

'It’s caused it internally, because the vast majority of people who work at the BBC do not get brilliantly paid.

'But the massive salaries given to top management angered people on the shop floor, exaggerated the "them and us" feeling that there was a chauffeur-driven top of the corporation with enormous salaries and massive bonuses.

'And that caused a lot of resentment and still does. I resented it personally.'

Bowen, who joined the BBC as a trainee, has covered conflicts in the Gulf, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Somalia and Rwanda throughout his career.

During the last financial year, the BBC paid out more than £25 million in severance payouts, including former Director General George Entwistle, who received £470,000 after he was forced to resign after Newsnight broadcast false allegations about Lord McAlpine.

Other senior figures who walked away with huge sums include former chief operating officer Caroline Thomson, who got £680,000, and deputy director general Mark Byford, who departed the BBC with a total payout of £949,000.

In 2012 it emerged that the corporation had used more than £6million of licence-fee payers’ money to pay 14 executives more than £300,000 each.

The figures reveal that redundancy payoffs almost doubled to £58million between 2010 and 2011.

In 2010, 481 BBC staff received redundancy payments worth a total of £27million, while in 2011, 1,281 staff were handed payoffs totalling £58million.

In the first six months of 2012, 270 staff members were given £14million. The average payout for departing BBC workers was £51,000.

It means that in total, the corporation paid £277million in redundancy to almost 6,000 staff in the seven years leading up to 2012.

Four executives took more than £8.5million in payouts and pension deals with them between 2010 and 2012 alone.

MPs were left ‘incredulous’ when learning that former chief operating officer Caroline Thomson left with a £670,000 pay-off in September 2012 - more than twice her £330,000 salary - even though she had wanted to quit.

Sharon Bayley, the former director of marketing, communications and audiences, left in October 2010. She was given a payout worth nearly £400,000, despite having been at the BBC for less than two years.

The biggest payoff was awarded to Mark Byford, the former director of journalism, who received £949,000 as compensation for loss of office, while an unnamed finance officer was given a £420,000 payoff.

[charmbrights]

He wants a pay rise?

After all, it must be hard work learning a HAMAS script and getting it right.

[Teddy Bear]

The Express has discovered the number of BBC employees that were given a massive redundancy pay-off and then subsequently re-hired to be far greater than first reported above.

BBC wastes £10million of licence fee-payers' money on redundancy payouts for hundreds of full-time staff...only to REHIRE them

• Almost 300 employees made redundant since 2002 were later re-hired
• The full-time staff were given payouts totalling more than £10million
• BBC said it was 'inevitable' that some staff would rejoin the Corporation

By Mario Ledwith for the Daily Mail

The BBC has paid out more than £10million to staff in golden goodbyes over the last decade before giving them new jobs at the corporation.

The cost of the ‘revolving door’ payroll emerged only days after the BBC was made exempt from a government crackdown on the practice.

NHS bosses and council leaders were last week told they would be stripped of their ‘unfair’ redundancy packages if they were later rehired.

But the BBC was not included in the legislation to ‘protect its independence’, despite repeated criticism of the huge severance deals handed to departing members of staff.

The revelation about the extent of spending on rehired staff will heap further pressure on bosses at the corporation to explain the use of licence fee money. Figures from the corporation revealed that 286 full-time staff made redundant in the last 12 years and re-employed on permanent or fixed-term contracts received £10,230,905 in payouts.

Although the average payment was just under £36,000, some senior figures have been re-employed despite receiving payoffs of up to £365,000,

The BBC last night defended the payouts, claiming it has strict rules in place preventing recently departed staff from being employed again.

Contracted staff are not allowed to be employed for a year after their initial employment has ended, while freelance staff must wait three months.

However, the corporation’s head of human resources or three directors can bypass these rules in ‘exceptional circumstances’. The BBC has not disclosed how many times such exceptional cases have been permitted.

TaxPayers’ Alliance director John O’Connell accused the BBC of ‘wasteful behaviour’.

He said: ‘This lucrative revolving door must grind to a halt. This is a totally inappropriate use of the licence fee and is costing hard-pressed families a pretty penny.’

Under new rules announced by the Treasury last week, officials earning over £100,000 a year who take another job in the same public sector area within a year will have to pay back their redundancy package. But exceptions were made in the cases of the BBC, Bank of England and the Armed Forces.

Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander said: ‘In acknowledgement of its independence from Government, the BBC is not subject to the clawback measures I announced last week.

‘However, I am writing separately to the BBC to explain the measures we have put in place. People will expect it to have in place measures at least as stringent as the ones I announced and that they will be implemented rigorously.’

Criticism of the six-figure salaries routinely handed to senior BBC figures led to Tony Hall capping severance payments at £150,000 last year.

A National Audit Report in 2013 found senior BBC managers received a total of £25million in severance deals between 2009 and 2012.

Embattled director general George Entwistle was given a £470,000 severance deal after resigning in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal despite completing only 54 days of work.

A BBC spokesman said: ‘Our rules are stricter than the civil service and during a 12-year period it is inevitable that a small number of staff will leave and re-join the BBC.’

[Teddy Bear]

Well 2 years later since this story first began, and the BBC have more than doubled the number of those being made redundant, received a huge pay-off, then rehired again.
Corrupt BBC, corrupt government for doing nothing about it.

BBC attacked for running 'lucrative revolving door' after sacking 700 staff with £10million golden goodbyes... then re-hiring them all back again

• The BBC has re-hired hundreds it spent £10.3million on making redundant
• More than 400 of these people are now freelancing back at the broadcaster
• It comes amid a row over the BBC's plans to broadcast controversial book
• The corporation will air The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
• Hilary Mantel's book imagines the killing of former PM by an IRA gunman
• It has been selected for Radio 4's prestigious Book at Bedtime slot

By Corey Charlton for MailOnline

The BBC has come under fire for re-hiring 700 people who it had previously spent £10.3million on making redundant.

It has emerged that of the 700 staff members who took redundancy packages, more than 400 are now back at the broadcaster working as freelancers.

Last night the Taxpayers' Alliance criticised what it described as the BBC's 'lucrative revolving door'.

John O'Connell, the director of the Taxpayers' Alliance, said: 'Licence-fee payers will be furious that their cash is being wasted on generous golden goodbyes, only for those made "redundant" to walk back in on a new salary,' the Sun on Sunday reported.

A BBC spokesperson told the paper it was common to have seasonal freelancers in the journalism industry as it helped keep costs down.

News of the spending comes amid a row over the corporation's plans to broadcast a story imagining the assassination of Margaret Thatcher.

The fantasy, written by bestselling author Hilary Mantel, was condemned as ‘perverted’ and ‘distasteful’ when it was published in September.

Despite this, Radio 4 has selected the story for its prestigious Book At Bedtime slot – sparking a furious backlash.

Supporters of the former Prime Minister accused the broadcaster of being deliberately provocative with a move that will stoke accusations of BBC bias against the Tories.

‘It is a sick book from a sick mind and it’s being promoted by a sick broadcasting corporation,’ former Cabinet Minister Lord Tebbit said.

Lord Tebbit's wife Margaret was paralysed when the IRA tried to murder Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet in the 1984 Brighton bombing.

Ms Mantel’s story depicts the callous murder of the former Prime Minister by an IRA gunman and was inspired by the Booker Prize-winning author’s own fantasy about assassinating Lady Thatcher, who she admits to ‘detesting’.

The broadcast on January 9 will increase tensions between the BBC and the Government after David Cameron and George Osborne accused the Corporation of bias in its coverage of spending cuts.

[Teddy Bear]

There is no way that any private corporation would dream of doing this with their profits. Despite all the advisors the BBC hire, also at great expense to the licence fee payer, the BBC are prepared to just waste this money in a giveaway.
Or is it money spent rewarding certain staff for ensuring the BBC agenda continues?

Hundreds get £47,000 BBC pay-offs only to be rehired: Corporation accused of creative accounting after spending £33million on payments to staff

• Of 702 staff laid off since 2002, 286 were subsequently re-employed
• Calls for a formal investigation into the ways BBC spends public money 
• Appalled Tory MP says BBC guilty run like a '17th century monopoly'
  

By Katherine Rushton, Media And Technology Editor For The Daily Mail

The BBC was accused of creative accounting last night for spending £33million on redundancy payments to staff it then rehired on new contracts.

Of the hundreds of executives who received payouts averaging £47,000 each, 40 per cent went back as employees.

The remaining 60 per cent returned on freelance contracts, often on much better pay than they earned before being given the boot.

Last night, critics attacked the ‘wasteful’ practice and called for a formal investigation into the way the BBC uses licence fee-payers’ money.

Some 702 staff laid off since 2002 were back on its books by last August, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Of these, 286 who received payouts totalling £10.2million from licence fee-payers’ money were re-employed on permanent or fixed-term contracts.

The remaining 416 were given £22.8million to go, but by August they were back at work at the BBC as freelancers, who stand to make even more money than they did when they were employees.

Some may even have been able to dodge the BBC’s own rules, supposedly put in place to stop so-called revolving-door scandals.

According to official policy, staff who are made redundant may not return to the Corporation on an employment contract for at least a year – or three months if it takes them back as freelancers. But, crucially, BBC directors can override these rules.

Tory MP Bill Cash said the enormous cost of making staff redundant and then rehiring them needed to be examined by the Commons Public Accounts Committee.

He added: ‘It’s unconscionable. They run the BBC like a 17th century monopoly. One ought to assume that if someone is being made redundant, the word means what it says.

‘This has the stench of unacceptable creative accounting.’

Andy Silvester, from the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘It’s time for the lucrative revolving door at Broadcasting House to finally grind to a halt.

‘Licence fee-payers will be furious that their cash is being wasted on generous golden goodbyes, only for those made redundant to waltz back on to the payroll.’

The broadcaster said: ‘The BBC employs about 3,000 fewer staff than in 2002, with a pay bill of £115million less in real terms, while providing more services. During a 12-year period it is inevitable that a small number of staff will leave and re-join.’

Many of those who were made redundant will have walked away with eye-watering payouts.

Chief operating officer Caroline Thomson left with £670,000 – more than twice her £330,000 salary – even though she wanted to go.

Deputy director general Mark Byford walked away with £949,000, and director general George Entwistle was paid £470,000 for 54 days’ work before quitting over the Jimmy Savile scandal.

The public were so angered by the lavish payouts that Mr Entwistle’s successor, Lord Hall, capped them in 2013 at £150,000.