BBC licence fee payers are to be hit with a bill which could soar to millions of pounds for two inquiries after the Jimmy Savile scandal.
Already £200,000 has been racked up on legal advice for BBC employees giving evidence to the Pollard inquiry into Newsnight pulling an investigation into paedophile allegations against Savile.
BBC chairman Lord Patten today came under fire from MPs over the rising costs of the Pollard investigation and the wider inquiry by Dame Janet Smith into the culture and practices at the corporation during the Savile era.
Appearing before the Commons culture, media and sport committee, Lord Patten said: “They will clearly be expensive, particularly because of the number of lawyers involved. I’m afraid that we must bear the costs, however much they are.”
He defended the payments, insisting that the BBC had a duty of care towards its employees.
But Labour MP Ben Bradshaw demanded: “Is there not a danger that this will become a horrendous tangle of lawyers just negotiating drafts of Pollard and changing them and so forth?”
Lord Patten said: “We are on a hiding to nothing — unless we go through all the procedures and give everybody legal rights and pay for those costs, we are accused of doing a shoddy job of work.”
As tension rose in the committee, Conservative MP Philip Davies accused Lord Patten of being a “sort of patsy for the BBC executive”. But the peer hit back, describing the “patsy” accusation as “extremely unfair and I would almost say unworthy”.
Around 40 staff have given evidence to the inquiry by former Sky boss Nick Pollard, though not all are getting legal advice which is being capped at £50,000 per head. Former director general George Entwistle is receiving legal advice, expecting to cost up to £25,000, as part of his severance settlement of nearly £500,000.
The Pollard inquiry is expected to report next month with the investigation by Dame Janet set to take considerably longer.
The latest row comes days after MPs on the Commons public accounts committee expressed outrage at severance payments totalling £4.7 million given to 11 top BBC executives. The cost of the Pollard inquiry is set to be sizeable after a QC was appointed to question staff. Lord Patten said the full Pollard Review would be published. Acting director general Tim Davie said the money for the report was coming from a contingency fund. “One of the things we feel very strongly about is that it should not impact on programme-making areas,” he said.
Read More
Lord Patten defended spending only three days on the inquiry into the second, botched Newsnight investigation, which led to former Tory treasurer Lord McAlpine being wrongly accused of being a paedophile. The BBC has paid him £185,000 as part of a settlement and he has launched legal action against people who named him on Twitter. Lord Patten said there had been “appalling editorial judgment” and that the “journalism involved, to be polite, was shoddy”.
