Greg Dyke calls for BBC Trust to be scrapped

Greg Dyke was director general of the BBC from 2000 to 2004

The BBC Trust should be scrapped and the organisation wholly regulated by Ofcom, ex-director general Greg Dyke has told the Royal Television Society.

The trust structure was "unduly slow and bureaucratic, expensive to run and created inbuilt conflict" in the BBC, he told the RTS Christmas lecture.

But he praised the BBC as a "guarantor of journalistic independence".

A spokesman said the trust was "getting on with the job of making sure that the BBC delivers for licence-fee payers".

"These were personal remarks made by Greg and he is entitled to his opinion," the spokesman said.

'Impossible structure'

Mr Dyke, who was BBC director general from 2000 to 2004, added his voice to those of the Culture Secretary, the shadow culture secretary and two parliamentary committees in saying the trust was not working and should be replaced.

He said the trust's "inbuilt conflict" had "left the BBC without a supportive board or chairman and the director general without the cover any chief executive needs".

When the organisation is under attack, as it currently is, the chairman isn't free to defend it as he should because he's really the regulator

Greg Dyke

"In any organisation the chairman-chief executive relationship is all important and here the structure works against it being effective.

"Most of all, when the organisation is under attack, as it currently is, the chairman isn't free to defend it as he should because he's really the regulator."

He said he was not criticising the trust's chairman Sir Michael Lyons or any other members "who have done their best to work in what is an impossible structure".

Ofcom should "logically" become the regulator of the organisation while a new BBC board should be responsible for running it, he added.

Mr Dyke also said executive salaries were too high - and it was time to cut them "in the long-term interests of the BBC".

But he also called on the industry to rally round the corporation, saying it was "the most reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of journalistic independence in Britain today".

Mr Dyke was forced to stand down as director general in 2004 after the Hutton report into the death of government scientist Dr David Kelly.

In April, it was announced he would be chairing a Conservative Party review of the creative industries.