BBC Chairman unveils modern governance for the Ofcom age
BBC Chairman Gavyn Davies will today (February 26) publish changes to the BBCs governance and accountability system to promote greater clarity and understanding, as well as address concerns raised as UK broadcasting enters the Ofcom age.
The reforms are the result of a review initiated when Mr Davies was appointed Chairman last October.
"The Governors and the Executive Committee of the BBC have distinct roles, but they are united in their single key objective, which is to sustain and improve the BBCs role as the UKs mass market, public service broadcaster, in the public interest," says Mr Davies in the foreword to the review document.
"One of the prime responsibilities of the Board of Governors is to keep its own house in order, ensuring that its procedures are suited to leading the modern BBC in a rapidly changing regulatory environment."
The four main areas of reforms are:
Clarity about who does what on the Executive Committee and Board of Governors
· For the first time, a clear statement of the very different roles the two boards fulfil in the public interest will be published.
· Governors will in future directly appoint and manage external auditors on fair trading, rather than through an Executive department.
· There will be a clear separation on complaints handling by moving initial programme complaints from the Secretarys office to the Public Policy division.
· The Governors Programme Complaints Committee will then monitor the effectiveness of the managements complaints handling and will hear appeals
More focus
· The BBC is under Ofcom in key areas like economic regulation, basic standards and quotas, which means the Governors can focus attention on the BBCs public service remit more than ever before. The relationship between the BBC and Ofcom will be formalised in the BBC Agreement with the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.
· There will be a new framework for setting and monitoring BBC objectives which will be published in the Annual Report.
· Individual Governors will take responsibility for monitoring performance against objectives. The Broadcasting Councils of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, along with the English regional advisory Councils will also play an important role in monitoring these objectives.
Greater openness and accessibility
· The BBC will publish its first Statements of Programme Policy for all services in the summer. They will be designed to be genuinely useful to audiences and there has been wide consultation on the tone and content, which will continue. The statements will be published each year alongside the Annual Report.
· New ways will be found to build on recent initiatives and make decisions, plans and performance more accessible to the public, right around the UK. We intend to move beyond the London and South East bias of our accountability activities and will, this year, hold the public launch of the Annual Report outside London.
Proper support for Governors to fulfil their responsibilities
· A new Governance and Accountability department will provide the Governors with more independent sources of advice and support on audience understanding, compliance, objective-setting and accountability.
Mr Davies says that the Governments intention to create Ofcom had, understandably, given the BBCs commercial competitors the opportunity to argue for profound changes to BBC governance and marginalise the BBCs role. However, other concerns were based on profound misunderstandings about how the BBC will relate to Ofcom in the new system.
"The BBC has no desire to stand aloof and separate from the new regulator. We welcome the proposed establishment of Ofcom and look forward to working with it," he says.
"The Governments plans already place the BBC under Ofcom in many crucial areas, including all forms of economic regulation, basic standards on matters like taste and decency, and quotas on regional, independent and original production.
"There have also been misunderstandings about the public service remit of the BBC and other broadcasters like ITV. Here, the Government intends to create a more level playing field, not by altering the position of the BBC, but by shifting the position of ITV (and others) decisively towards the BBCs current arrangements.
"In future, both the BBC and private broadcasters will be primarily subject to self-regulation in this crucial category, creating a more level playing field than the industry has ever known. The only difference is that back-stop powers will rest with Ofcom for the private broadcasters, and with the Secretary of State for the BBC.
"We believe that this difference is justified. A light touch, largely commercial, regulator like Ofcom is suited to wield back-stop powers over the increasingly relatively limited public service remit of private broadcasters. However, in the case of the all-encompassing public service remit of the BBC, a light touch regulator is not sufficient. Detailed regulation by a Board of Governors is necessary. And it is surely also sensible that the ultimate back-stop powers for a publicly-owned and publicly-funded organisation should rest in the democratic process, subject to frequent and direct Parliamentary scrutiny."
Notes to Editors
Download the full "BBC Governance in the Ofcom Age" document here in pdf format (134kb). To read it you may need Adobe Acrobat software which can be obtained free here.
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