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What do you think the BBC should spend its money on? Programme making? Buying the rights to major sports events? Or sending its managers to business school to buff up their administration skills?
While you may not feel this is the best way to distribute the licence fee, The Independent has discovered that the BBC has sent a hundred of its managers to the world's most expensive business schools - at licence payers' expense. BBC managers are regular attendees at pounds 20,000 courses at Harvard and Wharton in America, and Insead in Paris.
The total expenditure on management training is a huge pounds 2.3m annually. Put another way - it takes 23,000 licence fee payers to finance the Corporation's management courses each year. The BBC has never published an analysis of whether the sums spent on courses, both in-house and at business schools, are delivering value for money. However, The Independent has learnt that a government body is preparing to investigate the figures. The Public Accounts Committees of the House of Commons and the National Audit Office are likely soon to be given the power to scrutinise the accounts of the BBC. The PAC chairman, David Davis, says of the expenditure on management courses that "clearly this is the sort of matter we and the NAO would look at... these sorts of expenditures in a normal commercial concern that would have to be justified, and I would expect at least that level of justification for an organisation spending public money."
Insiders at the BBC say that colleagues are constantly off to America, France or the London Business School on "five or-six week courses, which they seem to enjoy hugely, but are of mixed benefit to the Corporation". Samir Shah used to be head of current affairs at the BBC, and now runs Juniper, the independent production house.
His experience is typical. "The BBC has two sorts of course. The first involved management consultants coming to the BBC and running short training sessions of a day or so," he says. "These were not useful at all - in fact,...
