- Corporation once used Steve Whittamore, later convicted of illegally accessing personal data
- Total of £31,000 spent over six years
So here we go again, the BBC thinking they are better than anyone else and its of ‘Public Interest’ when they do it!
The BBC spent £310,000 on private detectives over a six-year period, the Leveson Inquiry heard today.
The corporation once used investigator Steve Whittamore, who was later convicted of illegally accessing personal data, to check whether someone was on a particular flight.
On another occasion a BBC journalist commissioned a private detective to find out the owner of a car from its number plate, the hearing was told.
BBC director-general Mark Thompson told the press standards inquiry that the corporation’s staff used investigators 232 times between January 2005 and July 2011 at a total cost of £310,000.
News accounted for 43 of these occasions, at a cost of £174,500, excluding the use of private security teams.
BBC Vision, which produces the corporation’s TV programmes, was behind the remaining 189, spending about £133,000, in most cases for consumer shows.
Mr Thompson said these costs represented 0.011% of the news budget and 0.002% of the Vision budget over this period.
The inquiry heard there were two mentions of the BBC in the documents seized in the investigation into Whittamore’s activities known as Operation Motorman.
In 2001 a current affairs journalist commissioned Whittamore to supply information about whether a paedophile was on a flight into Heathrow Airport.
The programme, which for other reasons was never broadcast, was looking at whether people with UK convictions for child sex offences could get jobs giving them access to children in other countries.
Mr Thompson said: ‘The request to try and find out whether this particular paedophile was on the aircraft, I would regard as being justified in the public interest.’
He added that the Motorman papers also included a reference to ‘BBC wine blag’, which appeared to be an attempt by a newspaper to discover the corporation’s spending on alcohol.
Whittamore’s Hampshire home was raided by investigators from the Information Commissioner’s Office in March 2003. He was convicted of illegally accessing data and received a conditional discharge at London’s Blackfriars Crown Court in April 2005.
On another occasion a BBC journalist used a private investigator to find out the owner of a car from its number plate after the vehicle was used by someone suspected of involvement in a serious criminal conspiracy.
David Barr, counsel to the inquiry, suggested that this involved accessing private details from the DVLA’s vehicle registration database.
Mr Thompson replied: ‘There were many different ways in which this information could be obtained.’
He added: ‘It seems to me that it is an example where the technique used was justified in the context of the public interest journalism that was involved.’
The director-general said in most cases the BBC used private detectives to provide surveillance or security in support of journalists.
But sometimes investigators are commissioned to track down the subject of a programme so they can be given a right of reply.
The BBC places a very high importance on allowing people time to reply to allegations against them, sometimes giving them as long as 10 days in the case of a complex financial investigation, the hearing was told.
The inquiry heard that Mr Thompson commissioned a wide-ranging review of the BBC’s editorial practices last July, covering phone hacking, ‘blagging’ information, paying police and other public officials for information and the use of private detectives.
It found no evidence that any of the corporation’s staff had hacked phones or made improper payments to police officers.
The BBC sometimes makes small payments to politicians and police officers for appearing on programmes like Crimewatch, the hearing was told.
Mr Thompson noted: ‘Occasionally a politician, or indeed anybody else, appears on an entertainment programme on the BBC or a comedy programme on the BBC. They might receive a fee.’
This week the inquiry will also hear testimony from bloggers, including the founder of celebrity gossip website Popbitch, and top managers from internet giants Google and Facebook.
Mazher Mahmood, the News of the World’s former investigations editor best known for his ‘fake sheikh’ disguise, has been recalled to answer further questions after first giving evidence last month.
BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten, Channel 4 News editor Jim Gray and ITN head of compliance John Battle are also due to appear.
They will be asked about how they are governed by broadcasting watchdog Ofcom, which has stricter rules than newspaper and magazines regulator the Press Complaints Commission.
The inquiry will also receive written evidence from former BBC director-general Greg Dyke, who lost his job in 2004 following the publication of the Hutton report into Dr David Kelly’s death, BBC political editor Nick Robinson, BBC business editor Robert Peston and ITV News political editor Tom Bradby.
On Tuesday the witnesses will include representatives of lobby groups, among them the Science Media Centre, Index on Censorship, Equality Now and End Violence Against Women.
Lord Justice Leveson will hear on Wednesday from Mr Mahmood and David Allen Green, writer of the Jack of Kent blog, which focuses on legal and policy issues.
There will also be a legal hearing to discuss arrangements for the inquiry’s second module, due to start next month, which will look at the relationship between newspapers and the police.
On Thursday, evidence will come from Jonathan Grun, editor of the Press Association, D-J Collins, Google’s director of communications for Europe, Middle East and Africa, Richard Allan, Facebook’s director of European public policy, and Popbitch’s Camilla Wright.
Prime Minister David Cameron set up the Leveson Inquiry last July in response to revelations that the News of the World commissioned a private detective to hack murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s phone after she disappeared in 2002.
The first part of the inquiry, sitting at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, is looking at the culture, practices and ethics of the press in general and is due to produce a report by September.
The second part, examining the extent of unlawful activities by journalists, will not begin until detectives have completed their investigation into alleged phone hacking and corrupt payments to police, and any prosecutions have been concluded.
Lord Patten: Next director-general of the BBC will take a ‘substantial’ pay cut
* The BBC will ‘substantially’ cut the salary for its next director-general, it has been claimed.
The BBC Trust’s chairman, Lord Patten, admitted that the broadcaster has already started its search for the corporation’s most senior role.
But he revealed that the chosen candidate would be paid significantly less than the £671,000 salary paid to current director-general, Mark Thompson.
Mr Thompson, who has held the position since 2004, has not announced any plans to leave, but there have been rumours that he will step down after the London 2012 Olympics.
Lord Patten said an international head-hunting firm, Egon Zehnder, had already been appointed to produce a ‘succession plan’ by Easter.
He said: ‘It does not warrant the headline ‘Starting gun fired for Mark Thompson succession’.
‘They are going to give us a report on what sort of people we should be looking for. They are not seeking a candidate.’
He said he believed Mr Thompson would be able to stay in the role as long as he wished.
Lord Patten spoke out on the day that he and Mr Thompson will speak at the Leveson inquiry into press standards.
The former Conservative Party chairman told the Times that he did not agree with statutory regulation of newspapers.
He said: ‘It’s a more open, responsible and self-confident society that doesn’t give politicians any opportunity to prevent the accountability which goes with an interrogative, investigative press.’
He also defended journalists who did ‘things which flirted with the illicit’ if there was public interest in the story.
Lord Patten has often spoken of the need for reform at the BBC since he took over as chairman in June last year.
At the time, he said he would take action over the ‘toxic’ issue of executives’ high wages and cut the number of senior managers from around 530 to about 200 by 2015.
He said: ‘Licence fee payers don’t expect the BBC to pay sky-high commercial rewards to people that work for a public service.’
Lord Patten, a former Conservative MP who is now a Tory peer, played down the influence newspapers have on politics.
‘It makes some impact sometimes but I think that politicians in office, or for that matter some of them out of office, would sleep better at night and make better decisions if they weren’t quite so affected by the front pages of newspapers,’ he said.
He said when politicians got too close to the media it could become a ‘tar baby’ and leave the politicians looking ‘pretty bedraggled or dishevelled’.
Lord Patten said the ideal scenario was to avoid statutory press regulation, but expressed fears that it could be the only way if newspapers do not come together and agree on a method of regulation themselves.
He said: ‘I would prefer if we could do without the state becoming a regulator just because I think, if possible, politicians should be kept out of these areas.
‘But unless the press, owners, editors, come up with a convincing scheme, we’ll presumably get drawn in that direction.’
He added: ‘I think it would be far preferable if the written media themselves could clean out the stable.’
Lord Patten also praised Sky News’s coverage of the outcry over revelations about phone hacking at News of the World.
He said: ‘Sky has probably devoted more time to the hacking scandal than the BBC has, proportionally, which shows a good deal of spirited independence on the part of that very good news channel.’