BBC online budget scandal - the truth at last

News broke yesterday of the BBC Trust's review of bbc.co.uk, the corporation's gargantuan website, of which News Online is a major part. The results make interesting reading and have been widely analysed in the media.

First up, even the press release offers some intriguing statistics.

In 2006/7 the BBC spent 3% of the licence fee on bbc.co.uk compared to 70% on television channels and 17% on its radio services, yet it is now the BBC's fourth most widely used service.

Right - so it gets a snippet of the cash available... But wait - there's much more going on. Scroll down the press release and you'll see an appended table detailing the budget, the overspend and misallocation costs, accompanied by a very dry statement.

It fell to the Guardian to get stuck in. Its PDA blog made a scathing analysis of the financial mismanagement afoot.

The world's biggest news and entertainment website breached its 2007/2008 budget by a staggering 48%. About two-thirds of the £35.8m overspend was down to "misallocation of general overheads and costs'' - accountants at the BBC had, apparently, failed to include costs such as the buildings that house its digital teams. Then there was the £3.5m in unauthorised overspend and a further £7.4m in overspending that - bizarrely - is permitted under generous BBC rules that allow for "10% leeway either side of the target,'' as a spokesman put it.

So who gets fired? Well, no one. In part, because no one, it turns out, is in charge of the sprawling BBC.co.uk network.

Shocked? There's more:

How will the Trust rein in the spending? They won't. Instead, the Trust's recommendation is simply to accept the overspend, integrate it into the budget and add an extra £4.4m of additional padding. So the baseline budget for 2007/2008 of £74.2m is bumped up to £114.4m - a healthy 54% increase at a time when the BBC's private sector rivals are feeling the full whiplash of a global credit crunch.

Journalism.co.uk was also scathing of the figures.

From the point of view of media rivals, that sounds threatening. But it's not the place of this blog to detail the long-running war between Aunty and regional news outlets that feel threatened by the BBC's dominance. From the licence-payers' standpoint, it's mixed - bad that things ran over budget but good because it's still committed to investing in what is, after all, a heavily used site.

Sitting here in Cheshire, I can only look at the report from the angle of value for money for us licence-payers in the county. It is quite staggering that the BBC can throw licence-payers' money around like this - losing control of budgets, no one apparently in charge, spending at least £3.5m on "additional content", etc. Yet, the BBC continues to claim that there is no budget as yet to provide dedicated Cheshire content (either news or other regional content) and a million residents in the county are still expected to wait until January 2009 for the BBC Trust to give official approval to provision of equal coverage for Cheshire...

Personally, I'm not massively surprised at the financial waste - stories abound of vast budgets being spent on pilot TV shows that are scrapped before transmission. Neither am I surprised that no one was "in charge" of the whole sorry mess. But let's be frank - if the BBC was a modern plc, it would be a lean, mean, fighting machine accountable to shareholders and expected to rein in costs. Us licence-payers are sort of shareholders but without the control, so this kind of profligate waste continues to abound while the very people that this world-renowned public broadcasting service is to supposed to serve renain unserved.

A scandal? You bet.

Cash for local news at BBC

The journalism resource site Journalism.co.uk has reported more news on the BBC's plans for local news sites.

That pot of £68 million is a nice little sum. No surprise that regional press editors are unhappy about Aunty's plans as they've long seen this as the BBC muscling in on their patch. It's a shame they don't understand that local papers can and should provide a more detailed service to their community than the BBC will ever be able to achieve.

What we'd like to know is if Cheshire is included among the 60 sites that will be sharing the £68 million. The BBC has yet to specify if the 60 sites are the existing county web pages or if these are to be new ultra-local pages, which has been hinted at previously. Just when are they going to clarify this?

Results not just in but visible

It took a while, but finally all the votes were counted, the results were declared and the Tories took control of both the new unitary authorities of Cheshire East and Cheshire West and Chester.

In another historic first, BBC News Online reported the election results on all three of the Manchester, Merseyside and Staffordshire pages across which Cheshire news is normally spread (if we actually get any).

After two years of campaigning for one solitary Cheshire news page, perhaps we should now be demanding two - one for each half of the county...

The question is, is Aunty up to the challenge?

Election? What election?

It's polling day today. Hundreds of councils across England and Wales are up for re-election and, in case you have been living in the Gobi desert for the last six months and hadn't heard, so is the Mayor of London. Ken, Boris, Brian, whoever... even in Wick (that's in the north of Scotland) they are probably aware of who the main mayoral candidates are.

Here in Cheshire, we are about to vote for our two new (and unwanted) unitary councils. Not that you'd know from reading BBC News Online. Aunty has barely reported on the change in the last year, a change that will affect a million people and split the county in two forever.

Today's BBC coverage just ignores Cheshire, as usual. The main story this morning focuses on the general situation, then switches to the fight for London. The electoral news on the Manchester page, where some Cheshire news occasionally gets shunted, ignores the split, as does the report on the Staffordshire page.

Early this morning, there was no news at all on the Merseyside page about the elections. It took until 8.22am for the BBC to acknowledge what's happening. Even then, we are only offered two measly sentences on this momentous change. It would be fair to say that anyone outside Cheshire probably has had no clue of the impending split because it has been so woefully under-reported. Only the county's many local papers have kept Cheshire inhabitants informed, in a fragmented manner. The BBC offers no information today on the number of seats up for election in either authority, which boroughs are disappearing for good alongside the County Council, or what the expected turnout might be.

Eight other unitary authorities will be created today in these elections: Shropshire (minus Telford and Wrekin), Bedford, Cornwall, County Durham, Exeter, Ipswich, Wiltshire and Northumberland. All these areas, however, have their own county news page on News Online, meaning licence-payers in these places have been able to follow the BBC's coverage of the changes.

We shall await tomorrow's results reports with interest - just where on BBC News Online will we be able to hunt down the results of the Cheshire West & Chester and Cheshire East polls?