6 minutes a record

The eyebrows of your tireless blogger were raised to extremis when the BBC told an FOI enquirer that it would take more than two and a half days to work out the diversity stats for the 169 most recent recruits at BBC News.

Thank heavens - a BBC internal reviewer agrees with me. But look what they did to try to avoid answering...

"For the purpose of this review, I conducted further enquiries with BBC People in order to ascertain how long it would take to comply with the applicant’s request. BBC People confirmed that, while the information could not be automatically collated through a database (as it can be with full time employees), a manual search of electronically held documents would be required to determine the diversity and disability data held for the 169 external recruits. In the initial handling of the request, a sample exercise was completed and the BBC was of the position that the 18 hours would be exceeded. It is a time-consuming and manual process, but the BBC has now confirmed that it can complete the search within the appropriate limit."

Now we have to wait 20 days for the official figures. I sure they'll be as sparkly and shiny as the pan-BBC figures that recently emerged from, not HR records, but a survey.