Cute

Unsurprisingly, I can find little coverage today of Lord Patten's report on BBC Governance.   It's a cute piece of work from the old stager, with nasty jobs being pushed away from the Trust to others, in order that he can enjoy his tenure and concentrate on finding the next DG.

So the Trust is dropping its role monitoring "operational matters", and handing them off to the non-executives on the Executive.  The Trust will thus just set "strategy", and stop doing boring things like reading finance cases, etc. The report outlines the dropping large elements of Lyons-inspired process, including the "Purpose Plans", a title redolent of 1920s Russia.

Bits are wonderfully vague - the Trust will, for some reason, facilitate conferences on public service broadcasting (You might have thought that market was well served....) and hold regular impartiality seminars.
Compliance will be made "proportionate".   There'll be Public Value Tests only for significant changes and ventures proposed by the Executive; Ofcom will do the hard work - and the Trust will be the arbiter of "significance".

One job-from-hell will be created - a Chief Complaints Editor, reporting to the DG.  There'll be a single page on the website explaining how to complain - and another page, presumably infinitely extendable, for "Corrections".

I suspect, quietly, the Trust Unit will shrink by half within two years. Lord Patten doesn't like dull meetings.