Couldn't organise a ......

I'm still slightly bothered by the statement from the BBC that it does not have an organisation chart. The shock news was released at the end of the week, in a response to a perfectly reasonable FOI inquiry in May this year.

The BBC argued that it did not hold such a chart, and that it would be too expensive (under FOI terms - not absolute cost) to create one...

As we do not hold an organisational chart for the BBC we would have to ask each division to create an organisational chart for their areas. As the BBC currently employs over 20,000 staff across 15 divisions made up of a number of sub-divisional levels, this would involve managers of each department creating charts which feed into a larger divisional chart which would then become part of the overall BBC organisational chart. For this reason is not practical to represent the organisation in a standard chart as you request.


As extracting the information relevant to your request requires a high level of skill and judgement, this would amount to creating new information not already held and I can therefore confirm that this information is not held for the purposes of section 1(1) of the Act.


I can't determine what level of "skill and judgement" remains in the BBC's HR division. HR staff are now subsumed in the wider Operations Group. But there are still seven HR senior managers with salaries publicly disclosed, producing a total remuneration package of £1,250,000.  Do you think they have the skill and judgement to create an organisation chart ?  Or the judgement to think that such a chart might be useful ?

Perhaps the reality is that HR O&D advice has been ignored by the Thom(p)son Twins (Mark and Caroline) in their rush to reduce the Executive Board in size. Many middle managers now seem to have multiple reporting lines; simple new projects now require sign-off from multiple divisions; and, in all the current "simplification", the mind-numbing number of meetings and the number of attendees apparently required to keep the organisation ticking over remains unhealthily high.