Helping you tell the time

The BBC should consider reviving its FOI publication policy; nothing new on the site since early 2012.

At least, licence payers could then make more sense out of answers to the Daily Mail, which smothers them in outrage at the expense of assessable facts.

It seems that the BBC spent £5 million on the services of external consultants in financial year 2011/2, £10.4 million in financial year 2012/3, and £4.7m in the first six months of the current financial year. The Mail says the five biggest beneficiaries were Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and McKinsey. A separate Mail piece says £5.7m has been spent with Deloitte between January and August.

Going back, total spend in 2010/11 was £8.2m, with the biggest wedge going to Deloitte, at £3m.

In some of this, consultants make work for consultants. Deloitte's "helped" the BBC review freelance contracts; now, presumably, consultants have come up with the "creative input" test and a roll-out plan. Accenture were brought in to assess the value of the Digital Media Initiative (answer: not much) when the red flags were finally spotted by the Trust and Executive a year ago; PriceWaterhouseCoopers are checking the spelling mistakes in their investigation of what went wrong in DMI project control; and we should remember that, from the start, it was a project for which Deloitte provided considerable consulting power.

One of lot of McKinsey have been helping John Tate with a "lean" efficiency drive in programme making; but Lord Hall had to ask for another team to look at "simplification".  Deloitte and PriceWaterhouseCooper contributed a benchmarking report on severance pay in December 2012 - that went well, didn't it ? Until very recently, a range of consultants, including Deloitte, have been working on pay and grading reform; it looks like that now has been put in the "too difficult for too little return" box by Hall and Bulford, as they bid farewell to project leader Lucy Adams.