Food and Drink

Dogged FoI inquirers are always trying to find new ways to pry nuggets out of the BBC. Here's the result of one asking for the ten most expensive bottles of wine purchased by Auntie in December, and the ten most expensive meal claims in the same month. I suspect they were trying to find pre-Christmas excess - and haven't hit paydirt this time; maybe if it had been framed differently...there's many ways to fund a seasonal jolly..

I've got a little list - and I'm keeping it

If the minutiae of the BBC doggedly batting away Freedom of Information requests bores you, look away now.

The BBC has had a bit of a root around in its drawers, and does, after all, have some information as a result of McKinsey's £600,000 fee for reviewing management structures. But it's still keeping it under wraps. One element of McKinsey's work was to survey 1,500 staff in August last year in what's been described as an Organisational Health Indication Survey.  HR Director of blessed memory (now 'disruptive' personnel expert) Lucy Adams was said to have asked for details of the 30 departments with the worst symptoms.

The Information Commissioner ruled in May that the BBC should hand the list over. Yesterday, using lawyerly logic that would make Gilbert & Sullivan purr, they played with the word "survey".

"We do not hold what could be described as a "survey" This is because the survey is a diagnostic tool that contains proprietary benchmarks and frameworks belonging to McKinsey & Company. The BBC has access to McKinsey & Company's benchmarking data which allows it to compare its scores to global and sector comparators. However, the BBC does not hold the raw data or a report as such, and would need to ask McKinsey & Company to produce a piece of work in order to provide you with the information you have asked for...

The limited amount of information we do hold includes high level benchmarking information, in draft form, relating to different divisions of the BBC. Although we do not consider this information falls within the scope of your request as it is currently framed, we consider that this information would be exempt from release if requested. This is primarily because disclosure would be likely to prejudice the commercial interests of the BBC and McKinsey & Company by revealing commercially sensitive information that could be used by competitors to gain a competitive advantage. This information is therefore likely to be exempt from release under section 43(2) of the Act (commercial interests)."

Dry stone wallers

Edited highlights of a Freedom of Information enquiry to the BBC, and its progress, or otherwise,

Q: In 2013 the BBC undertook an Organisational Health Indication Survey. Please provide a copy of the survey and its outcome.

A: The BBC does not hold the information that you have requested. The BBC has not undertaken this work therefore we cannot provide a report.

Q: Your response comes as a shock. Having spent such a sum of money on commissioning this survey it is certainly a surprise to me that the BBC has not only misplaced it but forgotten that it was ever undertaken.
I therefore request that you refer this to an internal review by a BBC senior manager or legal adviser as you have offered.

The Organisational Health Indication Survey which the BBC claims it did not undertake and does not hold was an outcome of Dinah Rose QC's report into Respect at Work at the BBC. It was reported that Lord Hall wanted to look at the things the BBC was doing well, and not so well, and commissioned McKinsey & Company to carry out a piece of work on Organisational Health. This was to be a two-month review into making the BBC a "simpler place to work".

A: In the light of the further clarification provided by the applicant and further enquiries I have made with the relevant members of staff, I can confirm that the BBC does hold some information relevant to this request. I have seen nothing to suggest that this information was deliberately overlooked in the BBC’s original handling of the request, but in my view the BBC should have carried out a more adequate search for the requested information in the first instance. I understand that the BBC may need to consider whether any exemptions apply to this information prior to release. However, the applicant should be provided with a more appropriate response without delay.

Birthday greetings

I'm sorry to say I failed to mark the first birthday of this entertaining FoI request, filed in May 2013.

Dear British Broadcasting Corporation,

I understand that the head of HR at the BBC, Lucy Adams, has requested the results for the 30 departments/teams with the worst results in the BBC's 2012 Staff Survey, so that the reasons may be investigated. 

Would you please identify the 30 departments/teams she was referring to, and say in which divisions they are located. 

Yours faithfully, 

Spencer Count

By September 2013, the BBC had conducted its first internal review requested by the inquirer, which found that, yes sirree, the answer was late. In November, Mr Count complained to the ICO, and a second internal review said identifying the 30 unhappy teams could mean identifying individuals, but shared the divisional count of whingeing departments thus...

Mr Count responded straightaway by noting that the staff survey had been completed confidentially, and thus the argument of identifying individuals was nonsense. With no further response from Auntie, he asked for another internal review in January.  By February, he had a ten page response, saying the answer was Still No.

Mr Count took it to the ICO again in March, and this Tuesday wrote joyfully...

The ICO has ruled against the BBC and instructed it to disclose the information.

Such fun

The Information Commissioner's Office (current prop Christopher Graham, BBC News Trainee 1973) has put the BBC (current DG Lord Hall, BBC News Trainee 1973) on the naughty step.

In the six months to December 2013, the ICO received 84 complaints about the way Auntie handled Freedom of Information requests. One in three were about failure to respond within the specified time limits.

Now the ICO will monitor the BBC for the next six months, and those compliance teams and special assistants will have to pull their fingers out, so Tone can get off the step and get a cuddle

Information charges

Never mind £12,000 sofas. The BBC's Information Policy and Compliance team cost £682,000 to run in the last full year (2012/13), and, despite staff cuts, other costs, such as accommodation have risen, so that halfway through 2013/14 it's racked up £459,000.

And, between April 2010 and December 2013, £168,900 has been spent on legal support and barristers to fight cases revolving around Freedom of Information legislation.

Brain dump

Here's an FOI factoid for you, about BBC online live streaming and catch-up of audio and video.

In 2013, 466 petabytes of data was transferred for live and on demand streaming media (both audio and video) to all devices across BBC Online.

We need some context (see - BBC trained !). According to futurist Raymond Kurzweil, the capacity of a human being's functional memory is estimated to be 1.25 terabytes. This means the memories of 800 human beings fit into one petabyte. So BBC Online delivered 372,800 brainfuls of data in 2013. Well done.

We don't do irony

No commentary needed here on this FoI exchange... 

Dear Mr Barnard, 

 

Freedom of Information request – RFI20140105 

 

Thank you for your request to the BBC of 21st January 2014, seeking the following information 

under the Freedom of Information Act 2000:   

 

“Introduction: 

As most intelligent people have realised Newswatch is an ineffectual, theatre for complaints where 

license fee payers are patronised to death by 'senior BBC officials' but nothing ever changes. This 

request is to uncover whether there is, in fact, any effect on the BBC from complaints made to this 

piece of 'complaints theatre' or 'engagement' as it's cynically called nowadays. 

 

Question: 

How many complaints and observations to Newswatch have resulted in any substantive changes 

within the BBC News organisation over the past five years? 

 

I am not asking [at this point] for details, though, given the propensity of the BBC to spin, evade, 

hide, cover-up etc. I may ask the trust to corroborate details. Since I'm not asking for details, I'll 

complain to the information commissioner about the use of 'journalism, art and literature' to evade 

this question as the BBC has apparently evaded tens of others” 

 

The information you have requested is excluded from the Act because it is held for the purposes 

of ‘journalism, art or literature.’  The BBC is therefore not obliged to provide this information to 

you and will not be doing so on this occasion.

Stuffed

FOI factoid: in financial year 2012/3, the TV Licensing team send a total of 21,554,240 letters to addresses without a tv licence.

Naming names

The BBC spent £19,485 (including VAT at 20%) on external lawyers in trying to keep secret details of who attended the infamous "Climate Change: The Challenge to Broadcasting" seminar - and clocked up 120 hours of time within its own Litigation Department on the case.

Gold price

With the closing date for the Radio Academy Awards 2014 just over a month away, some FoI stats about BBC entries in previous years. In 2012, Auntie spend £40,240 on fees (above the hours spent by producers toiling away at their compilations) which equates to around 372 bids in the 30 or so categories. In 2013, BBC entries apparently fell, with spending at £34,074 - around 315 entries.

I say apparently. The assiduous person who compiled the 2013 list has no figures for Radio 5 Live - which is odd, considering they won four golds, including station of the year.

Bits

The FoI machine rolls on....

The BBC paid legal and mediation fees totalling £18,530 to HR Director Lucy Adams in her hunt for an apology from the NUJ.  The union had accused her of leading a "dirty tricks" including the hacking of staff emails, but withdrew and apologised earlier this month. The Guardian believes the NUJ covered the fees as part of the settlment, but the union made no comment.

A new consultancy firm has been helping with the BBC's Project Spark, yet another go at finding ways of making programmes more cheaply. The wheeze was conceived by former Strategy Numero Uno John Tate and made flesh, at an undisclosed cost, by McKinseys. Now it seems Ernst & Young are on board, at least in radio, where the BBC has spent £197,000 on additional staff since 2010, under project director Adrian Ruth.

There are seven requests pending for information about various cost elements of the BBC's coverage of Nelson Mandela's funeral - and that's just via the website What Do They Know?  Don't hold your breath - it's a fair bet they'll say it's information held for the purposes of journalism, and thus their secret.

No job like it

A short sharp series of raspberries was heard from Broadcasting House yesterday, as the BBC answered an FOI enquiry asking some reasonable questions about the employment of laughing Al Yentob. Below, my edited version of the Q&As, which started by seeking...

Q. A copy of the job description and objectives set for Mr Alan Yentob as Creative Director
A. I can confirm that there is no job description for Mr Yentob’s role, due to the fact that [because ?] this is [a ?] highly specialised and bespoke role that is unique to Mr Yentob. The post of Creative Director is not a contracted full-time role. The objectives set for Mr Yentob, and the terms of employments [sic] are considered to be personal information and we are therefore withholding this information under section 40(2) (personal information) of the Act.
[Oh, dear HR department, how is possible to evaluate a salary without a job description ? How did we arrive at a rather specific-looking package of £183,300 ?]

Q. The terms of employment and/or any other information showing whether the role is full time or part time including confirmation of contractual hours and leave allowance.
A. See answer above

Q. An organogram of the Creative Director's office and direct reports
A. Mr Yentob reports directly to the Director General, Tony Hall, and has one direct report which is his Personal Assistant.

Q. A copy of Mr Yentob's work diary/schedule for the past 12 months
[An internal BBC review has found that the enquiry response is late; the reviewer expects an answer within four weeks. There is precedent for releasing PDFs of BBC diaries, though heavily redacted. There are other ways of working out what Mr Yentob is doing, as the BBC's most-papped staff member. Last week he was in New York; this week he was giving an award to Sir Terence Conran at the Sanderson Hotel; this weekend he's in Hampstead in conversation with Kevin Spacey]

Q. Information that clarifies of whether the Creative Director role entitles Mr Yentob to commission his own programmes (ie those he presents, features in or produces) or whether these programmes are subject to the exact same competitive commissioning process as other in house or indie programme makers have to go through. A note of these appointments in the requested diary details would be helpful.
A. Information regarding the Commissioning process of programmes is out of scope of the Act....  I can confirm that Mr Yentob does not commission his own programmes.

Departmental circular

Ah, the Kafka-esque world of the BBC and Freedom of Information legislation.

In summary, bloke writes to ask for all recorded communications between the BBC and GCHQ. BBC writes back, nicely, that it's too big a task for the rules - could he narrow it to a part of the BBC ?

Bloke tries a different tack: can he please have any recorded communications between BBC and GCHQ this calendar year ?

BBC gets a little snotty: ‘as the factor which causes your original request to be over the appropriate limit is the size of the search we would have to carry out on the basis of location within the BBC, and not the timescale of the information, this narrowing does not reduce the handling of your request to below the appropriate limit.’

Fair enough, thinks our bloke, and writes back for the complete list of every BBC department that The Information Policy & Compliance Team deem separate, so I can make an informed request that'll burden your department less and would fall within the FOI budget for single requests.

And the BBC plays what it clearly thinks is checkmate: The BBC does not maintain such a detailed list. You will appreciate that due to the size of the organisation and its nature, it changes regularly and such a list would become outdated quickly. 

Hard to believe that the BBC doesn't pay people via a code for the department they're working in. Maybe salaries don't reach the Information, Policy and Compliance team that way.

Time out

The BBC was late, i.e. missed a 20 working-day target, in responding to 27% of Freedom of Information requests in 2012. That's out of a total of 1557.

54 people challenged the BBC's stance on supplying information they requested, by asking for an "Internal Review".  The time set for those to be conducted is 30 working days - but cheerfully, the BBC says it doesn't keep records on that particular time-keeping !

Brmm brmm

BBC FOI news: "During the financial year 1 April 2011 to 31 March 2012, a total of £2,646,618 was paid in car allowances to 531 individuals". That's a big drop from £3,279,866 in the previous year, but still a substantial number.

It's not entirely down to a reduction in the number of bosses. The BBC has been phasing out private medical insurance and car allowances for new executives and senior managers with effect from August 2011 and April 2012 respectively.  But when you're looking at the website for salary comparisons, you should note:  old execs and managers have the cash benefit included in their total package; new people, like James Purnell, James Harding and Anne Bulford don't.....

Copying without looking

Sometimes the BBC's wriggling over FOI requests is reminiscent of scenes from Alice in Wonderland. Here's the latest on attempts to get information about how much Jimmy Savile was paid over the years..

A request was submitted in January. At the end of March, the BBC, apparently generously, said that although "contributor files.. fall outside of the scope of the Act,  in this case the BBC is prepared to volunteer this information to you.  Due to the age of the files in question, it has proved difficult to scan pages in sufficiently high quality. I therefore propose sending the information to you in hard copy form."

Now we learn that the originals - many of them carbon copies - were sent outside the BBC to produce these  hard copies. So they WERE scanned, but not by the BBC, and instead of getting a digital copy  in the process, the BBC has only new paper copies. Which it hasn't got time or resources to SCAN. See ?  From the organisation that brought you the iPlayer.

Enjoy the detail of this letter, sent out at the end of last week...

As we have previously explained, the original documentation is over 1000 pages, much of which is carbon copy paper from the 1960s-70s. Our own photocopiers are unable to replicate a copy of a readable quality documents of this quality, so we have organised for a third party with appropriate technology to produce a photocopy on our behalf which we can post to you if required. 

We have not been able to scan this document to provide you with a copy via e-mail as the PDF document created by our scanning technology exceeds the size permitted to be saved and e-mailed by our systems. As I am sure you will appreciate, breaking the document down into more manageable chunks has significant staff time implications.

Half right

"Between January 1st 2005 and 28th February 2013, the BBC received a total of 11,371 Freedom of Information Act requests. Of these 11,371 requests, the BBC considered 49% to be out of scope of the Act, i.e. the information requested was considered to be held for the purposes of Journalism, Art or Literature".

And it makes journalism, art and literature much more Serious and Sensible if you give them capital letters....

"However, as part of the BBC’s programme for openness and transparency, the BBC often volunteers information when it considers the information requested to fal [sic]outside the scope of the Act".

On publication of direct Freedom of Information inquiries, the BBC has made a commitment, adopting a  model scheme for public bodies. It says the BBC will proactively publish or otherwise make available as a matter of routine, information in line with the statements contained within the scheme. Sadly, by it's own admission, that proactive publication has been in abeyance for over a year, apparently waiting for a new website.