Letter to the Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP, Secretary
of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport from Amyas Morse,
Comptroller and Auditor General, National Audit Office, 22 October
2010
Thank for your letter of 22 September about National
Audit Office access to the BBC. I wanted to take a little time
to reflect before responding.
I should start by registering my concern that we
were only informed of the Government's planned announcement a
few days before it was made. These are matters that directly concern
the work of the National Audit Office, and I must therefore ask
that we are involved from the outset in the discussions about
the wording of the relevant parts of the formal Agreement between
the Government and the BBC. As an Officer of the House of Commons,
I will be looking for an outcome which is consistent with the
Comptroller and Auditor General's ability to support Parliament
by providing independent and unfettered scrutiny of the BBC.
I am grateful for confirmation that you have agreed
in principle with the BBC that the Comptroller and Auditor General
will be able to decide which areas of BBC spending will be examined
by the National Audit Office. This is a positive step, although
"spending" does not capture the full scope of our interest,
which is in the use of all BBC resources and includes revenue
generating activities, as they both exploit BBC resources and
contribute to them.
I also welcome your assurance that we will have the
right of access to any information required to carry out our programme
of work, and this right should extend to the information we need
to identify the areas to be examined. I should add, however, that
without a statutory right of access, we will continue to have
no right of access to information covered by the Data Protection
Act.
I agree with you that the position on editorial matters
needs to be clear. Just as we do not question the merits of government
policy objectives, we do not and should not question the BBC's
editorial judgements. I have previously made clear to the BBC
that I am happy to work with them to come to a working definition
of editorial policy which is not so broad as to inhibit or prevent
proper audit scrutiny of the way BBC resources are used.
You envisage a "requirement" that we inform
the BBC Trust before deciding our programme of work. In a public
statement on 22 September the BBC Trust went further and referred
to the National Audit Office choosing its programme "on an
annual basis". As your letter is silent on who will decide
the timing of value for money work, it might be helpful to clarify
what I have in mind. The Comptroller and Auditor General's ability
to decide what to do and when to do it go hand in hand. The former
is worth little without the latter. We would expect to discuss
our plans with the BBC Trust and the BBC Executive so we could
take account of their views, as we do with other organisations,
but I would be unwilling to commit to annual plans. We must have
flexibility to react to changing circumstances and issues of the
day.
I am disappointed that it remains your view that
my reports should reach Parliament via the BBC Trust and the Secretary
of State. This means that the Comptroller and Auditor General
will not control the timing of publication. It raises the possibility
that the BBC Trust or the Secretary of State could redact material
or indeed not publish the report, and, under current arrangements,
it means that the BBC, uniquely, responds to the issues raised
by our reports before they have been considered in Parliament.
I have shared with you previously my view that the
Comptroller and Auditor should be the external auditor of the
BBC's accounts, an appointment which the BBC Trust can make only
with the approval of the Secretary of State. This is more than
a point of principle, as we will not be as well placed to identify
and deliver a fully informed programme of value for money work
as we would be were we the BBC's external auditors.
I understand that there are difficult issues at play
here and welcome your commitment to monitoring the effectiveness
of the arrangements proposed in your letter. I am concerned, however,
that audit access which depends on continuing agreement between
Government and the BBC rather than on statute leaves important
matters unresolved and may mean that in practice the Coalition's
proposals may not take things much further forward in terms of
independent scrutiny of the BBC.
Finally, I should tell you that John Whittingdale,
Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, has written to
seek my views on the Government's proposed changes. I thought
the most straightforward way of dealing with his request would
be to let him see this letter to you and so I am sending him a
copy.
I am also copying the letter to Jonathan Stephens.
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