The furore surrounding the release this morning of the Public Accounts Committee report into the BBC’s move to Salford has prompted the BBC North director Peter Salmon to issue this defence.
Via a video clip on his blog he defends both the relocation costs and the contractual arrangements with Peel Holdings.
As we reported earlier today, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said the scale of some allowances for 850 staff who relocated were “difficult to justify”.
The committee’s report said relocation costs for 11 staff members exceeded £100,000 per person, with one costing £150,000. The average relocation cost was £28,000.
Read the full committee report here.
Salmon said it was a cost-effective option: “We are mindful that the cost of redundancy was about twice of relocating here to Salford so we went all out to make sure that people with essential skills arrived here to do the job that viewers and listeners needed them to do.”
And he refutes the report’s which suggested the BBC “risks becoming overly dependent” on the Peel Group which owns the BBC’s Salford buildings.
“The main one (contract) is with Peel for the studios but we don’t pay them a penny that we don’t use to put programmes on air. That’s the nature of the flexible nature of the deal of we’ve done with them, and we think we got it at a very good market rate.”
Listen to the full video update below.
