BBC Trust

The BBC Trust has published a supplementary note from the National Audit Office (NAO) to the NAO’s report on severance payments for BBC senior managers.

The original report, published on 1 July 2013, examined a sample of 60 of the 150 severance payments given to BBC senior managers in the three years to December 2012. In response to a request from the BBC Trust and the Public Accounts Committee after this report was published, the NAO agreed to examine the remaining 90 payments and one additional case that has come to light, and provide a supplementary note on its findings.

The supplementary note, together with a cover letter from BBC Trustee Anthony Fry to the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee Margaret Hodge can be found below.

Severance payments for senior BBC managers - supplementary note (PDF file, 407KB)

Letter to Margaret Hodge from Anthony Fry, Trustee (PDF, 742KB).

Anthony Fry’s letter also sets out the correspondence between the BBC Executive and the BBC Trust relating to the severance package given to the former Deputy Director-General Mark Byford. This can be found below:

Annex to letter from Anthony Fry (PDF file, 3.6MB)

In its response to the initial NAO severance report, the BBC Trust set out a number of actions to ensure there could be no repeat of fundamental failures of central oversight and control. These included requiring BBC management to report publicly in the BBC’s Annual Report and Accounts on any exceptions to policy and the justification for them.

The original NAO report on BBC severance pay can be found here.