................................................TAXI TO SEOUL PLEASE......

There is no doubt in my mind that the purge on excesses in the House of Commons was desperately required, and this should be followed by a clamp down on the behaviour of members of the Lords, but we should not stop there.

In times of real hardship we have to look at every single thing that we can trim to reduce costs, downsize and save people money they no longer have. Traditionally of course, this has fallen disproportionately on the poor. Libraries, Community Centres, Leisure Centres, Benefits, Pensions... typical examples of cuts that have been made in the past when we have been in a mess.

But, in this new age of Freedom of Information, and an ever more demanding poor, we need to look at how we spend money a little farther up the socio-economic scale.

I was interested in an article on the salaries and expenses of the top people at the BBC. Amazingly, the number of people in the organisation being paid more than £100,000 a year has risen to 400.

I link to an article I read in the Independent, but I’ll just give you a little taste of some of the most ridiculous claims that leapt off the page at me. This is how they spend the £3.6 billion they collect from us in licence fee:

Mark Thompson, Director General, who earns £664,000 a year, has claims ranging from 57p for a parking meter to £5,616 spent through the BBC's central bookings system for a flight to Seoul. You can get return flights to Seoul with Expedia for (at the time of writing) £470. So he wasted over £5,000 of our money because he could. There was no one to say “NOOOOO”;

Jana Bennett, director of BBC Vision, included £38.48 for a "sympathy gift for a key presenter" and £1,254 on six nights at Sunset Boulevard Hotel in Los Angeles. Also she spent £2,392 on taxis through the BBC central bookings service and £106 through expenses. Lunch with a presenter and agent cost £161. It must be bloody hungry work at the BBC, or was that “thirsty” work;

Eric Huggers, director of future media and technology, spent £7,514.80 on a flight to Seoul last year. (He should speak to Mark, his boss, and save us all some money.) He also spent £4,984 on taxis between July and September. There were 13 fares that totalled more than £100 each. The biggest single fare was £627.37. What? Over £600 on a taxi? Was that him coming back from Korea?

These are a few of the joke expenses that you and I are paying for while pensioners, paying the licence fee, shiver and go hungry. Meanwhile the quality of programming goes down and down and down. They say over and over that they need that kind of money and they could go elsewhere in the private sector and get more.

I say that that is complete nonsense. If they could get more elsewhere then that is where they would be. They try to make us think that we are the lucky ones, getting their talent for a mere fraction of what they are worth. Besides, with advertising revenue stretched over more and more channels, and getting thinner due to recessionary cutbacks, ITV and their likes are shedding staff.

But if I’m wrong and they could indeed get more, then what I say is bye bye.... Don’t let the door hit you in the butt.

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PS... What the hell is going on in Seoul that all these inordinately important people need to attend?

P D JAMES GIVES BBC DIRECTOR GENERAL A GRILLING ON HIS OWN NEWS SHOW

Yesterday P D James, the 89-year-old crime writer, attempted to bring some of the order she applies to her plots to BBC finances by giving its Director General a grilling on his own flagship news programme “Today”. Lady James, who is actually a Conservative peer and a one time member of the BBC Board of Governors, was a guest editor on the Radio 4 morning news magazine. She interviewed Mark Thompson in a way that perhaps no one employed by him would have dared.

She started by criticising the huge salaries that some BBC executives get. 375 employees earn over £100,000 per annum, a tenth of these earning more than the Prime Minister.

Mr Thompson insisted that high salaries were essential to prevent defections to the private sector. He said that the controller of BBC One had a £1 billion annual budget, underlining the importance of getting “the very best person doing that job”. However Lady James was having none of that. Where, she asked, in the private sector would these people get better money? When Mr Thompson said that they might go to ITV she laughed at the suggestion, pointing out that ITV was cutting both positions and salaries.

Well done P D James. How many times have highly paid people defended their immense salaries by saying that they could earn more if they worked in the private sector? Please! If someone cares about money and could earn more in the public sector then that is where they would be. Not one of these BBC managers is doing us a huge favour by working for a pittance with the public service broadcaster.

The other matter in which Lady James went for the jugular was the duplication of managers’ tasks: “You have a director of marketing, communications and audiences who gets over £300,000, then there is a director of communications. One wonders what actually is going on here.”

Mr Thompson said that bureaucracy was a “real issue”, adding: “One of the things we’re looking at is whether we can make an auditable commitment to how much of the licence fee we can spend on content.”

Describing the corporation as a “large unwieldy ship” that was “bringing more and more cargo”, Lady James said that the BBC had changed for the worse since its inception in the 1920s. She told Mr Thompson that some BBC programming was indistinguishable from commercial equivalents.

Again I couldn’t agree more. The people in higher middle management in the BBC seem to have the most amazing jobs with fantastic conditions, salaries and pensions of unbelievable size, all of which they get from us, the public. Hopefully Mark Thompson will be as good as his word with regard to this.

P D James has risen immeasurably in my book. I rarely heard so much good solid common sense spoken in such a short time.

(Just an interesting little afterthought: P D James is one of the country’s best known, and much loved mystery writers, and sits as a Conservative peer in the House of Lords. Ruth Rendell is of equal rank in the murder mystery stakes, also much loved, and sits as a Labour peer.)