UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT of ORAL EVIDENCE to Be Published As HC 649-I
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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 649-i HOUSE OF COMMONS ORAL EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE THE CULTURE, MEDIA AND SPORT COMMITTEE THE BBC'S RESPONSE TO THE JIMMY SAVILE CASE TUESDAY 23 OCTOBER 2012 GEORGE ENTWISTLE and DAVID JORDAN Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 224 USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT 1. This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others. 2. Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings. 3. Members who receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant. 4. Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee. 1 Oral Evidence Taken before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on Tuesday 23 October 2012 Members present: Mr John Whittingdale (Chair) Mr Ben Bradshaw Dr Thérèse Coffey Damian Collins Philip Davies Paul Farrelly Steve Rotheram Mr Adrian Sanders ________________ Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: George Entwistle, Director-General, BBC, and David Jordan, Director of Editorial Policy and Standards, BBC, gave evidence. Q1 Chair: Good morning, everybody. This is a special session of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee to look specifically at the recent revelations about the abuse committed by Jimmy Savile during the time when he was employed by the BBC, and also the handling of those revelations by the BBC. I would like to welcome the Director-General, George Entwistle, and the Head of Editorial Policy, David Jordan. I am sorry that the first appearance before this Committee by the Director-General should be in these circumstances, but I would also like to express the thanks of the Committee for your offering to come before us this morning to address what, I am sure you will agree, are very serious concerns. If I may start off, last night on Panorama, you will have seen John Simpson, that very experienced and respected member of BBC staff, describe this as “the worst crisis that I can remember in my nearly 50 years at the BBC”. Would you accept that that is the case? George Entwistle: There is no question in my mind that what we now know happened is a very, very grave matter indeed. For somebody to have worked for the BBC and at the BBC over a number of decades and have been responsible for what the police describe as “an unprecedented scale” of child sexual exploitation—there is no question in my mind but that this is a very grave matter indeed, and I would seek to show that the response the BBC has made recognises that gravity. Q2 Chair: I think we would all accept that, but you will also be aware of the concern about the handling of this matter by the BBC. It raises very serious questions about potential suppression to avoid embarrassment, and obviously about some of the allegations broadcast last night on Panorama. Would you accept that this has not been handled well by the BBC in the last few weeks? George Entwistle: No, I would not accept that. I would accept that there have been times when we have taken longer to do things than I would have liked in a perfect world, but if you look at what we have achieved since the scale of the crisis became clear, I think you would see that we have done much of what we should have done, and have done it in the right order and with proper respect paid to the right authorities. The first thing we did was that I 2 personally made contact with the police, when the scale and credibility of the allegations had started to become clear, and said to them, “This looks like it has the potential to become a criminal matter.” I have significant anxiety about action by the BBC in any way compromising, or in some way damaging, potential criminal investigations; that is the first thing I am determined to avoid. Those conversations with the police were characterised initially by them saying to me, “Please do not rush into setting up your own internal review or inquiry of any kind, because we are also worried that you may trespass on our position”. So we spent that first week absolutely making sure that our liaison with the police was as good as it could possibly be, and putting our investigations unit and all our internal resources at the service of the police in such a way that they could get to work as fast as possible, and that we would be in a position to help them. On the Monday of the following week, I went on the Today programme and announced that, when the police were ready, we wanted to have our own internal review. Perhaps I could have made it clearer the previous week that I was prepared to do that, once the police were ready for me to do it, but the key thing for me was to absolutely make sure that I did not do anything that trespassed on the authority and prerogative of the police at that point. Q3 Chair: We will want to come on to look at the co-operation between the BBC and the police in due course, but in terms of the communication and the handling of this, I am sure you would accept that the BBC’s reputation for trust and integrity is one of its most precious assets. Do you not accept that that is in jeopardy as a result of some of the suggestions that have been made in the last few weeks? George Entwistle: There is no question but that what Jimmy Savile did, and the way the BBC behaved in those years—that the culture and practices of the BBC seemed to allow Jimmy Savile to do what he did—will raise questions of trust and reputation for us. There is no question about that. This is a gravely serious matter, and one cannot look back at it with anything other than horror, frankly, that his activities went on as long as they did undetected. Of course, that is a matter of grave regret to me, and something that the BBC and I need to demonstrate an absolute determination, here and now, to do everything we can to put right. There is no doubt about that at all in my mind, and I am determined to do that. I believe that the two reviews we have set up have been given the independence and support they need absolutely to get to the bottom of this. I think there is virtue in having established two separate reviews rather than one overall review, because the review that will be done by Dame Janet Smith has decades of culture to look at. The truth is that Jimmy Savile worked at the BBC from the mid-1960s, and there are a great many people we need to try to talk to, to find out whether anybody did know what was going on. What was going on, in terms of how he was managed and how he was overseen? This is a really significant exercise in cultural examination. It is critically important that we do that with absolute thoroughness. At the same time, I recognise there are questions about the way the Newsnight investigation unfolded, and I would seek to answer those much more quickly. Nick Pollard has been given the task of weeks, rather than months, in that regard. Q4 Chair: We will come on to that as well, but you must accept that in the last 24 hours, a BBC programme carried interviews with a reporter and producer of another BBC programme, in which they publicly disagreed with the explanation given for the dropping of that investigation; the BBC then had to issue a statement saying its original explanation was misleading. That is not exactly a triumph of handling, is it? George Entwistle: If I can take the correction to the blog first, there is no doubt that it is a matter of regret and embarrassment that the version of events recorded in Peter Rippon’s 3 blog on 2 October did not turn out to be as accurate as it should have been. Again, that is something that should not have happened, and that I regret. Whenever the BBC puts something into the public domain, it has an ongoing obligation to ensure the accuracy of whatever it has put out there, so there is no question in my mind but that we were right to identify the inaccuracies in the blog. It seems to me absolutely the right thing to have done. When it comes to last night’s Panorama, in a way, although I think the BBC does look mystifying to some outsiders in respect of its capacity to do this kind of thing, I think the fact of last night’s Panorama is something everybody in the BBC should be incredibly proud of. Here is an organisation investigating itself, in its own airtime, on its main TV channel, with appropriate resources given to the task, asking questions of itself that I do not believe any other media organisation on earth would do.