BBC HQ Revamp Blew £6 Million in 6 Months
Over a hundred million pounds over budget, four years late and the subject of a National Audit Office investigation, the BBC’s revamp of Broadcasting House was a disaster from start to finish. The ten year renovation project, which was supposed to be completed in 2008, was still haemorrhaging money right up until the day it was completed last year.
Media Guido can reveal that as the project drew to a close in the first six months of last year, the BBC blew close to a further £6 million of licence-fee payers’ money on the ill-fated rebuild. The £5.765 million finishing touches figure includes £3.2 million forked out for furniture and some £26,000 on “graphics”, presumably those aesthetically-pleasing billboards Lord Patten proudly did his TV pieces in front of at the height of the Jimmy Savile scandal. The Beeb are refusing to reveal how much they spent on individual decorative items, citing the feeble excuse that disclosure would weaken their “commercial bargaining position”. Nothing to see here.
Almost £6 million of licence-fee payers’ cash spent on the finishing touches of a doomed revamp that spent over a hundred million more than budgeted. 2012: a year to be proud of for the BBC…
Piss poor management, once again.
We are all in together
Privatise the BBC and let us see how it gets on in the real world where it has to earn its living without taxpayer back up.
They’ve having a Turkish. I bet there are some contractors out there with a new van, a two week holiday in Florida and more. Tasy, very tasty.
And don’t ask what the rate is from London to Salford, no sir.
Starve the beast.
Stop paying telly tax.
Invest the money in beans and gold instead.
Feeble ‘journalism’ for a cheap headline? No mention of the £750m savings made possible by New BH which swamps the overspend on Phase 1 of this Project? No mention of the fact that this fit-out budget paid, in part, for 4,000 desks and chairs (which naturally enough go into BH at the end of a Project)? No mention that Phase 2 of the Project is on schedule and under budget since 2006 (6 years ago)? No mention that thousands of staff and hundreds of hours of programmes have been transferred smoothly?
Big Bunch of Cnuts.
“You knew perfectly well that you were not welcome in the United States. You knew that because you tried before and you had not got in, and you knew the reason for that – because, rightly or wrongly, the US authorities do not welcome people in their country who have convictions of the kind that you have.
“With that full knowledge, you equipped yourself with a passport. I am told that it was given you by way of a loan from your friend Andrew McMaster, to which you bore, I am told, some resemblance. And by use of that passport you did what you could to get into the United States.”
[sentencing remarks Stephen Lennon of the EDL. They're quite concerned about immigration. Apparently]
How is that relevant please?
I’ve been thinking about it for some time, but after this I’m seriously going
to embrace mulitculturalism and vote Labour.
Gank III – I wouldn’t bother if I were you, Even one of the Asian Labour MP’s has already said at Conference that muli-culturalism will not and will never work,
unless of course you like living in a ghetto surrounded by immigrants, playing spot the white man !!!
Yet again shocking mismanagement by the BBC , the arrogant misuse of our money but no doubt the BBC will try to pretend that it’s all for the greater good, after all the BBC is a national icon!!
However it is becoming more and more apparent that its only a model of incompetence and self serving jobsworths.
It is rapidly becoming a national icon of the same vein that the swastika did.
Don’t tax pensions
Give everyone a tax brake
Sell off the BBC
“It is because of the unique way in which the BBC are funded that allows us to piss taxpayers money up the wall & pay ourselves a fortune for being utterly incompetent”………………..
And as usual no-one will lose their job.
Social Democrat Cameron – weak, weak, weak on BBC waste, incompetence & corruption.
Agree 100% one of the reasons I refuse to paying the bbc tax
You have to nail these builders down to a fixed-price contract, with absolutely no variances for any reason whatever, and make it clear to the staff that, if it isn’t in the plans that were signed off, they aren’t going to get it.
Why didn’t you mention that ten years ago?
Let us improve their “commercial bargaining position” by abolishing the TV poll tax.
Just cancel your direct debits. It’s easily done. If TV tax inspector salesman appears on your doorstep, possibly after a year or two, then say ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. They are powerless.
Ah ! You still don’t like that word, huh ?
Cancel your direct debit, eh ? But when they ask for the money we’ll pretend that it hasn’t been cancelled; that’ll make you over-drawn, if we’re lucky, so that we can slap on charges for ‘insufficient funds’, then we’ll charge you again for running an unauthorised over-draft. When you don’t put enough money in your account to cover that we’ll slap on more charges.
We really hate our customers.
Why ? Because we’re a bunch of thieving Hunts.
Talking cobblers as always. At least he believes in this rubbish, unlike most present day Labour Party Members, who do not believe in anything except grabbing and holding on to power at the expense of everybody else.
Tony Benn also beleived in keeping the proles off a public footpath that ran across his country home of Stansgate Abbey.
What a man of the people!
Benn was and is a certified loon, yet he gets the loons that vote libour to put him on a pedastal
Benn, for a man who so hated the hereditary principle that he renounced his seat in the Lords, seems to be a step in a 100 year + dynasty of Westminster hierophants. I understand that his grand-daughter has ambitions to be the fifth generation in da’house. Still raving hypocrisy and inter generational privilege and influence are only bad when it is ‘toffs’ who take advantage of them.
Tony Benn shut down more mines than Thatcher.
Imagine this in the private sector?
The board & shareholders would have Pattens resignation without a massive golden parachute pay off faster that Superman can fold laundry.
FFS – when will this incompetent luvvie infested monolith be taken out & shot?
Marr show has a new set and if it is coming from the new studio why is back drop still Millbank ?
The perception of “Londonistan backdrop gravitas”.
Marr doesn’t want to look like a cheeky Mancunian monkey.
‘The Beeb are refusing to reveal how much they spent on individual decorative items, citing the feeble excuse that disclosure would weaken their “commercial bargaining position”’
—
Ever unique on the power being held to account thing, then.
Helen Boaden’s famous LSE talk on this spent the last several weeks on the BBC website ‘not being found’ and now… even Google can’t locate it ever existed.
It did, and still does, somewhere:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/posts/helen-boaden-director-of-bbc-news-at-the-lse
Luckily, some may have take page grabs and downloads, in case commercial bargaining issues or purposes of jour… hushing yet more up meant they needed to get busy on the archive like a Kremlin May Day rally photo retoucher.
Meanwhile, get a banana stuck in the lift and it will be the end of civilisation as they know it.
Can we get a freedom of information request going guido to try to elicit from bbc the individual amounts of these decorative items ??
No go with that link unfortunately.
Xanadu?
BBC becoming such? Closed shop, british perverted selective society, selling us what they hope we want to hear and see? Brainwashing us unnaturaly to be condusive to their warped sub-culture way of thinking, to just keep them in jobs.
As Esther Rantzen did with her That’s Life programme, funnily enough arpund the same time as Jimmy Savile – her programme destroying inner confidence in the british car industry, unconstructive, and any other brit industry with it, even though we were better than most in europe.
BBC needs shooting.
It’s only money. What’s money to these chaps and chapesses? Plenty more where that came from.
Something for Jeremy to get wound up about.
During the revovations I suspect they found mant more saviles in the attic.
I know I know
A few months ago I reported that White City yardies were having yard sales of BBC computers either donated or liberated from the self-styled ‘BBC Village.’ After the locusts had departed the huge ground floor offices were completely empty: no puters, no desks, nothing.
Then, just before Christmas, the offices were suddenly packed again – with restocked desks, new IT eqpt and even an occasional ‘worker’ (usually young men stroking their beards as if in contemplation of doing something, sometime.)
Have the Salford refugees returned en masse? Has the Beeb taken on new staff to make those exhibition-size offices look less empty? The levy-payers should be told!
I’ve had it with them – enough is enough etc….
This is a disgrace – their headquarters is now swankier than ours. How can that be fair?
And now we’ve sold Auto Trader we are completely fucked.
We demand a progressive newspaper license, payable by all households with newspaper delivery equipment installed.
Anyone found able to receive progressive newspapers without a license would need to be criminalised in order that our good works may continue.
Break them up.
Their job always has been social conditioning. And that is morally wrong.
They don’t need breaking up – they need exterminating …. permanently.
The BBC is beyond parody the sooner that it becomes subscription only the better or get a chairman in who will sort it out once and for all,Patten is and has always been a complete waste of time the ultimate establishment fixer given positions way beyond his intellect the Chinese sussed in weeks.
They might wheel Fat Pang out again to rudely and arrogantly dismiss any suggestion of incompetence. How dare they question what we do with their money?
So we will know what to do when the BBC start screaming that they are broke and need a large increase in the licence fee……….
Anyone notice the yellow in the ‘Graphics’ the beeb are using. That apparently helps sell things…
BBC is just a £3.5 Billion/year job creation scheme for lefties. Bin it.
Scrap it now, go subscription and see how many lefties still support it.
Westminster came in a billion quid over budget at today’s prices; that was under Victorian efficiency and Tory governments. Extrapolate spending under Henry VIII, public spending versus forecasts is value for money. The Olympics, £6 billion over budget. It happens-get real, Guido.
They can go fuck with their renewal letter to me. Not paying a penny more, ever
Is ‘Media Guido’ like normal Guido but a bit more tiresome?
Oh do stop moaning. It’s only public money.
There’s lots more where that came from.
Ask Ed Blinkiebollocks and the boy Miliband.
Remember that much of the funding for the project came from BBC Worldwide funds – not the license fee payer! The BBC as an organisation is so much bigger than people think.
When we all stop paying the BBC television licence, how days do you think BBC Worldwide would exist.
Stop paying the licence.We did and we will never pay then another penny.
The BBC waste £3.5 billion of our money every fucking year.
Only if you keep handing over the cash.
Stop paying them. Ignore the threatening letters and tell their collection agents to piss off.
Sixa Millione?
That’s eez a lota Coke!
£6m in 6 months? What’s the big deal, the BBC Asian Network burns money at that exact rate too!