Lord Deben, the Chairman of the influential Committee on Climate Change, has been found guilty by the BBC Executive Complaints Unit of misleading listeners of the Today Programme. The former Environment Secretary claimed that the government were preventing communities that want to build onshore wind farms from doing so:

“What on earth is the government doing, saying that even where a community wants to have an onshore wind farm, it can’t have it. This is sheer dogma.”

But the BBC Executive Complaints Unit found that the opposite is true: the Government has in fact devolved the decision to approve onshore wind turbines to local councils.

The BBC acknowledged that “Lord Deben was presented as someone with a significant degree of expertise and knowledge in this area” and accepted that “he should have been challenged on this point to ensure listeners were not left with a materially misleading impression.”

One consequence of the BBC’s decision not to invite sceptics on to its programmes any more is that guff from Gummer et al is more likely to go unchallenged…