F8 and I were discussing the future of the Beeb over on the Olympics thread
and now the issue seems worthy of a thread of its own.
Given how long the Tories had been gunning for them and disgust over the
ham-fisted Savile cover up still fresh In everyone’s memories, it’s gob-smacking
how the Beeb gave Hew Edwards a raise and continued to pay him for five months
after they learned of his arrest.
Be interesting to see how the new government reacts to and deals with this latest
own goal by the Beeb.
The Mail and Murdoch papers are going to be baying for blood come tomorrow am if they
aren’t already
Aside from the inevitable Government enquiry and a spike in the growing number of those refusing to pay their licence fees , what do AWers think can be done or Is going to be done?
A pedant writes, the BBC knew he’d been arrested for a serious offence I believe, not that it was for viewing child pornography.
Still gave him £40k rise though.
Even assuming the police hadn’t told the Beeb the exact nature of the “serious offences”, given all that had gone before, surely they would
have asked Edwards to clarify what he’d been charged with.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c880zykre4lo
Have asked the mods to delete the last three words in para 2 of the OP
You want them to delete “of his arrest“? And just leave “the Beeb gave Hew Edwards a raise and continued to pay him for five months after they learned.“?
I predict that newcomers to this thread unable to contain their curiosity will be contacting you in droves to find out what it was they learned. It’ll be like that scene in Life Of Brian where Brian doesn’t finish his sentence to the crowd. I’d leave it as is, if I were you.
You would have hoped so. Mind you, innocent until charged?
No innocent until found guilty … sacking him after being arrested could have been a very costly mistake.
This might just be the perfect excuse for the new government to strip out the Tory plants put in by Johnson & Co. Davie has run his course; it’s been scandal after embarrassment after mistake on his watch; so he should go. Robbie Gibb has far too much influence over editorial content, especially in the Newsroom. The decimation of Newsnight is a scandal and the programme needs a move back to investigative journalism and forensic reporting. Far too many senior people have no journalistic background at all; Deborah Turness has been a disaster as Head of News and Current Affairs and is one of the people obsessed with Farage, Tice and generally giving the right way too much attention.
So I think that a clearout at the top of the Beeb will have been on Lisa Nandy’s to-do list and this opportunity has presented itself a lot earlier than she might have expected.
Perfectly put, completely agree. They need to remember what they’re for.
For example, what happened to public information films? “The Day Reginald Molehusband got it Right” etc. Don’t be a lane hog. Beeb territory surely, but for the modern age?
Sorry JG but the whole “shoots in foot” thing is just way too tabloid. The BBC had to try and balance conflicting requirements on them as an employer. As an HR person, I can attest that the whole area is a nightmare.
Usually, you’d suspend the employee on full pay while you conduct an investigation. Typically said employee will not co-operate with an investigation because it may prejudice the criminal investigation. Often employers won’t know why the employee has been arrested, and even if they do, they won’t know enough detail to rely on.
So, most companies will be cautious, and suspend but then await the trial. Suspension has to be on full pay, with benefits sustained, and without prejudice to things like pay reviews. Which is pretty much what the BBC have done. The BBC set out the following as part of a statement
“It said it had been “made aware in confidence” in November 2023 that Edwards “had been arrested on suspicion of serious offences and released on bail whilst the police continued their investigation”.
“At the time, no charges had been brought against Mr Edwards and the BBC had also been made aware of significant risk to his health,” the statement continued.
The corporation noted: “If at any point during the period Mr Edwards was employed by the BBC he had been charged, the BBC had determined it would act immediately to dismiss him. In the end, at the point of charge he was no longer an employee of the BBC.”
A further complication is that given the individual is innocent until proven guilty in court rather than in The Daily Mail, they retain a duty of care to the employee. So if they’d sacked him, and he was subsequently found innocent, the headlines would be “BBC shoots self in foot” because they’d now have to pay out for unfair dismissal, failing in duty of care, reputational damage etc etc. Edwards resigned in April – he wasn’t paid off – and so the BBC had no responsibility to act from that point onwards.
The tabloids will of course ignore all of the above, as inconvenient facts like staying within the law have no place when whipping up hysteria about nonces. As someone who has had to manage cases like this, you are pretty much fucked what ever you do from minute 1, as everyone knows what should happen, unencumbered by the knowing anything about the law.
I once worked for a company that had reported a major fraud (seven figures of cash missing, not counting the pence) to Old Bill but still got rinsed over in court on an unfair dismissal claim because guilt was assumed, and the internal investigation was largely non existent.
In the Edwards case, I honestly can’t see what else the BBC were supposed to do.
Excellent post
Yes, thanks @fortuneight. Very informative.
Calm and sensible – two things that are in short supply these days
Absolutely: HR procedural to the (legally enforced) letter. Tribunals don’t come cheap.
Tabloids, hysteria, social media outrage among those like-minded who decide they know better than the experts and mobilise to take action, do it their way. A modern malaise that can even creep in here, sadly.
Good points well made, F8, but, given:
* Public disgust at their jaw-dropping arrogance in thinking they could get away with covering up the Savile scandal
* The existential threat represented by the growing number of people refusing to pay and/or calling for an end to the licence fee
* Long-term Cross-party resentment at the broadcaster’s alleged left/right bias
I still think the Beeb could – and should – have prepared for and handled this latest shitshow far better than they have done. Giving the bloke a massive pay rise is an excellent example of their failure to read the room.
Sadly, in an age where x/Twitter-driven moral outrage is the norm, perception sadly trumps actuality, and many (most?) people are going to look at your well-reasoned argument and think “tl;dr”
Sadly, that sounds like a race to the bottom.
I work for an organisation where a senior colleague was arrested on similar charges. People inside and outside were up in arms about how long it had taken before they were charged and why this person hadn’t been sacked. The person resigned and waited for the case to come to court.
A year later and they were found innocent of all charges. Someone else has their job and, although they have a clean record and conscience, their professional life is ruined. This, I think, is what the BBC were considering in the Huw Edwards case.
Great post, @fortuneight . Newsnight could have done with such a voice last night in its coverage of the HE situation. As temperatures rise, the room really needs some grown-ups.
Newsnight was gutted of its credibility and meaning as a source of analysis when budget cuts resulted in its being scaled back to a round table discussion.
The fact that the planned scale back came into effect just before the election makes the Beeb’s decision to do so even more absurd.
The BBC would have expected the election to be in November like everyone else. They got surprised like everyone else. They formulated plans on changes months back, back in 2023, and were acting on them. I don’t get where they failed here, or what’s absurd.
Speculation about when the election would be called had begun on Jan 1 and, far from being limited to Nov, covered several options.
I had addressed the fact that the BBC had agreed on the downscaling of Newsnight months earlier. While I never used the word failure in my post, I still feel their decision to emasculate their flagship current affairs show in what they knew was going to be an election year was an absurd decision
A excellent summary and a very sensible approach.
This is how the real world operates (or should). For very necessary reasons. It won’t always give a perfect outcome for everyone (especially those with an axe to grind) but it is the balanced and professional way it should be done.
@Gary (9.04)
Too late.
The now deleted words concerned came after “of his arrest” and concerned the reasons for it. AWers can contact me to explain the words if they wish, but I will not waste any time replying.
Despite the police not making the reason for Edwards’ arrest clear at the time, the BBC would have surely asked him to clarify so as to prepare themselves for the inevitable fall out when the story broke.
F8 nd the board’s other HR professionals have outlined how the Beeb has delivered on its duty of care to Edwards, HR is, however, only a small part of the story, and their doing the right thing here is not going to protect the broadcaster from the torrent of sewage that is surely speeding their way from elsewhere.
Knowing very little about HR and rather a lot about image management, my argument is based on the BBC’s serial failure to ever have in place any kind of crisis plan. An unbelievable shortcoming given the fact that they have spent the last several years reeling from crisis to crisis and continue to face sustained attacks from all sides of the political and media spectrum.
Damn but them mods is efficient.
@Gary
Ironically, less than a day after saying they didn’t know the exact nature of Edwards’ offences, the BBC’s DG has now done a reverse ferret and admitted they did.
Or he did at least. Still innocent till proven guilty and the same HR protocol that Fortune Eight covered would still apply.
Not sure they knew the exact nature. This is a quote from Tim Davie:
“Asked about how much BBC managers were told in November, he said: “We knew it was serious, we knew no specifics, apart from the category of the potential offences.”
The BBC were also asked by the police to keep the infomration confidential. as they were still investigating. Sacking Edwards would have made that impossible.
I am still a long way from thinking the BBC have made any serious errors of judgment here. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Not sure an employer is entitled to ask what the nature of a criminal investigation of an employee is. Unless the police want access to their workplace or to interview their colleagues/managers to further their investigation.
I’m also pretty sure that he’s not obliged to tell them any details, if they did ask.
You can ask, but no brief worth paying will advise their client to answer. There’s zero benefit to the accused in doing so.
My point JG was that the BBC had to respond in a way that was legal. In doing so they discharged their duty of care not just to Edwards, but to viewers and the tax paying public. as well There is no “room to be read”, no crisis plan that provides for an alternative. They did what’s legal, which doesn’t trouble the bottom feeding tabloids and politically motivated. Quite how Edwards gets a fair trial out of this is beyond me given the hysteria being whipped up by a pitchfork wielding minority.
There’s no trial as Edwards has pleaded guilty.
https://rozenberg.substack.com/p/huw-edwards-convicted
No idea at all how the BBC could legally have done anything different (except maybe his alleged payrise but for all I know that was a contractual obligation). If Edwards was found to be not guilty the very same tabloids would be screaming “BBC persecuted an innocent man!!”
Perfectly understand that, F8. Think we are looking at things from our respective professional perspectives – you from a HR POV and me from an image management POV
The rod with which the BBC’s critics will beat its back isn’t about how fairly and decently their HR department treated Edwards. You have shown us that the answer to that question is very fairly and decently indeed.
For me, the core issue is their inability to anticipate the “victim” pile on and resultant fall out that was/is sure to follow the story’s hitting the front pages. Not the first time they have fallen short in this area.
That the story about what was known and when had already started to shift as early as today’s LT news is further evidence of this lack of any cohesive strategy.
FWIW, the issue of whether or not Edwards will receive a fair trial is moot as he has already entered a guilty plea.
It’s a given that certain parties are always going to pile onto the BBC for absolutely anything, no matter what the BBC do or don’t do.
Actual facts don’t seem to matter to the pilers-on or to their eager readers, so what effective action can the BBC take to mitigate such a pile-on?
I’d say their options are very limited indeed.
Genuine question – how do you counter newspapers and social media that pay no attention to facts and laws? I’d have thought the best strategy was to stay factual and wait for the news cycle move on.
@Mike_H
@fortuneight
Not pouring petrol on the fire by issuing a statement that clearly stated your boss was unaware of the nature of the events Edwards had been charged with only to recant the very next day might have been an option/strategy.
With Edwards not likely to be sentenced until Sept, going to be a while before this particular news cycle runs its course
You are not going to let this go, are you? Whatever the BBC ‘s failings, this ain’t one of them. Their hands were tied legally, they had nowhere else to go. I suppose they could have said , ” We had no idea our main news presenter was a paedo” but that might have been stretching the whole impartiality thing a bit far…..
Sorry, L, but all I have argued is that the BBC could and should have anticipated how this story was going to develop and handled this matter better.
I have acknowledged where others have made valid points and I take no satisfaction that the Beeb’s obfuscations of the last 24 hours have proved me right.
It does seem that the BBC’s DG should have either kept his trap shut or said something carefully innocuous, rather than having to correct himself after saying something that was incorrect.
But then the BBC’s DG was a political appointment from the previous government and was chosen for his connections and malleability to their program, not for his intelligence and insight.
I wonder if the charges were on a token amount of images?
Doesn’t matter, if the intent to acquire them was there.
It’s a minefield and the employer is in a very difficult situation.
We had someone who gained a professional qualification by claiming someone else’s work as their own. This was proved beyond doubt and the person admitted it. Some of the material is hand-written and when you look at the signature on the papers it’s very obvious that tippex has been used to obscure the signature that was there before. To my mind, that’s serious misconduct and instant dismissal – however it turned out to be a lot more involved than that once m’learned friends got involved. We had to pay a few grand to settle, amazingly. However, HR and our legal people saw it as a good outcome.
And yet somehow The Sun and Mirror are still publishing, and no-one is up in arms about that on a periodic basis.
I am. I place the demise of this country, for that is what it is, firmly at the feet of the tabloids. Nothing to do with small boats, black kids in Tottenham, Asians in Bradford or the BBC.
Is the Rwandan scheme still an option? Let’s get all these old football hooligans from the dire 1980s, currently ripping up Sunderland, on it. The country would significantly improve then. Give their houses to people from Sri Lanka and Pakistan! Seriously, it would be a win-win.
“I place the demise of this country … firmly at the feet of the tabloids.
Yep, I’d agree with you there. The Mirror wouldn’t be among my main culprits though. I haven’t read it for years, not even online, but it’s the paper I grew up with and at least back then (mid-to-late 1900s) it used to be nowhere near as dishonest, shit-stirring or racist/sexist/homophobic as The Express, The Daily Mail or The Sun (a low bar, granted).
Grew up reading the Mirror during its 1960s’ heyday under the editorship of Hugh Cudlipp.
Having been forced to join the race to the bottom when Murdoch
bought and relaunched The Scum, the paper became little more
than a joke after it became The Daily Maxwell in summer 1984
Have you seen the list of settlements they’ve had to make for criminal acts?
The Mirror and/or The Sun? Imagine it would be an imposingly lengthy list
if you covered up the mastheads, you would struggle to tell one from the other these days.
The Mirror at its 60s peak was a terrific paper. The only things it has in common with its more recent incarnations are paper and ink