Speeches by Lowe.

“That is not money that you have to go and earn; it is money that comes in. I accept that they have not agreed it yet—it is remiss of me not to have done that—but I am struggling to understand why your finance system is so complicated. A complicated and opaque finance system means that it is very difficult to make good …”

“Thank you for that. I have a question on the complexity of your finance system. I am finding it difficult to understand why it is so complex. I would like to know why. After all, your actual business model is not that complicated. You send out 72 million letters a year to collect the licence fee from those people who h…”

“The question for Jonathan is “What are you now doing to change as a result of this Report, if you accept this Report as valid and having veracity?””

“There is a question that follows on from that, Tim. It does not sound as if you have fully taken on board what the NAO said.”

“On that basis, nobody would bother with a budget.”

“Just because you are in a difficult world, that does not mean that you do not try to forecast.”

“I am not sure that it is necessarily the prime concern, Tim. The key is that you can deliver the savings, but the question that I think the NAO is asking, and it is a valid question, is what the downstream effects of those cuts are. It does not appear that you necessarily have the management tools to be able to make th…”

“Too much paperwork can be confusing, can’t it?”

“But you have to accept that some of this is quite critical.”

“We see in the Report: “However, these business cases did not meet NAO‑identified good practice. They lacked options analysis, had poorly developed risk assessments and in some places contained inaccuracies… The Service’s monitoring of its savings progress was hampered by the complexity of its finance system. It therefo…”

“I think you will find, Tim, that the young do not go to the BBC.”

“But you cannot judge it if you do not have the information.”

“We touched on this earlier on. This Committee sits with a hat of representing the taxpayer and value for money. That is the reason we are here. As the NAO says, without clear ways of measuring non-financial impacts, how can you demonstrate the savings you are making? I accept you are making savings, Tim, but are they h…”

“Okay.”

“Good morning, everybody. To start with, I should probably declare a conflict of interest, in that I have had three complaints upheld against the BBC in the last 12 months. In case anyone thinks that makes me biased, I probably ought to disclose that. My question is for Tim. Have you actually all read the NAO Report in …”

“I am asking you whether you have thought about it or discussed it.”

“I don’t think we are picking holes, Tim. I think what we are saying is, “Let’s get at the truth.” That is where we want to be.”

“We are not Victorian Britain.”

“I am sure we can have a further debate on this, but I am not sure that UK plc is in particularly good health. We are looking at the economy here being destroyed.”

“I will end there, Chair.”