Yentob Kids Co row prompts corporation to impose tougher restrictions on executives
SENIOR BBC executives will face stringent new rules to ensure that they do not act in a way which may appear to interfere in the corporation’s coverage of their charitable activities, in the wake of the scandal that claimed the job of Alan Yentob.
Mr Yentob, who chaired the now defunct Kids Company, was forced out of his executive role at the BBC in December, after being accused of attempting to influence the corporation’s coverage of the collapse of the children’s charity.
The BBC Trust, the broadcaster’s governing body, announced yesterday that it had approved proposals put forward by David Jordan, the BBC’s director of editorial policy, to create a new code of conduct for senior executives, to ensure that the corporation’s reputation was not damaged by future incidents.
Trustees said that they would not ban senior staff from sitting on the boards of voluntary organisations, but agreed that the current regulations did not take into account a situation in which executives might be asked by the corporation’s own news outlets for comments on a story about a charity with which they were involved.
Richard Ayre, the chairman of the Trust’s editorial standards committee, said yesterday: “BBC people who use their own time and professional skills to assist in charitable work make an important contribution to demonstrating the BBC’s corporate social responsibility. But the more senior the individual and the more prominent the outside body, the greater the need for robust systems for managing conflicts of interest, especially if those bodies become the subject of public controversy and a focus of interest for BBC programmes.”
Mr Yentob quit after admitting that the row had become a “serious distraction”. He was accused of having at- tempted to interfere with the BBC’s coverage of Kids Company on three occasions, including making an unsolicited phone call to a Radio 4 journalist.
The executive quit his post as creative director after learning that if he did not do so, the governing body would launch a formal inquiry into his behaviour.
He remains the chairman of BBC Films, as well as presenting Imagine, the television arts show.