The BBC Trust today announced a series of changes to the governance arrangements for BBC Worldwide. As part of its review of the BBC’s commercial activities the Trust has agreed a revised governance framework within which the BBC must operate its commercial activities. These changes are designed to strengthen the oversight of the BBC’s commercial operation and ensure even greater clarity and confidence in the separation of the BBC’s public service and commercial activities.
Among the changes agreed are:
- The BBC Worldwide Board, which is a subsidiary board of the BBC’s Executive Board, will become smaller and more focussed on the delivery of a rolling three year commercial strategy agreed by the Trust.
- The new chairman of the BBC Worldwide board must be a non-executive director from the BBC’s Executive Board – thereby strengthening the link between the two boards and the role of the BBC’s public service arm as the shareholder in the company.
- There will be changes to the membership of both the BBC’s Executive Board and the Worldwide Board in order to reduce the potential for conflicts of interest. Specifically, the Chief Executive Officer of BBC Worldwide will no longer be a member of the BBC’s Executive Board and staff from BBC Vision (who produce most of the BBC content subsequently sold by Worldwide) will not be eligible to be members of the Worldwide Board. This will result in Jana Bennett stepping down from the BBC Worldwide Board.
These changes will bring the business further in line with the Combined Code on Corporate Governance. The Trust has also stipulated that it expects BBC Worldwide to operate as far as possible within the principles set by the Code, and any deviation from it needs to be agreed by the BBC Trust.
This new governance framework for BBC Worldwide, proposed by the Executive Board, will be stipulated in the Trust’s protocols. The BBC’s Executive Board, led by Director-General Mark Thompson, will be responsible for ensuring compliance with it. The changes will come into effect from 1 October 2009.
In addition to the above changes, the Trust has decided that the financial threshold for referral of transactions for Trust approval should be lowered from £50m to £30m and the Trust will retain the ability to scrutinise any activity that it believes is not consistent with the strategy it has agreed.
(Source: BBC Trust)
