BBC spends £8.23m on consultants in a year

Corporation’s expenditure, equivalent to a series of a BBC1 drama such as Spooks, revealed in FOI request • How the BBC spent £8.23m on consultants in one year A programme of cuts may be underway at the BBC, but the corporation still spent £8.23m on consultants in the 12 months to the end of March. The amount paid to consultants such as Deloitte, Capita and Ernst & Young is equivalent to a series of a top BBC1 drama such as Spooks . A breakdown of the figures shows the BBC spent £769,045 on consultants to help it with “change management” and £1.9m on “strategy”. The biggest winner appears to be Deloitte, which earned just over £3m from the BBC over the 12-month period. That included £197,649 for “management consultancy” and £498,619 for “change management”. The figures were provided under the Freedom of Information Act and passed to the Guardian. They have angered some BBC staff who are facing cutbacks as a result of last year’s stringent licence fee settlement. Programming is also under threat under the Delivering Quality First cost-cutting strategy, with the corporation looking to make about half of the 16% cut to operating costs from “scope ” – BBC management speak for content budgets. However, the £8.23m bill for consultants is less than the £10.9m that was spent by the corporation during the 2008/09 financial year . The BBC head of sourcing at BBC Procurement, Tracey Morris, said: “The BBC in common with other large organisations does employ consultants but only when we need specialist advice and resource on projects that are outside of the normal course of our business and where it would not be cost efficient to maintain those specialist skills in-house.” • To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly “for publication”. • To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook . BBC BBC licence fee Television industry BBC1 Tara Conlan guardian.co.uk

Posted by on September 23, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.