Last week, after 6 long years, the BBC Trust finally apologised and retracted the last of its serious allegations about us.
It’s been miscarriage of justice by email. Not one member of the Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee has ever met or spoken to us, not even to check facts or opinions. And despite our multiple requests for meetings, we have met Trust staff just once. 6 years ago.
The Trust has apologised and withdrawn its false claim that one of our films featured a project run by the charity that funded the film. Ofcom, in its detailed 2015 reporting of BBC editorial malpractice, rejected the other serious Trust allegation about us: that the film had been funded by a company which appeared in it.
The BBC knew 7 years ago that it had named the wrong charity, yet the Trust repeatedly refused to acknowledge facts accessible to any 12 year-old with a smart phone. The project featured in the film was run by the University of Edinburgh, and the charity named by the Trust had nothing whatsoever to do with it. It’s all in the public domain, just where it has always been.
The Trust has withheld its secret “evidence” from 2 Freedom of Information requests (and appeals) by telling the Information Commissioner (ICO), who republished the allegation in 2016, that their information about us was protected by a BBC derogation. Now they’ve admitted they had no evidence and the ICO is reviewing this. The Trust says this all happened because of a “Summarising Error”. Really – that’s what they say. We wonder what they summarised …
The BBC, with the Trust riding shotgun, used us a scapegoat, giving us undue prominence to divert attention from its own regulatory failings to which we had alerted BBC bosses.
The Trust has now been dissolved because it was widely perceived in Parliament and beyond as beholden to BBC management and not fit for purpose. ‘Not fit for purpose’ doesn’t come close: On one occasion before publication the Trust gave Richard 24-hrs to respond on the day his mother died (they knew).