BBC did not lose plot over £1m pay-off, says Mark Thompson

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Ex-BBC director general Mark Thompson has told MPs the corporation had not "lost the plot" when it agreed a pay-off of almost £1m to his former deputy.

He also accused Lord Patten, chairman of the trust which oversees the BBC, of "unfair and untrue" claims not to have known about Mark Byford's payment.
Lord Patten said he "couldn't have been expected to know" about the sum.
Mr Thompson told MPs the trust put him under "ferocious pressure" to make senior redundancies like Mr Byford's.
The BBC has been criticised for paying £25m ($39m) to 150 outgoing executives - £2m ($3.1m) more than their contracts stipulated.
'Full support' Mr Thompson - who is now chief executive of the New York Times newspaper - is one of seven senior BBC figures giving evidence to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC).
He was asked about a £949,000 pay-off package given to former deputy director general Mr Byford.
He said Mr Byford's redundancy was part of a wider effort to cut the number of highly-paid executives at the BBC and had ultimately saved the corporation money.

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Mark Thompson: "Mark Byford's pay-off was value for money"

He said he believed he had the "full support" of the BBC Trust in trying to do that within a very short time frame.
Committee chairman Margaret Hodge said under Mr Byford's contract he could have been paid off with £500,000.
But Mr Thompson said he was paid almost twice that because the corporation wanted him to be "fully focused" on his job in the final months of his tenure and not "worried about his future".
He said the fact that he had known Mr Byford for more than three decades and socialised with him did not affect judgement about his severance package.
Asked by Mrs Hodge if the BBC had "lost the plot", Mr Thompson replied: "I do not think we lost the plot."
Savings Former trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons agreed with the MPs that payments like Mr Byford's "look eye-watering", but said the process of making "rapid reductions in senior management" was "very difficult".
"You think we should have done it for less and with the benefit of hindsight maybe we should have spent more time being clear," Sir Michael said.
"The price of that would have been that it would have taken longer and the savings would have been smaller."
BBC trustee Anthony Fry told the PAC there had been "months and months of arguments" between the trust and the BBC executive committee over financial issues such as pay, perks and bonuses - although he admitted that severance packages were not given much attention.
"It became a battleground. I got the distinct view... that our views were not being taken with what I believed was the seriousness they deserved," he said.

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Analysis

David Sillito Arts Correspondent

What's at stake here are reputations. Mark Thompson is said to be furious about the way the trust pointed the finger at him for allegedly leaving them in the dark over pay-offs. The man who is now chief executive of the New York Times wants to clear his name.
In response, the BBC Trust has called his comments "bizarre" and "unsubstantiated". It now has to prove that.
If it doesn't, two things are at stake. First the reputation of the chairman, Lord Patten. To be accused of sitting before MPs supporting a case that Mark Thompson says is "fundamentally misleading" is serious.
Secondly, the trust itself wants to prove it is up to the job of overseeing the BBC. MPs on the Public Accounts Committee have already castigated it for not doing more about pay-offs over the past six years.
With the debate over the renewal of the BBC's Charter not that far off, the Trust will certainly want to be seen to be "trustworthy".
The BBC has already accepted the pay-offs were wrong. The seven senior BBC executives, past and present, are today arguing over the issues of blame and responsibility.

The hearing is a follow-up to a similar hearing in July which saw Lord Patten tell MPs he was "shocked and dismayed" by pay-offs totalling £25m to senior managers made between 2009 and 2012.

He said then that if Mr Thompson was called before MPs, he would be "as interested as you are, why we didn't know" about the payments.
However, ahead of his appearance before the committee on Monday, Mr Thompson sent a letter to the PAC saying statements by Lord Patten were inaccurate and the trust chairman had been "fully briefed" about settlements.
Mr Thompson said he had emails which showed that trust members approved the payments.
He told the MPs on Monday he stood by those documents and said Lord Patten's claims not to know about the settlements were "damaging, unfair and misleading statements".
In reply, Lord Patten said he took the charge of misleading the committee "very strongly" and insisted that he had been told settlements for Mr Byford and former marketing boss Sharon Baylay were "contractual payments".
"I'm in the position in which I'm accused of having misled the committee on something I didn't know and couldn't have been expected to know," he added.

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BBC Trust

• meant to act as the "guardian" of licence payers' money and ensure the BBC fulfils its remit to inform, educate and entertain
• sets the BBC's strategy, approves how and where money is spent, sets editorial guidelines and reviews the performance of all BBC services
• its chairman, Lord Patten, and 12 trustees are separate from the BBC's executive board, which is led by the director general and controls the day-to-day running of the corporation - in line with a framework set by the trust
• also responsible for protecting the BBC's independence

Trust director Nicholas Kroll said the deputy director general's severance package was not part of the trust's remit.

But Mrs Hodge said the "the job of the trust is to protect the licence fee payers' interests", adding: "There is not one person around the table who can understand why there was no challenge from you."
'Persuaded' Former chairman of the BBC executive board remuneration committee Marcus Agius said there had been "a great deal of concern" within his committee "about these redundancies and the amounts".
"We challenged and tested Mark Thompson and after sustained debate we were finally persuaded on value for money grounds," he said.
Mr Thompson's 13,000-word document to the PAC included an attachment challenging Ms Adams's claim, made at the hearing in July, that she did not know of an email explaining the pay-offs, and appeared to show that, in fact, she helped to compose it.
However, before Mr Thompson submitted his document, Ms Adams had already written to the PAC and admitted a mistake in earlier evidence that she had failed to recognised the email from its description.
Ms Adams apologised to the committee for that mistake and said she had never meant to imply that Mr Thompson had tried to block plans for a cap on severance pay.
She said she took the suggestion of a cap to the executive board before Mr Byford's package was agreed, but it had decided it would be "inappropriate to introduce the cap at that time".
The biggest severance payments included:

• Mark Byford, deputy director general, 31 years of service - £949,000

• Jana Bennett, executive director, 33 years - £687,333

• Departmental director, 25 years - £866,300

• Caroline Thomson, chief operating officer, 17 years - £680,400

• Controller, 31 years - £476,700

• George Entwistle, director general, 23 years - £470,300

• Departmental director, 2 years - £394,500

• Controller, 26 years - £381,600

• Roly Keating, departmental director, 29 years - £376,000 (money returned minus tax)

• Project director, 19 years - £356,200

• Head of department, 33 years - £347,900

The PAC meeting in July followed the publication of a report in which the National Audit Office criticised the corporation, saying the scale of the payments risked public trust.
A spokesman for the prime minister said "legitimate questions" had been raised about the use of licence payers' money and should be answered.