‘Wasteful’ BBC will pay price

The BBC is nothing but hypocritical in my opinion.

Not long ago it made the decision to scrap the over 75s free TV licence. Now it has become public knowledge that it has wasted £350,000 on travel and hotel bookings that were never used.

The Corporation has admitted that 5,455 train tickets costing £273.000; 600 hotel room bookings at a cost of £64,800 and 1,631 taxi trips at £25,000 were all cancelled over the last five years and the BBC was unable to claim refunds.

Breaking the total down means the BBC wasted £6,000 a month on transport and accommodation that nobody ended up using.

A BBC spokesman said that being a 24-hour international broadcaster a significant amount of travel is inevitable,

Whilst we fully understand and accept that what we don’t accept is spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers cash on travel and hotels that weren’t even used. That is totally unacceptable.

The recently appointed new Director General Tim Davie has pledged to keep a strong focus on cost reduction, so maybe he should make a start here.

The BBC has been a British institution for decades and has always been a massive part of our lives. But now, unfortunately, it has become unprincipled and wasteful and now it urgently needs to be checked.

Does an OAP have to suffer while some exec books a train or taxi to take them to a comfy hotel room only to not make the journey in the end? Oh well, I guess it doesn’t really matter because someone else is paying for it.

With more and more viewers buying subscriptions surely it can only be a matter of time before watching the BBC will become a matter of choice.

You can bet your bottom dollar that when that happens and the BBC has to compete for viewers it will be a lot more careful about how it spends its pennies.

Mrs L M Jackson