LAST week I wrote in TCW about a meticulous survey submitted by News-watch as part of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) consultation exercise about the BBC’s Charter renewal.
It showed that of the 2.3million complaints made to the BBC between 2017-25, only 200 were upheld by the Corporation’s Editorial Complaints Unit, and only 38 of those were about impartiality.
The BBC’s response? To stick its fingers in its ears and fall back on two ludicrous lines of defence: that its complaints system is ‘open and comprehensive’, and that research by the broadcasting regulator Ofcom has found ‘very high levels of satisfaction’ with the process.
A BBC spokesman quoted in a Daily Telegraph article about the News-watch survey said: ‘The BBC has one of the most open and comprehensive systems for handling complaints in the UK media, regulated by a fully independent regulator in Ofcom, which in its most recent major research project found very high levels of satisfaction in our system. The vast majority of complaints are addressed and resolved at Stage 1 of the process, with only a small portion progressing to the Executive Complaints Unit for further consideration, so no meaningful comparison can be drawn from outcomes between the two stages. The ECU uphold complaints where they consider there to have been a breach of editorial standards.’
Both strands of that defence are disingenuous, outrageous tosh.
First, far from the data being ‘open and comprehensive’, it took News-watch almost 1,000 hours to assemble and analyse it in the survey because it is published not cohesively but in a tangled mass of reports and internal bulletins.
The BBC says that the vast majority of complaints are resolved at stage one. That sounds reassuring but since 2017 the BBC has received roughly 2,275,000 complaints. Fewer than 5,000 progressed beyond the initial filtering stage handled by the Corporation’s Audience Services.
Expressed as percentages, that means fewer than 0.22 per cent of complaints move beyond the first hurdle. Put another way, more than 99.7 per cent of complaints are stopped before they reach the stage where the BBC’s editorial adjudicators examine them formally.
The narrowing becomes even more dramatic at the next level. Of those complaints that the Corporation deigns to refer to the Executive Complaints Unit, only around 200 have been upheld or partially upheld since 2017. That represents 0.009 per cent of all complaints, or about one in every 11,000 complaints received.
The BBC’s reliance on the claim that complaints are ‘resolved’ at stage one conceals a more fundamental problem. Nobody outside the BBC knows what those complaints are, or how they were tackled.
Stage one responses are handled internally by the Corporation’s Audience Services department run by the external services supplier Capita. The BBC does not publish the complaint topics unless there are more than 100 on an individual subject and then only the bare details. It does not tell the outside world the reasoning used in those replies, nor give any systematic data showing the level of satisfaction with replies.
Responses frequently rely on broad editorial assertions rather than detailed engagement with the issues raised. Complainants may be told with bull-headed rectitude that there is a ‘consensus’ that climate science is settled, or that balancing perspectives exist elsewhere in the BBC’s output.
The BBC’s second line of defence, that Ofcom research shows ‘very high levels of satisfaction’ with the complaints process, also turns out to be more PR tosh.
The research in question was a mystery-shopping exercise conducted in 2024 involving only 25 complainants. Of those, 13 said they were satisfied with the process and 12 said they were dissatisfied. In other words, the evidence cited as proof of ‘very high levels of satisfaction’ is fantasy. More importantly, the ‘satisfaction’ did not relate to whether complainants believed the BBC’s editorial decisions were fair or justified. It referred mainly to whether the paperwork involved was easy to follow.
Other research conducted by Ofcom about the complaints process paints a very different picture. Its 2022 survey found that more than 80 per cent of respondents expressed dissatisfaction with the fairness of the complaints process.
Public service broadcasting ultimately depends on public confidence. The blunt facts are:
- 99.7 per cent of complaints never pass the BBC’s Stage 1 and how these are ‘resolved’ is never revealed;
- The content of the vast majority of these more than two million complaints is not known;
- The BBC makes no effort to make responses publicly available except in those few cases which escalate to the ECU. Even at that level the details are kept to the bare minimum;
- The underlying statistics are available only by combing through dozens of fragmented reports;
- The BBC’s claim of ‘high satisfaction’ rests on the views of just 13 respondents’ experience of the paperwork involved.
