Former BBC HR boss admits mistake in evidence to MPs
Former BBC HR boss Lucy Adams admits she helped draft a memo about controversial severance payments to BBC staff, despite telling MPs in July she had no knowledge of the document.
Ms Adams, who announced last month she was leaving her post as HR director at the BBC, has written to members of the public accounts committee, telling them she made a mistake when giving evidence to MPs in July.
At that hearing, she told MPs that she had not seen a note detailing plans for pay-offs to Mark Byford, the former deputy director general, and Sharon Baylay, a former BBC marketing boss.
These included a £1m settlement for Mr Byford, and a £390,000 pay-off for Mrs Baylay.
However, she has now written to MPs that she had in fact been “involved in drafting” the key memo.
It comes after Mark Thompson, the former director-general, accused Lord Patten and other senior members of the BBC of systematically misleading parliament over severance deals.
Mr Thompson, who is now chief executive at The New York Times, alleges that Lord Patten and Anthony Fry, a BBC trustee, gave evidence to MPs that was “false”.
In a statement on Thursday, the BBC Trust vehemently denied the claims by Mr Thompson.
In its statement, it said: “We completely disagree with Mark Thompson’s analysis, much of which is unsubstantiated, in particular the suggestion that Lord Patten was given a full and formal briefing on the exact terms of Mark Byford’s departure, which in any event took place before the current chairman’s arrival at the Trust.”
Lord Patten has described Mr Thompson’s claims as “very curious”.
“There’s one aspect of this very long deposition by Mr Thompson which I found very curious, which is the focus on Mark Byford and his pay-off because as anybody who works at the BBC knows that happened before I became chairman of the Trust so it’s slightly difficult to see how I could have been responsible for that,” he told BBC News.