BBC Scotland has to ring up England to open the blinds

THE BBC is under fire after it emerged Scottish staff have to call an office in England to open or shut their blinds.

news, scotland, orkney, italian, george osbourne, glasgow, chancellor, commonwealth, games, bbcThe BBC have have faced public scrutiny over the money paid to staff [GETTY]

Bosses have outsourced facilities management to a West Midlands-based firm which controls moving electronic shades at BBC Scotland’s Glasgow HQ.

A “centralised help desk”, in Redditch, Worcestershire, then calls back and allocates the job to a member of staff at Pacific Quay.

An insider said: “There is a number you have to phone in England to open or shut the blinds. If you want to take a partition away in a green room, you have to phone the number in England.

“They then phone staff in Scotland who actually carry out the action. It’s ridiculous bureaucracy.”

Critics last night condemned this latest waste of licence fee cash. A spokesman for TaxPayer Scotland said: “This is a thoroughly depressing example of the petty bureaucracy and bizarre rules that ends up wasting licence fee payers’ money.

The disclosure comes after the BBC spent £25million of licence cash last year on staff leaving

“BBC staff should be using the licence fee to create high-quality programming, not wasting their time and our money on phoning up a far-away control centre when it gets too hot in the office. .”

Academic John Robertson, of West of Scotland University, who has previously accused the BBC of “damaging” the independence debate with biased reports, said: “It must be pretty frustrating for people who work there. It just seems ludicrous.”

The disclosure comes after the BBC spent £25million of licence cash last year on staff leaving, including £3.6million going to senior managers.

Also, 232 senior managers still at the BBC received salaries of £100,000-plus, the annual accounts showed.

A separate report by Audience Council Scotland, the BBC Trust’s advisory body, raised a series of questions over the Corporation’s coverage of Scottish affairs.

It said the BBC’s news coverage of Scotland has not changed significantly since devolution in 1999 and “is not able to fully reflect the needs of audiences in contemporary Scotland”. 

A BBC spokesman said it outsourced facilities management “to one provider for the whole of the UK as part of its strategy of getting best value  and investing as much as possible into programme making”.

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