BBC’S £300k booking waste

THE BBC has wasted more than £300,000 of licence fee payers’ money on taxi, train and hotel bookings that were never used.

During the last five years the Corporation has admitted that 4,684 train tickets, 565 hotel rooms and 1,226 taxi trips were all cancelled – and the broadcaster was unable to claim a refund.

Aborted train trips cost the BBC £233,000, cancelled hotel bookings added another £61,500 to the bill, while abandoned taxi journeys added up to £18,000.

It means that, over the five years, the BBC wasted more than £5,000 every month on transport and accommodation that nobody ended up using. Each unused cab cost the public broadcaster an average of £15, cancelled train tickets cost around £50 each, while the booked hotel rooms that were left empty cost an average of £100 each.

The BBC says it tries to keep cancelled bookings to a minimum and for unused flight tickets its booking agent, American Express, automatically claims the money back.

For taxis it says all BBC fares have an initial 10-minute waiting time built into the charge and that this is normally enough time to allow late-running passengers to still get their cab. On train fares it says many tickets not collected from machines are refunded but they cannot claim back on cheaper “advance” fares, as these are non-refundable.

Due to the pandemic and lockdowns there was much less travel in the last year and the BBC’S bill for wasted travel and accommodation was significantly reduced, although it still totalled almost £10,000.

Andrew Allison, chief executive of the Freedom Association, said: “The BBC has to prove to all licence fee payers that it is delivering value for money – even more so now it is charging over-75s for a licence fee. This is yet another story about how it is not. The answer is simple for the Corporation: become a private company that earns revenue on the amount of people who wish to subscribe to its services and these stories will go away.the telly tax has to go.”

A BBC spokeswoman said: “As a 24-hour international broadcaster, a significant amount of travel is inevitable and the nature of our work means plans can often change at short notice.

“We are always mindful of costs, we have strict policies in place to help keep expenses to a minimum and, wherever possible, we will recover the costs.”