BBC accused of off-shoring deception
BECTU has accused the BBC of misleading Parliament over details of its plan to move finance jobs to India.
The union has publicised a major discrepancy between information given to staff about the deal, and submissions made by top Corporation executives to the Public Accounts Committee.
“Parliament appears to have been mislead over whether the XANSA bid was the lowest”
At a hearing on November 29th in the House of Commons the BBC claimed that a bid by Xansa, the company which was awarded a contract involving hundreds of jobs going to India, was the cheapest that had been received.
This contradicted a meeting only a day earlier, where the BBC had told BECTU officials that Xansa's bid was not the cheapest.
MPs also heard that all bidders for the BBC's finance contract, currently in the hands of Media Accounting Services (Medas), had included an element of offshore work in their proposals.
However, at the meeting with union representatives, the BBC said that the bid from Medas itself did not include any element of off-shoring, although some jobs would have been moved from London to Swansea if the company had won renewal of its contract.
BECTU Official Luke Crawley said: "The BBC is contradicting itself in its stories about the cost of off-shoring jobs. If what it says to the staff and BECTU is true then the BBC is spending more public money to send jobs overseas than it would cost to keep those jobs in the UK. This also raises a question about why the public purse should fund the resulting unemployment of this exercise.
"Parliament appears to have been mislead over whether the XANSA bid was the lowest bid for the outsourced work", he continued. "BECTU is calling on the BBC to own up and tell the truth, either it has lied to Parliament or it has lied to the staff and Unions about the contract."
The BBC's responded by saying that the winning bid from Xansa included a number of one-off costs that made "one of the other bidders marginally cheaper than the Xansa bid". BECTU has taken this as confirmation that, over the life of the 10-year contract, another bidder, thought to be Medas, would have been cheaper than Xansa.