Restoring trust, one performance measure at a time

When it comes to the BBC, putting sense on the radio is a lot easier than putting it into practice. Here is future BBC Director-General, and former Radio 4 controller, Helen Boaden posting at the BBC Editors blog on restoring trust in the Beeb this year. She begins with a little reminder of her radio days:

…I commissioned the Reith Lectures from the philosopher and ethicist, Onora O’Neill. She took as her subject the issue of trust and argued that the so-called “revolution in accountability” of the last decade, with its ever increasing micro-performance measures, had singularly failed. This revolution had not reduced mistrust in institutions. Rather, she argued, it had actually reinforced a culture of suspicion and disappointment.

So far, so convincing. And hang on! Here is Onora in her third lecture, Called To Account:

In theory the new culture of accountability and audit makes professionals and institutions more accountable to the public. This is supposedly done by publishing targets and levels of attainment in league tables, and by establishing complaint procedures by which members of the public can seek redress for any professional or institutional failures.

But underlying this ostensible aim of accountability to the public the real requirements are for accountability to regulators, to departments of government, to funders, to legal standards. The new forms of accountability impose forms of central control-quite often indeed a range of different and mutually inconsistent forms of central control.

Some of the new modes of public accountability are in fact internally incoherent.

So are we on the brink of some heretical management-led challenge to performance culture at the Beeb?

Back to Helen…

2008 will be an important year for rebuilding a battered trust with our audiences. Some of it will include performance measures: everyone involved with content must do the Safeguarding Trust course for example and the BBC Trust will be counting to make sure they do.

(Of course, it’s much worse in education – but I didn’t say that.)