John Plunkett 

Sacked BBC technology chief wins unfair dismissal case

John Linwood claimed he was made the ‘fall guy’ for the £100m Digital Media Initiative fiasco. By John Plunkett
  
  

John Linwood
The BBC’s former chief technology officer John Linwood, sacked over the £100m DMI fiasco, has won his unfair dismissal claim. Photograph: PR

The BBC’s former chief technology officer John Linwood, who was sacked in the wake of the £100m Digital Media Initiative fiasco, has won his unfair dismissal claim against the corporation.

Linwood took legal action against the BBC after his contract was terminated in July last year following the failure of the DMI technology project which was scrapped by BBC director general, Tony Hall.

Linwood claimed in an employment tribunal in central London earlier this year that he had been made the “fall guy” for its failure and said the project need never have been axed.

The BBC claimed at the tribunal that Linwood was responsible for a “massive waste of public funds” and a “quite shameful flight from responsibility” over the failure of the initiative, which was supposed to make the BBC “tapeless”.

In a verdict handed down on Thursday, it was the tribunal’s “unanimous verdict” that Linwood’s claim of unfair dismissal was “well founded and succeeds”. It said Linwood had contributed “to the extent of 15%” to his own dismissal.

But two other complaints made by Linwood were rejected.

The tribunal said that the BBC was wrong to charge Linwood with gross misconduct and begin disciplinary proceedings against him.

But it said a “reasonable employer … having lost confidence … might reasonably have informed him of this fact in a transparent manner and given him six months contractual notice, on gardening leave”.

A BBC spokesman said: “This was a very difficult set of circumstances for the BBC. We had a major failure of a significant project, and we had lost confidence – as the tribunal acknowledges – in John Linwood. At the time we believed we acted appropriately.

“The tribunal has taken a different view – we are disappointed with the outcome, but nevertheless we will learn lessons from the judgment and we’re grateful to staff who were involved in dealing with a very difficult case.”

The employment tribunal was scathing of the BBC’s disciplinary procedures which followed Linwood’s suspension, describing them as “profoundly substantively and procedurally flawed”.

It described the disciplinary investigation as “wholly inadequate” and “not the actions of a reasonable employer”, at times showing an “apparently cavalier disregard for any of the accepted norms of a fair disciplinary process”.

The tribunal said one of the BBC’s human resources executives responsible, Clare Dyer, may not have read key documents and “appeared to regard the detail and the documents as a tiresome and unduly time-consuming distraction from the task in hand”.

The tribunal’s 66-page ruling reveals in forensic detail the unravelling of the DMI project, which was first undertaken by electronics giant Siemens before being taken in-house.

Such was the size and ambition of the project that one BBC executive compared it to “boiling the ocean”.

But the tribunal said Linwood was not guilty of being overoptimistic about the progress of the scheme, as claimed by the BBC, saying he had been encouraged to “get on with it” by senior BBC managers including the then director general Mark Thompson.

It said the fallout from George Entwistle’s resignation as director general at the height of the Jimmy Savile crisis after just 54 days in the job had “generated particular sensitivities, fears and anxieties from [BBC trustee Anthony] Fry down through the senior executive and senior management about being ‘the fall guy’ left ‘carrying the can’”.

The tribunal said that other BBC executives feared the announcement of the DMI abandonment in May 2013, soon after Hall took over as director general, could lead to another “Entwistle moment”.

The BBC’s then director of operations, Dominic Coles, said in an email to chief creative officer Pat Younge – both have since left the corporation – that it “sounds like a potentially George [Entwistle] moment”.

Younge replied: “Linwood can just spin in the wind for now … Hall is fireproof.”

The tribunal described the email exchange as “quite extraordinarily unattractive” in tone and content, and was symptomatic of a BBC culture of “steering the spotlight of blame in other directions on the part of those who felt themselves to be in danger of association with a sinking ship”.

It said there was a “deeply ingrained cultural expectation within the organisation of sacrificial accountability” for which Linwood had paid the price.

The amount of compensation that will be paid to Linwood, who earned £240,000 a year and received a £140,000 signing-on bonus, will be decided at a later date.

The tribunal concluded that the decision that Linwood should go was taken by a BBC executive board, attended by Hall, on 13 May last year, although it said the minutes of the meeting were inadequate and made no mention of Linwood’s name.

It said management had decided Linwood should go “one way or another”; emails subsequently sent by executives, including the then human resources director Lucy Adams, discussed his dismissal as a foregone conclusion.

The meeting followed a BBC Trust meeting on 8 May in which the trust had expressed “profound concern” at the planned write-off of DMI assets, after which Fry wrote to Hall to ask “who from the executive he considers should be held responsible for the outcome of DMI”.

The tribunal said: “This was tantamount, in the context of what was clearly a very torrid and difficult meeting, to a very vivid instruction to the executive to ‘find the culprit’.”

Later that month, the BBC’s strategy chief James Purnell, wrote: “We need a clear line on [John Linwood], whether he is resigning or being fired and why.” The tribunal said: “It was notable that there was no third option in Purnell’s mind, such as a different disciplinary outcome.”

The BBC ploughed £125.9m into DMI – an attempt to create an integrated digital production and archiving system – before it was scrapped at a net cost of £98.4m.

Its closure was announced on 24 May last year, at the same time as Linwood’s suspension was announced internally after he refused to resign over the issue.

John Tate, the BBC’s then head of policy and strategy, is reported to have told Linwood: “Of course it’s a stitch up, but you must have seen this coming … I hope you’ve got a good lawyer. You’ve got them frightened.”

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