BBC wasted £50,000 last year on travel tickets, cabs and hotel rooms which were never used
Auntie employees missed over 536 cab rides, 838 train journeys and left 63 hotel rooms empty all at license fee payers expense
THE BBC squandered thousands of pounds of licence fee payers money last year on travel tickets, cabs and hotel rooms which it booked but never used.
In the last financial year more than £50,000 was spent on travel for Auntie staff where the seats remained empty and almost £10,000 on hotel rooms that never saw a guest.
The total included 536 taxi journeys that were booked where the cabbie turned up to collect somebody who didn't show up.
These wasted taxi bookings set the Corporation back £9,185, an average of £17 per booking.
The BBC said that cancelled taxis account for less than one percent of all taxi bookings made by the broadcaster.
There were also 838 train tickets costing a total of £42,997 where the BBC employed failed to make the journey.
Travel bosses at the BBC said it has an automatic system to claim back the cost of unused rail ticket but that it cannot get its money back on “advance” tickets, which are cheaper but also non-refundable.
In addition, there were 63 hotel bookings costing £6,886 where the room went unused because the BBC employee failed to show up.
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The BBC also said 317 air plane tickets went unused but that the Corporation has a flight provider that automatically refunds the cost of journeys if it sees on its computerised system that the trip was not taken.
Jonathan Isaby, Chief Executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: "It is crucial that the BBC does everything possible to keep costs down and keep these ghost journeys to an absolute minimum.
“Every pound wasted on an empty cab is a pound away from quality programming."
A spokesman for the BBC said: “Booking in advance often ensures best value for money, but as a major broadcaster and live news organisation there are inevitably a few occasions, like breaking news, where plans change at the last minute.
“Rigorous guidelines make sure the cheapest and most appropriate method of travel is used and refund arrangements mean cancellations account for 0.001 percent of all bookings. More than a third of all taxis are to get guests to and from shows.”
Earlier this month the BBC admitted it frequently “doubled up” and sent too many reporters to cover the same news event due to poor communication between departments.
The Corporation sent 17 staff to Brussels to cover David Cameron’s post-Brexit dinner with European leaders and had at least five reporters covering the terror attack in Nice.
Jonathan Munro, the BBC’s head of news gathering, said that “the sheer numbers we deploy on events” needed to be looked at.
Commenting on the summit staffing he said: “It’s hard to argue that they were all generating distinctive content – it was a summit after all, taking place in one building, over a few hours; not a few days.”
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