Adjudication of the Ofcom Content Sanctions Committee – British Broadcasting Corporation, in respect of its service BBC London 94.9FM
| Published date | 18 December 2008 |
| Issuer | Office of Communications |
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Ofcom Content Sanctions Committee
Consideration of
sanctions against
The British Broadcasting Corporation (“the BBC”) in
respect of its service BBC London 94.9FM (“BBC
London”).
For Breaches of the Ofcom Broadcasting Code (“the
Code”) of:
Rule 2.11: “Competitions should be conducted fairly,
prizes should be described accurately and rules should
be clear and appropriately made known.”
Relating to the following conduct:
The inclusion of competitions in five pre-recorded
editions of Tony Blackburn broadcast ‘as live’.
Listeners to the broadcasts were invited to
participate in the competitions when they had no
chance of entering or winning.
Between December 2005 and December 2006
Decision To impose a financial penalty (payable to HM
Paymaster General) of £25,000 and, in addition, to
require the BBC to broadcast a statement of
Ofcom’s findings on its service BBC London, on a
specified occasion, at a time, and in a form to be
determined by Ofcom.
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Summary
1.1 For the reasons set out in full in the Decision, under powers delegated from
the Ofcom Board to Ofcom’s Content Sanctions Committee (“the
Committee”), the Committee decided to impose statutory sanctions on the
BBC in light of the serious nature of its breaches of the Ofcom Broadcasting
Code (“the Code”).
1.2 This adjudication under the Code relates to the broadcast of Tony Blackburn
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on BBC London on 1, 8, and 15 April 2006, and on two further unspecified
dates between December 2005 and December 2006.
1.3 Tony Blackburn was a weekly radio show, usually transmitted live, broadcast
on Saturday on BBC London between 12:00 and 14:00. The programme
regularly featured an invitation to listeners to answer a question posed by the
presenter. On average two questions were asked per programme. Listeners
who correctly answered the questions won a “goody bag”, which usually
consisted of a DVD or CD.
1.4 Five editions of Tony Blackburn were pre-recorded and broadcast ‘as live’
between December 2005 and December 2006. Each of these programmes
included invitations to listeners to enter competitions and, later in the
programmes, the competitions themselves. No information was given to
listeners during the programmes about how entrants would be selected to
participate in the competitions. As all five programmes had been pre-
recorded, listeners to the broadcasts had no chance of entering or winning
the competitions.
1.5 Listeners to these programmes were invited to enter the competitions via
telephone using a BBC London phone-in number (a London ‘0207’
‘geographical’ number).
1.6 On the five occasions when the programme was pre-recorded, the production
team selected listeners who had previously contacted the programme to be
competition entrants.
1.7 Reacting to press interest in the mishandling of the use of premium rate
services
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(“PRS”) in competitions and voting by a number of broadcasters,
including the BBC, the BBC carried out two separate “trawls” of its output.
The first was launched on 7 March 2007 and looked into the BBC’s use of
PRS. The second, launched on 12 July 2007, was much wider in scope, to
include any audience deception.
1.8 On 17 July 2007, the BBC issued a statement admitting serious breaches of
its editorial standards in a number of its programmes. As a result, an Ofcom
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The programme title Tony Blackburn is distinguished from the presenter h imself by the use
of italics throughout this Adjudication.
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Premium rate services are services that offer some f orm of information or entertainm ent and
which are charged to consumers’ telephone bills. Pre mium r ate calls cost between 10p an d
£1.50 per call, or per minute, from a BT landline (charges fr om other networks may vary).
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