Help stop the BBC cutting off complaints — consultation closes today

Since the beginning of March this year the BBC Trust - which oversees the BBC's complaints process - has offered a public consultation on its website over its proposed changes to the Corporation's complaints framework.

In July last year the Trust undertook a review of its own practices, identifying ways of potentially improving its complaints system including more clarity, fairness, efficiency and timeliness of the process. Full Fact supports all of these sentiments.

However, Full Fact believes some of the proposed changes in the consulation will do damage, not good, to the BBC's complaints process.

In order to focus BBC resources on current complaints given limited resources, the BBC Trust proposes to:

"[Focus] resources on current complaints by normally accepting complaints about online content within 30 working days of the date stamp on the page (but BBC management has discretion to take a complaint outside the timeframe if there is good reason to do so). There will be a right of appeal by the Trust so that there is a way of ensuring that complaints have not been closed down in error" [emphasis added]

Full Fact thinks this is a terrible suggestion and said as much in the consultation:

"The priority in any content complaints procedure must be serving your audience and where there is still an audience for a piece of content, they will expecting the BBC to continue to meet its usual high standards.

Inaccurate information published with the authority of the BBC is just as damaging whether the inaccuracy is discovered straight away or much later, particularly as BBC news coverage tends to be quoted as authoritative.

We appreciate the need to constrain the burden of the complaints process and can see that answering a complaint about bias in a previous election would be fruitless. Answering a complaint about accuracy in content that is still read is not.

We note that libel law current holds that libels in old content online remain current. We further note that the PCC, which has a two month limit on complaints about articles published on paper, also views online articles that are still online as continually republished and therefore applies no such limit.

The BBC would be clearly on the wrong side a broad consensus if it went down this route, certainly in respect of the accuracy complaints which concern us. Whether or not the arguments above are accepted, and we reserve the right to challenge a decision to go ahead with this policy, one month is clearly too short a time period."

You can help stop this suggestion before it starts. It only takes a few minutes to complete the consultation (Q4) before it closes tomorrow.

As well as this, the BBC propose to implement a time limit on when they must reply to complaints by.

Again, while Full Fact supports the BBC's aims at speeding up its own process, we don't think a flat time limit is the answer, as we said in our evidence to the Editors' Code of Practice review. Election campaigns and the passage of Bills in Parliament demand much smaller time limits so inaccuracies can be dealt with before major changes happen.

Here again you can help by complete the online consultation (Q3c) in a few minutes before the end of the day tomorrow.