Q61 Mr Bacon: Was it not the case that there was a series of projects which effectively fell through during these years?
Mr Thompson: The BBC started building on this site almost immediately and the White City 1 building was opened in the late 1980s.
Mr Smith The White City 1 building was designed in a previous era of management to move people out of the West End from the expensive Langham Island site, which is now the Langham Hotel, to West 12 where land, property and other costs were cheaper. So the building went up more or less straight away.
Q62 Mr Bacon: An awful lot of it was still not used for many, many years and I am just asking whether that was a good use of public money?
Mr Smith: Again prior to any of our involvement, various schemes were put forward to develop the spare land which was there, in addition to the building which did go up and none of them really offered attractive value for money at the time.
Q63 Mr Bacon: When you say various schemes were put forward, by whom were they put forward?
Mr Smith: By the BBC's management of the day.
Q64 Mr Bacon: So the BBC's management of the day got hold of this land.
Mr Smith: Yes; built on it.
Q65 Mr Bacon: Then the BBC's management of the day put forward various schemes, but none of them was felt to be suitable.
Mr Smith: The BBC's management of the day built one building.
Q66 Mr Bacon: Is it not the case that if this had been more commercial, or if you had had more autonomy perhaps, something would have been done more quickly rather than sitting on a valuable asset of land for so many years?
Mr Thompson: May I ask you to turn to page 8 of the Report and look at the two diagrams showing the property? Frankly, because of the foresight of the BBC in 1985, we now have the opportunity of a much, much simpler, consolidated, more efficient portfolio with a cluster of buildings. They are all on one site. They are shown as three dark blue blobs, but they are all on one site at White City and television centre, rather than what you see in West London above: Union Threshold Centre, Woodlands, Maida Vale and so on. The ability to do this, which will drive efficiency and cost reductions for the BBC over decades, was made possible because the BBC secured this land when it did.
Q67 Mr Bacon: While on this subject, I notice that Bush House has gone from the 2008 map below and the 2000 map already says that some of Bush House is sub-let. Is the idea that all of Bush House will disappear from BBC use?
Mr Thompson: That is correct.
Q68 Mr Bacon: So where will the World Service be instead?
Mr Thompson: The World Service and the external services will be relocated to the redeveloped Broadcasting House.
Q69 Mr Bacon: In paragraph 50 it says that although you " . . . made ad hoc use of some of the space in the Media Centre" you avoided using the unoccupied space so that you could claim a rates rebate. To go back to your first sentence about each stage of this process saving the public money, it beggars belief that that could be true, if you have so much extra space that you could not use it, that you actually roped it off in order to make sure you got a rates rebate.
Mr Thompson: Firstly, the position as of today is that vacant space is 6%.
Q70 Mr Bacon: Actually you have triggered off my next question and I shall move straight onto it. You said that it had gone from 22% down to 15% down to 6%.
Mr Thompson: Yes.