The former BBC presenter Huw Edwards’ guilty plea to charges of making indecent images of children has sent the corporation into damage limitation mode, raising questions about management’s handling of the scandal and the impact on its reputation.
“The BBC is shocked to hear the details which have emerged in court today,” said a spokesperson for the corporation. “There can be no place for such abhorrent behaviour and our thoughts are with all those affected.”
The 62-year-old, the face of the BBC’s coverage of national events including the funeral of the late queen and the coronation of King Charles and a main presenter on BBC One’s News at Ten, admitted to having 41 indecent images of children that had been sent to him at his request by another man on WhatsApp.
They included seven category A images, the most serious, showing abuse including penetrative sexual activity, two of which showed a child aged between about seven and nine.
Edwards, who is facing a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and will be sentenced on 16 September, was the BBC’s highest-paid newsreader, pocketing between £475,000 and £479,000 in the year to 31 March.
He continued to be paid, including receiving a £40,000 pay rise, despite not working for most of that time, having been suspended by the BBC since last July.
Can the BBC claw back Edwards’ pay?
Last year, Barclays scrapped £18m in pay and bonuses for Jes Staley, its former chief executive, after the UK’s financial watchdog ruled he had misled the bank over his relationship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He was also fined £1.8m by the Financial Conduct Authority.
However, one employment law expert said the BBC was unlikely to be able to claw back any of the salary it had paid Edwards since the scandal broke and up until his resignation in April on medical grounds.
“It is typical in financial services to have malus [the opposite of ‘bonus’] and clawback provisions, but that is not typical in other industries,” said the employment lawyer, who asked not to be named. “I suspect they will not have a contractual right to recoup monies that have been paid. The BBC might consider Edwards has been in breach of contractual obligations to them, and look at a breach of contract claim.
“But that would be unusual as the corporation would have to show what financial losses it suffered as a result. Its reputation maybe, but how do you demonstrate an actual monetary loss of that?”
Edwards was the highest-paid BBC newsreader despite only spending three months of the corporation’s financial year to the end of March on-air.
Speaking at the publication of the BBC’s annual report earlier this month, Tim Davie, the director general, said that he was always trying to be “judicious” with the spending of the publicly funded BBC licence fee.
“What you’re trying to do since the onset of that affair [with Edwards] is act proportionately, fairly and navigate this appropriately,” he said. “I think that is what we did. We wouldn’t have wasted money if we weren’t doing the right thing.”
Have BBC bosses mishandled the scandal?
The court heard that Edwards had been involved in an online chat with an adult man on WhatsApp between December 2020 and August 2021 who sent him a total of 377 sexual images.
The pair continued to exchange legal pornographic images until April 2022.
Last May, a family member of a young person attended a BBC building seeking to make a complaint about the presenter, and a day later contacted BBC Audience Services, who referred a complaint to the corporation’s investigations team.
There was no action until July, when the Sun newspaper ran a report about Edwards, the source of which was the same person who had made a complaint to the BBC, which was the first time Davie or any executive directors were made aware of the case.
Three days after the news report Edwards was suspended.
The BBC apologised earlier this year, admitting that it should have acted more quickly.
In an interview Davie subsequently said that the scandal was “clearly damaging” and that there “may well be some learnings from this case on process and protocol” – but stood by his corporate investigation team.
“The BBC is often in the midst of quite painful and difficult affairs and storms, and these are clearly damaging to the BBC,” he said.
Mark Borkowski, a public relations and reputation management expert, said that time and again the corporation had been caught out by an inability to act swiftly, fuelling a crisis as newspapers and social media commentary fan the flames by filling the information void.
“The problem with the BBC is they are not structurally fast enough and quick enough to deal with these situations when they arrive,” he said. “A vacuum is created, they are ponderous and they struggle to pivot. When you have something as critical as their key anchor announcing the queen’s death and king’s coronation and then disappearing mysteriously off screen, this is a problem. The BBC allowed a vacuum for the story to get much bigger; it should have been dealt with.”
The police confirmed on Wednesday that the indecent image charges were not connected to the original complaint raised with the BBC last summer.
Edwards was arrested last November and charged in June, two months after he resigned from the BBC. “If at any point during the period Mr Edwards was employed at the BBC he had been charged, the BBC determined it would act immediately to dismiss him,” said a BBC spokesperson.
What does the outcome mean for Edwards and the BBC?
For Edwards, his personal life and presence as a household name on British television is over, an ignominious end to a 40-year career at the BBC.
The court heard on Wednesday that Edwards may be considered for a “suspended sentence”, meaning he would at least not spend any time in jail, with his mental health problems, “genuine remorse” and previous good character likely to be considered mitigating factors.
For the BBC there is now the question over whether it can, or will, continue to use archive footage of various big political and royal events fronted by Edwards, now that he has pleaded guilty to the charges.
Earlier this week it emerged that the BBC has updated its guidelines on relationships in the workplace, warning staff that using “celebrity status” to influence people to make a decision in your favour is an “abuse of power”.
The corporation’s Managing Personal Relationships at Work policy also gives examples to staff of what to be on the lookout for, including “signs or evidence of potential grooming”.
The document advises employees to raise concerns if they hear about “rumours or evidence of a potential relationship involving an imbalance of power”, “coercive behaviour” or “inappropriate gifts,” and to report them or discuss them with a line manager.
