Channel 4 boss weighs in on duty of care debate amid BBC presenter allegations

Channel 4 chief executive Alex Mahon said broadcasters needed to ensure procedures were in place that would quickly flag up issues such as the allegations facing the BBC about an unnamed presenter. The BBC presenter has been facing allegations they paid a teenager for sexually explicit photos, amid a host of new claims, while the corporation comes under fire for its handling of initial complaints from the young person’s family. BBC director-general Tim Davie has since ordered a review to ‘assess how some complaints are red-flagged up the organisation’. During the annual report press briefing on Wednesday, Channel 4 boss Ms Mahon was asked if the BBC had a duty of care to name the presenter in question, to which she replied: ‘It doesn’t look easy does it.’ She added: ‘The key thing for us is to make sure that our procedures would flag something like that to us. ‘We have a ‘speak up’ procedure that is on every call sheet that goes out on every production, and those instances are described to us as senior management, to me, within 24 hours, if something comes in. ‘We’ve got our own internal HR processes, which flag in a similar way and then we’ve got viewer enquiries. ‘We get an email every day with a summary of what’s coming through viewer enquiries and there’s an escalation process to pass them to HR if something of that nature comes in. ‘So as confident as I can be that it would have been escalated to me … of course, the detail is in what exactly makes that complaint and what procedures you go through. ‘I think the key thing is to make sure that we would have been aware of it.’ The BBC has produced a timeline of events in relation to the allegations, which confirm that a family member of the young person first complained when they attended a BBC building on May 18. On May 19, a family member contacted BBC Audience Services and the details of the complaint were referred to the BBC’s Corporate Investigations Team (CIT), which assessed that the claims did not include an allegation of criminality but nonetheless merited further investigation. The BBC said two subsequent attempts to contact the complainant via phone and email were unsuccessful and while the CIT was due to return to the matter in the coming weeks, no additional bids to contact the complainant were made after June 6. The case remained open throughout, the BBC previously said. The Sun first contacted the BBC about the allegations it was due to publish on July 6, which was the first time it is said Mr Davie or any executive directors at the BBC were aware of the case. It was also the first time the unnamed presenter was spoken to about it by a senior manager. The claims made by The Sun last week contained new allegations which were different from the matters being considered by the CIT, the broadcaster said. The young person told BBC News via a lawyer on Monday that nothing inappropriate or unlawful had happened with the unnamed presenter and the allegations were ‘rubbish’. It comes amid a host of fresh allegations against the same unnamed BBC presenter, including a 23-year-old person who claims the star broke lockdown rules to meet them during the pandemic in February 2021.