This is taken from the Guardian:

Dyke's 'posh lady' attacks BBC trust

by Chris Tryhorn and Ben Dowell
Wednesday April 12, 2006

A former BBC governor has forecast that the corporation's new regulatory trust will be no more effective than the board of governors it replaces.

Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, a former intelligence chief who served on the BBC's board of governors from 1997 to 2004, predicted the trust would be "as likely to suffer from schizophrenia as the existing governors".

One of the "posh ladies" blamed by former BBC director general Greg Dyke for his demise, Dame Pauline said the trust would be no better than the governors had been at dealing with the potential conflict between its governing and regulatory roles.

"The new structures created to govern and regulate the corporation will be elaborate and complex and a great deal more expensive to run than the present set-up. Will they be more effective and will they result in better programmes? This is a good deal less clear," she said, writing in Television, the magazine of the Royal Television Society.

She added: "The white paper ... creates in the trust, having both governance and regulatory duties, a body as likely to suffer from schizophrenia as the existing governors."

It was likely the interests of licence fee payers would clash with those of the BBC's competitors, said Dame Pauline, arguing "the whole point of the BBC is to distort the market".

The public wanted a strong public service broadcaster that would continue to affect competitors adversely, she said.

And she predicted the "real battle" would be joined over the BBC's next royal charter, which would start in 2017, and doubted that the trust would survive as long as the governors.

She said any future clashes between the BBC Trust and its executive board would undermine the credibility of governance at the corporation and the quality of its output.

"Will some of the more innovative stuff now be hobbled?" she asked.

"And when interests diverge, what happens to relations between the two tiers of BBC governance? Conflict between them would certainly undermine the credibility of governance as a whole without necessarily satisfactorily resolving a regulatory issue," said Dame Pauline.

The BBC Trust is the body set up in the government's white paper on the future of the BBC to succeed the governors.

It will issue licences to the board for running BBC services, which will have to conform to guidelines ensuring their originality and quality.

It will need to apply a "public value test" to new services, while the media watchdog, Ofcom, will provide market impact assessments.