The Financial Times, in an editorial, sets out what it believes the BBC should do, in order to rebuild public confidence:

Reviving the BBC after the scandals
UK broadcaster’s future lies ultimately in its own hands
Wednesday January 29, 2014

Since Tony Hall took over at the BBC last year, the director-general has been on a mission to refocus the broadcaster’s activities.

Time has been called – in word if not yet always in deed – on the empire-building that characterised the reign of his predecessor-but-one, Mark Thompson. Lord Hall has stressed the core task of making programmes that rivals cannot and distributing more content over commercial platforms rather than the BBC building its own.

Some excesses and inefficiencies have been curbed. The vast thickets of incomprehensibly titled middle managers have been pruned a little. Reporting lines have been shortened and the craze for bumper pay packages curbed.

Tuesday’s report from the National Audit Office into the failure of the BBC’s £100m “digital media initiative” is a reminder of why this commonsense revolution is both necessary and incomplete.

What began as a sensible IT project aimed at modernising production and archive systems for programme makers ended up as an exercise in comic mismanagement. The BBC pumped about £100m of licence-payers’ money into a project for little real benefit. So out of touch was the board that Mr Thompson even turned up in parliament to declare the system operational just as the project was collapsing in disarray.

The NAO takes a harder line than a previous report from PwC, commissioned by the BBC’s governing trust, whose grip is also questioned. Sadly, the trustees merit the criticism in the NAO report. As the group charged with ensuring licence-fee payers receive value for money, they seem to have fallen asleep on the job.

Repairing the damage to the BBC’s reputation caused by this and other scandals is not the work of a moment. But there is little time to lose. If, when the BBC’s royal charter comes up for renewal in two years’ time, the corporation is to continue to receive the proceeds of a tax on television usage that raises nearly £4bn a year, it must do a better job of explaining what it is for and of husbanding its resources.

The director-general is ordering and shrinking the still swollen ranks of management. More must be done. Lord Hall must meet his promise to rebalance the ratio of programme makers to penpushers.

Bringing in outside blood at the top is sensible, given the inward-looking “lifer” culture in the senior ranks, which helped smooth the excessive pay-offs to departing managers. Hopefully the new non-executives Lord Hall is bringing on board will bring a critical and detached eye to decision-making. The BBC needs more of both.

Running the BBC requires diplomatic as well as managerial skill. This is because of the unique position the broadcaster occupies in public life: publicly funded yet independent of political control.

There should be proper accountability for public money, but this should not come at the cost of making the BBC risk-averse in its approach to innovation. The corporation has been at the forefront of driving new ideas and technologies, such as iPlayer, which have benefited viewers and dragged the private sector in its wake. It should not be forgotten that many of the glitches identified by the NAO plague the private sector as well as the corporation when it comes to IT projects.

Nor should oversight be allowed to turn into some sort of shadow political control. It is troubling that BBC bosses have been called to parliament 17 times in the past year to explain themselves.

Yet the means to avoid such pitfalls must lie in the BBC’s own hands. The top brass must show that it can manage. Governance needs to improve. Much, then, is hanging on Lord Hall’s project of renewal. Those who value the BBC’s contribution to national life can only hope that he succeeds.