BBC spends £220,000 training staff to use iPhones

The BBC has forked out over £220,000 on training staff to use an iPhone, a Freedom of Information request has revealed.

In the last three years, the corporation has taught 783 employees to use the phones to capture and edit video, at a cost of over £280 each - a waste of money, according to Andy Silvester, campaign manager for the Taxpayers' Alliance.

"It's absolutely incredible that the BBC has run up a bill of this size teaching staff to use mainstream technology," he says. "School teachers across the country know full well that teenagers can master an iPhone, so professionals should be able to."

According to MailOnline, the BBC has been bulk-buying the devices themselves, too, snapping up 266 iPhones, 427 iPads and 815 MacBooks between January 2012 and October 2013 at a cost of up to £2.5 million.

However, the BBC points out that it actually spent less on training last year, and defends its actions as representing good value for money.

"We are harnessing new technologies to train our journalists to use their phones to film, edit and transmit news stories on mobile phones," a spokeswoman told the Mail.

"This not only keeps costs down for the licence fee payer, but also increases our ability to work in remote places where there are no other means of broadcasting."

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The BBC has come under a lot of fire recently for mismanaging technology projects. Last year, it wrote off £100 million after scrapping its Digital Media Initiative (DMI), aimed at linking new digital production tools with a central digital archive.

It's also been accused of wasting licence-payers' money in other ways. In April, for example, it was criticised for spending £12 million on sending 272 staff to Brazil for the World Cup - twice as many as ITV. And last year it was accused of an even bigger waste of money, with the National Audit Office saying the BBC had "breached its own already generous policies on severance payments too often and without good reason."

BBC spending is under the spotlight more than ever right now, with the corporation's Royal Charter up for renewal next year. Senior Conservatives are believed to be pushing for a cut to the licence fee, in what many have seen as a step towards privatisation.

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