BBC suspends all competitions

The BBC has announced that all competitions running across all its services are to be suspended as part of an "action plan" to address breaches of editorial standards.

Mark Thompson, the corporation's director general, delivered a report to the BBC Trust today after an audit of output since January 2005 uncovered "further serious breaches of editorial standards" in BBC programming.

The breaches uncovered by the audit and reported to the Trust were: Comic Relief - in March, where a member of the production team posed as a caller in an on-air competition; TMi - in September 2006, a member of the production team again posed as a winning caller; Sport Relief - in July 2006, a contingency plan was put into effect in which a production team member posed as a caller; further, the competition would have been impossible to run as it was described on air; Children in Need - in November 2005, the name of a fictitious winner was read out on air; The Liz Kershaw Show - multiple times in 2005 and 2006, a competition was presented as-live on a pre-recorded show; White Label - a winner was announced on the World Service despite no winning entries actually having been submitted.

The incidents were reported to the Trust in addition to the previous high-profile Blue Peter phone-in scandal and a recent incident in which a misleadingly-edited cut of an RDF-produced documentary about Her Majesty The Queen was shown to journalists by BBC One controller Peter Fincham.

The Trust said it was "deeply concerned that significant failures of control and compliance within the BBC" had "compromised the BBC's values of accuracy and honesty."

"We are not ready to draw a line under the editorial failures reported to us today," the Trust added.

In a statement, Thompson said: "Nothing matters more than trust and fair dealing with our audiences. The vast majority of the 400,000 hours of BBC output each year, on television, radio and online, is accurate, fair and complies with our stringent editorial standards."

Thompson also made a broadcast to BBC staff today in which he said: "Our values and our editorial guidelines must take precedence over everything else. There is no excuse for deception. I know the idea of deceiving the public would simply never occur to most people in the BBC. We have to regard deception as a very grave breach of discipline which will normally lead to dismissal. If you have a choice between deception and a programme going off air, let the programme go. It is far better to accept a production problem and make a clean breast to the public than to deceive."