Does the BBC respect its whistleblowers?

The integrity of Rosie Millard

It’s been a year since the then Chair of BBC Children in Need, Rosie Millard, raised concerns about grants given to LGBT Youth Scotland. Her story encapsulates the dismal history of the BBC’s response to scandals involving male aggression and male misbehaviour, including its appalling record on covering gender identity and women’s rights: driven not by corporate principle and integrity, but by individualist fears over career progression, reputational damage and personal safety.

We know there are honest journalists working there still - and we need the BBC to act with principle now, more than ever. But Rosie Millard’s experience is very revealing about BBC complacency and the relative power of the whistleblower.

In a gripping conversation on the Heretics podcast with Andrew Gold, Rosie recalls the moment she spotted a worrying report about LGBTYS and rang the Chief Executive of Children in Need with an urgent question: ‘Do we fund this charity? He replied ‘I don’t know…let me find out, obviously if this involves any harm to any children we wouldn’t.’

In the interim, Millard did some research of her own and to her horror “it felt like the worst possible thing that a Chair of a beloved children’s charity could feel. When you see that your charity is funding a place that harboured a paedophile I couldn’t actually believe it. I was on a train and when I got off I immediately rang the chief executive and he said ‘look, I’m at a Bruce Springsteen concert in Ireland, I really can’t focus on this now’’.

Millard, a journalist of 35 years experience, saw immediate dangers, including the risk of damage to children and young people in Scotland and a situation that could bring ‘potential existential ruin’ to BBC Children in Need. The legacy of LGBTYS was deeply concerning - a then chief executive, James Rennie, had been imprisoned for abusing a baby, there were historical allegations of sexual abuse which hadn’t yet been cleared, and, more recently, another convicted paedophile, Andrew Easton, had been involved in creating the charity’s guidance material for primary schools. LGBTYS had 40 schools signed up to a charter that ‘effectively promoted trans policies and concepts to small children who were learning to read’. The concepts included the promotion of breast binding, mixed sex dormitories on school trips and said that ‘puberty blockers were OK’.

Ms Millard called an emergency Children in Need board meeting where she proposed they stop the funding straight away, protecting children as well as having the benefit of protecting the BBC from a damaging association and negative publicity. But the board dragged its feet for months - despite the Cass Review published in April 2024 which, amongst other guidance, warned of the risks of puberty blockers.

The stress and frustration felt by Rosie Millard is evident. ‘To see the whole legacy and future of Children in Need threatened by this association was just awful. The whole structure by which the BBC does a lot of fundraising depends on reputation - we are the BBC, we are Pudsey Bear, we are trustworthy - would be fatally undermined by the money going to a charity which is harmful to children. What was so astonishing was the whole board couldn’t see that, they were too frightened, they were too cowardly.’

At one point, the chief executive of Children in Need, Simon Antrobus, told Millard he was concerned for his own safety. She quotes “He said, ‘I need safety cameras, I’m worried about death threats.’ He was willing to carry on the funding because he was worried about his own skin. He wasn’t worried about confused and abused children in Scotland”.

Antrobus’ comment is also revealing because for years BBC coverage of sex/gender issues has reported as though trans people are the most vulnerable in society and ‘toxicity comes from both sides’. Yet it’s clear senior people at the BBC know which group poses the violent threat.

The pressure on Millard continued for months. “It overwhelmed my life, the lives of my husband, my ex-husband, my four children. I could not think about or do anything else other than think about why are we funding them..I got into all sorts of group chats with horrified parents across Scotland, (the Scottish Government funds LGBTYS to around £2 million a year), so this was overwhelming and all-encompassing, and still the board would not move, would not finish the grant.”

Millard spent time abroad with a dying friend, the house had no internet, so each day she drove to an hotel so she could join board meetings. The friend, now dead, “was a great journalist, he was a Daily Mail hack and he said to me this is a great story, you should leak it”. But Millard was hoping to sort out the mess without damaging the reputation of Children in Need or the BBC.

The board decided to commission a report, which took 3 months, and members visited the headquarters of LGBYS in Glasgow, where everyone was spruced up as if for an Ofsted inspection. ‘Nothing to see here’ was the feedback - and when Millard asked about the allegation of grooming leading to the drugging and rape of a teenage boy, the response was ‘Oh he’s always had it in for them’. Millard: ”this was a teenager who joined a youth group set up for young people who might want support to express their sexuality, who got taken to a club in Glasgow where he was raped by adult men. This was under the aegis of a children’s charity funded by BBC Children in Need”.

Eventually the intransigence of the board and the pressure was such that Millard decided to speak to the papers. When she told the board she had done so, only at that point, the very last day before the piece was published (by Janice Turner in The Times), BBC Children in Need pulled the money. Millard says “because they were so worried about press coverage. That was more important than the abuse and the pain and peril of children. So, figure that out.”

This raises the perennial question about why the BBC takes so long to tackle dubious associations and allegations of abuse. There are echoes of Savile and Huw Edwards, and Andrew Gold asks whether she thinks the BBC is ‘arrogant’. “No, I felt the board were uneasy this sort of politics had entered the terrain of BBC Children in Need. They like being on the board, but they don’t want any trouble; so actually just to quickly pay the rest of the grant and be quiet was just easier. Half the board is BBC executives, the rest is people with expertise in tax, law, charity work, all committed to doing the right thing.

“I said to them all, would you be happy sending your own children to a primary school that had signed up to the LGBTYS Youth Charter? And all of them said ..well, actually, no. But on the face of it they were so terrified of being seen to upset the trans lobby, which is very powerful; the BBC is desperate not to be ruffling those feathers that it didn’t have the courage to say ‘We are stopping this funding’. Even though they knew it was wrong; they said let’s quickly just finish the grant (£466,000 over 12 years) and then we won’t be seen to have stopped it. And I just said no, we have to stand up for children.”

The pushback continued. Millard states the chief executive Simon Antrobus had concerns about the reaction of some 100 BBC staff at the BBC Salford base of Children in Need, allegedly saying ‘This decision won’t go down well with the troops because a lot of young people work for Children in Need.’ Millard thought to herself “I don’t care, that’s why you’re paid £150K a year”. Millard also remarks that Antrobus more than once parroted to her the well-debunked trans suicide myth ‘children across Scotland will be committing suicide’.

She asked for a review because of concerns that the executive, paid to know how the money is being spent, wasn’t fully aware of the detail of what was being funded, and it emerged BBC Children in Need funded 7 trans charities, though no others raised alarm bells like LGBTY Scotland.

Then in October she turned up at a board meeting to discover she was to be thrown under the bus for speaking to the papers. Millard quotes the board saying “we still want you to chair, but you must sign on the dotted line never to speak to a paper again”. Realising they had no faith in her, Millard resigned.

The Director General, Tim Davie, asked her to stay on and when she refused said ‘we’ve got a resignation letter for you’ which Millard says didn’t include the actual resignation reason, it was essentially “Rosie’s going to go and spend more time with her family….I said no, this is not true!” The press officer told her the resignation letter would be going to a few charity newsletters; their strategy, rather than the vaunted transparency the BBC claims to practice, seemed to be to play the story down.

Rosie Millard then decided to go public on her resignation, which meant it did then become a big media story. After many months of stress and concern she decided to blow the whistle “Because the governance of these charities is really important. People have to know if they’re giving money to charities that the money is spent wisely and properly. People love Pudsey …If you’re in charge of an agency (CinNeed) that funds other charities, do you have integrity and authority? … where is the money going and what’s the money being spent on?

And now? “I just hope that the executive is more connected to what that actual charity is doing and also hope that the welfare and health and safety of children is uppermost in every single penny spent by BBC Children in Need. Because it hasn’t been.”

For any employee or former employee who’s tried to whistleblow at the BBC, bells will be ringing all over the place.

Complacency - the over-arching attitude. Foot-dragging? of course. Reviews, investigations, reports, working groups, listening sessions. The tedious potential for activists in Salford to kick off. Very senior execs refusing to make the decisions they’re paid (a lot) to make, and the attendant fear of having their name attached to an unpopular action. An insulting, eye-rolling disrespect for those who complain, righteously but repeatedly, about BBC failings. The extreme aversion to challenging gender identity activists and powerful men. The inevitability that compliant women progress and the squeaky wheel will always get the grease.

The next few weeks will tell us whether the BBC has changed. There are principled people at senior levels, but there are plenty who make decisions out of fear, self-aggrandisement or laziness. We need those with integrity to be in charge of the response to the Supreme Court ruling.

Listen to the whole interview: Rosie Millard talks to Andrew Gold on Heretics

————————————————————————————————————