Leveson inquiry: BBC spent £310,000 on investigators from 2005 to 2011

The BBC spent £310,000 on private investigators between 2005 and 2011, director general Mark Thompson has revealed at the Leveson inquiry. Thompson admitted at the inquiry on Monday that the BBC had used the convicted investigator Steve Whittamore and that the corporation has sought to get confidential information from the DVLA concerning the owner of a vehicle. He said he believed there was a "strong public interest justification" for using Whittamore, who pleaded guilty in 2005 to illegally obtaining and disclosing information under the Data Protection Act. The investigator was used by the BBC in 2001 when it was researching whether paedophiles convicted in the UK were able to or getting jobs where they would have access to or contact with children in other countries. At the time the corporation needed to establish whether "a known paedophile" was on a particular flight. Thompson told Lord Justice Leveson the corporation had also used private investigator on one occasion to establish the ownership of a vehicle. Again, Thompson said the journalist involved "genuinely believed and with good reason that he was following someone who was involved … in a serious criminal conspiracy" and this justified the request for confidential information. An internal review of the BBC's use of private investigators found that in the six-and-a-half-year period from 1 January 2005 to 31 July 2011 private investigators were used on 232 occasions, receiving recorded payments of about £310,000. In his written evidence, Thompson said that this amounted to an average of about 35 occasions a year across the whole of the BBC. "Of the 232 occasions, News (including the Nations and Regions) used private investigators on 43 occasions totalling approximately £174,500. These exclude the occasions where the private investigation company was providing a security service," wrote Thompson. Giving evidence on Monday, the director general told Leveson that the "most common use of private investigators is actually to provide security and surveillance services for the BBC, protecting journalists when they are at work". Some £133,000 was spent during the review period on private investigators by BBC Vision, mainly consumer programmes such as Watchdog and Rogue Traders. Often, said Thompson, they would be able to track down a fraudster who used several addresses quicker than a journalist and this was an important part of programme-making, as Watchdog and Rogue Traders would have to give the target of their investigation a legal right to reply to allegations of wrongdoing. Separately, Thompson told Leveson that the BBC rarely sanctioned invasions of privacy for secret filming. Journalists had to provide prima facie evidence there was "a wrongdoing or criminality" and prove there "was no other journalistic means that could be used" to substantiate the story. Secret filming, he said, could not be used as a "production value" to make a programme "seem more exciting, more attractive". It could only be used "as a piece of evidence gathering". He told the inquiry he was opposed to broadcast-style statutory regulation of the print media. "If you simply took the Ofcom code now and threw it over to the papers, I think it would be very constraining of the press. It's horses for courses," Thompson said. "The objective to a statutory framework is not that it is important to lay out an appropriate code for the press, it's more to do with whether or not the independence of the press from government and from other powerful interests could be guaranteed in the long term in a framework which at any point parliament could change. "In my view it is quite desirable in terms of plurality of media in this country that the press are not as regulated and constrained as a broadcast media whose power … and whose reach is broader and more immediate." Leveson also expressed great interest in the BBC's complaints system. Lord Patten, the BBC Trust chairman, who took the stand just 10 minutes before the lunch break, said the complaints system was not as clear to the public as he would like. "I do have an instinct, which is not borne out by a wealth of statisticians' evidence, that we can learn to say sorry quicker," said Patten. The BBC gets more than 1m communications from the public every year, 240,000 of which are complaints. Most complaints are settled through the management's complaints system, with a handful going as far as the trust, which takes internal and external advice on whether to pursue them. Thompson was asked about the controversial incident on Russell Brand's BBC Radio 2 show in late 2008 in which recordings of lewd messages he and Jonathan Ross left on Andrew Sachs's voicemails were broadcast. "That was a programme that which went, in my view, far, far, far beyond the line. It wasn't close to the line, it was far beyond the line," Patten said. • To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email [email protected] or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication". • To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook . • This article was amended on 24 January 2012 to correct the number of communications the BBC receives each year from 240,000 to more than 1m