The Countryside Alliance has written to the Culture Secretary following complaints about the BBC's "anti-rural bias".
The rural organisation believes the BBC "lacks independent oversight of the Editorial Guidelines", with complaints "poorly handled" over its "evident anti-rural bias".
It has now written to the newly-appointed Culture Secretary, Jeremy Wright to offer some "workable solutions".
The BBC Editorial Guidelines includes rules on impartiality that govern presenters’ off-air activity, summarised in a letter to the Countryside Alliance by Paul Smith, Head of Editorial Standards and Commissioning Policy, BBC Radio as: “Any BBC presenter, freelance or otherwise, needs to consider how their outside comments might impact on the work they do for the BBC”.
There are no such rules in the Ofcom Code, which was made the BBC’s external regulator last year. This means no one is empowered to judge whether the BBC is handling their presenters’ off-air activity.
In a statement, the Countryside Alliance said: "The Alliance believes this is why we are seeing a seemingly random application of these rules by the BBC in which some presenters are arbitrarily and immediately censured while others are left to operate with impunity,"
"The Alliance recognises that this is not a time at which the Government is likely to spend energy overhauling the governance of the BBC, but this is a matter of serious import to rural communities and we will not allow it to drift until the mid-term Charter review in 2022.
"As such we have written to the Culture Secretary outlining some simple solutions that would instantly improve the situation."
'Promote own agendas'
The Countryside Alliance has instructed Ofcom to undertake an assessment of the progress being made on the recommendations made in the 2014 BBC Trust review of “BBC coverage of Rural Areas in the UK”.
Countryside Alliance Head of Campaigns, Liam Stokes said: “When the BBC Trust was regulating the BBC, the BBC may have been marking its own homework, but at least it was marking all of it.
“Now Ofcom have taken over that role, they are unable to rule on huge swathes of the Editorial Guidelines that are vital in ensuring a neutral BBC. We know how important it is that BBC presenters do not abuse their licence fee-funded platforms to promote their own agendas, or to allow their own beliefs to colour their work for the BBC, yet there is no one checking whether the BBC is effectively policing these conflicts of interest.
Mr Stockes added: “As a result, we end up with an entirely random and arbitrary application of the BBC Editorial Guidelines. In our letter to the Culture Secretary we have set out some achievable solutions to this solution, and we look forward to working with MPs from all parties to take these ideas forward.”
