BBC failed to pay charities from phone vote

In another phone vote scandal, the BBC has said that it failed to pay out thousands to charity for voting errors made in many of its programmes, including last year's UK Eurovision final.

The BBC failed to pay £106,000 to charity from phone votes in more than 20 programmes, including Eurovision: Making Your Mind Up 2007, where a presenter mistakenly told viewers to vote before phone lines had opened.

The news comes in the week that its rival ITV was fined £5.68 million by Ofcom over a string of premium rate phone-in scandals.

The other BBC programmes, which have not been named, relate to Audiocall, part of BBC Worldwide, retaining all money raised from premium rate calls made by viewers who were mistakenly voting despite lines being closed.

The BBC Trust has ordered the Corporation to apologise on air for breach of trust - and it has asked the director general to consider disciplinary action against a small number of BBC Worldwide staff.

The BBC said the sums that should have been paid to charity have since been repaid with interest.

The problems, published in a BBC commissioned report, occurred between October 2005 and September 2007.

BBC chairman Sir Michael Lyons said that while a "clear editorial failure" led to the problem with Eurovision, where the lines were also being handled by Audiocall, in the other cases "the problems were entirely with Audiocall".

He said the BBC Trust was "shocked to find another problem".

In BBC1's Making Your Mind Up, viewers voted for Scooch to represent the UK at the Eurovision Song Contest.

But the BBC said if the votes before lines opened had been counted, the result would have remained the same.

Upon learning that more than 20 programmes had been affected, Sir Michael said that he was "confident" they'd uncovered the "full scale of the problem".

He said it was "not entirely clear" why staff hadn't flagged up what was occurring, but said they are clear "there was no criminal intent".

The problem stopped when technology was introduced to stop people voting when lines closed.