In July, Mark Thompson, the Director General of the BBC outlined plans for the relocation of 1800 staff to Manchester.

It has since been revealed that those who move will get at least £12,000 a head: a relocation grant of £5,000, £4,000 to cover the cost of legal fees on a new house and £3,000 to buy household items such as curtains. They can also receive £900 toward removals and up to £1,500 to cover the cost of furniture.

That’s all bad enough, spending £21.6 million of our money on a pointless move to Manchester which has nothing to do with programme quality and everything to do with tokenistic lip service towards regionalism.

But I have since discovered that the true plans are far, far worse. The BBC is now so desperate to get volunteers – almost no one wants to go – that it is proposing to squander grotesque amounts of licence fee payers' money by offering to buy employees’ current homes at the full London market price.

Take Radio Five, the flagship of the move. It has over 200 employees. The current average house price in London is £270,285 That means, on a conservative estimate, that there will be a further cost of £54 million - quite apart from the cost of the new studios in Manchester. That's a minimum of £75.6 million in relocation costs alone.

If the BBC makes the same offer to all 1800 of the staff it wants to move – and there is no logical reason why it wouldn’t – that would be £508.1 millon.

Clearly some of these will then be resold. But - as I know from my own experience at the moment - the housing market in London is almost static. So the BBC will either have to hang on to any number of properties which it can't shift, or will take an enormous hit when it has to offer them at way below cost to get rid of them. The net cost of the purchase of these properties is likely to be jawdropping.

Not that any of this should surprise anyone. The whole thing is entirely typical of the scandal of the BBC's abuse of the license fee. We pay for programmes (not that it gets those right), rather than for tokenistic PC moves to Manchester.

The scandal gets worse. Broadcasting House is being rebuilt at a scheduled cost
of £400M(a sum which has already been overspent, although it is not wholly licence fee funded). That project was begun well before the Manchester move was decided on. So the BBC has undertaken a massive rebuild of Broadcasting House to provide, amongst other things, a spanking new set of studios for Radio 5 which will, if its move to Manchester goes ahead, be redundant.

The reason for the move? It was part of the attempts to ensure the renewal of the Charter. But even the government - hardly a beacon of good sense when it comes to thrift with other people's money - thinks the idea is mad (as I know from private conversations; Tessa Jowell believes the move is a waste of time and money).

I urge readers with contacts within the BBC to do more digging on this. This is a financial scandal of the highest order - a wilful, calculated and entirely deliberate squandering of other people's money.