23 Nov 2012

New BBC chief appointed

10:26 pm on 23 November 2012

A former head of BBC News has been appointed director-general of the BBC.

Tony Hall, 61, is currently the chief executive of the Royal Opera House in London. He starts next March on a salary of £450,000 per year.

George Entwistle, the previous director-general, resigned on 10 November after a report on the Newsnight programme led to a former senior political figure being wrongly implicated in child abuse.

He had been in the job for 54 days.

BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten said Lord Hall was "the right person to lead the BBC out of its current crisis".

Lord Patten said the BBC needed "to take a long, hard look at the way it operates and put in place the changes required to ensure it lives up to the standards that the public expects''.

Lord Hall joined the BBC as a news trainee in 1973. He began his job at the Royal Opera House in 2001, after 28 years at the corporation

In 2009 he joined the board of the organising committee for the London Olympics. He was made a peer in 2010 as Lord Hall of Birkenhead.