New BBC Director General takes a break just six weeks after starting his £450,000 job

BBC Director General Tony Hall has been rapped for taking a holiday just six weeks into his new job.

Lord Hall is due back at his desk tomorrow according to a BBC source after reportedly going off on a break on May 24th.

He had agreed to take up his £450,000 role in early March, but didn't start until April 2nd after taking another holiday.

Under fire: Tony Hall took a holiday just six weeks after taking over as Director general of the BBC

The Corporation announced it had wasted £100 million on an IT system on the day he is thought to have gone away - announcing the news in a press release.

Criticised: MPs described the waste of £100 million of licence fee money on a IT project as an 'outrage'

Since his arrival, Mr Hall has had to deal with the continuing fallout over the Jimmy Savile scandal, the conviction of former BBC presenter Stuart Hall of sex attacks on girls aged between 9 and 17 and allegations that celebrities abused victims on BBC premises.

The debacle over the failed computer archive project came barely a week after the BBC was condemned for giving 894 staff an average of £23,000 each to move to its new headquarters in Salford.

Tory MP Alun Cairns told the Sun today: 'Everybody is entitled to a holiday, but I've no doubt many eyebrows will be raised at this because of the crises.'

Even his own staff are furious he gets a week extra holiday than they are entitled to.

David Young, an assistant news editor wrote in the in-house paper: 'It sends out a terribly divisive message if there's one rule for the DG and another for the rest of us. He gets 30 days annual leave. We get 25. Why?'

MPs branded the £100 million waste of licence fee money as an ‘outrage’. The corporation suspended its chief technology officer and threatened  disciplinary action for those responsible.

Mr Hall axed the Digital Media Initiative (DMI) after the corporation’s governing body admitted it would be ‘throwing good money after bad’ to finish the project, which began five years ago.

Abuser: Fallout over the Jimmy Savile scandal continues at the BBC

Executives will be forced to explain the humiliating failure before the influential Public Accounts Committee of MPs next month, and the  National Audit Office is expected to launch a further probe later this year.

The DMI was supposed to allow BBC staff to access the entire archive from their computers, doing away with the need for audio and video tapes.

It was expected to save the corporation £18million in production costs because staff could share and download material remotely instead of transporting tapes between headquarters.

First the original contractor, Siemens, was dropped in 2009 after months of costly delays.
Control of the project was handed to John Linwood, hired as the BBC’s chief technology officer from Yahoo! on a salary of £280,000 per year

But alarm bells continued to ring over the way the DMI was being handled, and it was the subject of a damning National Audit Office report in 2011.

Astonishingly, Mr Linwood was awarded a £70,000 bonus just months after the report was published.
He has been suspended by Mr Hall while the BBC conducts an investigation into the debacle.