The BBC was handed its largest fine yesterday after Ofcom, the media regulator, found the broadcaster guilty of a litany of offences involving phone-in competitions.

The corporation was ordered to pay a total of £400,000 for breaches of the broadcasting code involving four television programmes, including Comic Relief, and four radio shows, which the regulator said had involved staff “faking winners of competitions and deliberately conducting competitions unfairly”.

The ruling takes the total fines levied by regulatory bodies on broadcasters to nearly £11.5 million in the past year, after a spate of incidents involving the abuse of premium-rate phone-in competitions.

The fine, which the BBC accepted immediately, is much smaller than the £5,675,000 that ITV was ordered to pay in May, for deceiving viewers of primetime programmes such as Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. Ofcom could have levied a fine of up to £2 million, but said the lesser penalty was because the corporation had not sought to make money from the transgressions. The regulator said that the BBC had committed very serious breaches of the broadcasting code, which involved staff taking “premeditated decisions to broadcast competitions and encourage listeners to enter in the full knowledge that the audience stood no chance of winning”.

Comic Relief last year, Sport Relief in 2006 and Children in Need in 2005 were all found to have involved faked competitions, with producers unwilling to admit on air to technological glitches, for fear of deterring viewers from calling in to donate. A member of the production team posed as a winner on Comic Relief and Sport Relief, and the name of a fictitious winner was read out on Children in Need.

On TMi, a children’s programme shown on BBC and CBBC, a researcher was asked in September 2006 to affect a child’s voice and pose as a competition winner, after staff had problems contacting potential winners.

The regulator reserved its harshest criticism for the four radio programmes, handing down a £115,000 fine for fabrications featured in the Liz Kershaw Show, a fixture on BBC 6 Music, the digital channel.

Ofcom said that 17 prerecorded episodes had involved listeners being invited to call or text entries to competitions they had no chance of winning, with fictitious winners’ names later read out on air. About ten production staff posed as winners or contributors.

The regulator said that the “premeditated, deliberate deception”, over a 17-month period, represented a “very significant breakdown in the trust between the BBC and its audience”, adding that the decisions to fake winners “were taken with the full knowledge of the production team and the presenter”.

The Jo Whiley Show on Radio 1 involved a faked competition winner on two occasions, attracting a £75,000 fine, with the Russell Brand Show and the Clare McDonnell Show, both on 6 Music, also featuring faked competition winners. Both were fined £17,500.

In a statement the BBC management said: “We have taken these issues extremely seriously from the outset, apologising to our audiences and putting in place an unprecedented action plan to tackle the issues raised.”

A year ago the BBC was ordered to pay £50,000 after a studio guest posed as a winner of a Blue Peter phone-in competition. The show is also the subject of an inquiry over the fabrication of a viewers’ poll to name its new cat.

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