The BBC spent £310,000 on private detectives over a six-year period, the Leveson inquiry heard today.
The corporation once used investigator Steve Whittamore, who was later convicted of illegally accessing personal data, to check whether someone was on a particular flight.
On another occasion a BBC journalist commissioned a private detective to find out the owner of a car from its number plate, the hearing was told.
BBC director-general Mark Thompson told the press standards inquiry that the corporation’s staff used investigators 232 times between January 2005 and July 2011 at a total cost of £310,000.
News accounted for 43 of these occasions, at a cost of £174,500, excluding the use of private security teams.
BBC Vision, which produces the corporation’s TV programmes, was behind the remaining 189, spending about £133,000, in most cases for consumer shows. Mr Thompson said these costs represented 0.011 per cent of the news budget and 0.002 per cent of the vision budget over this period.
The inquiry heard there were two mentions of the BBC in the documents seized in the investigation into Whittamore’s activities known as Operation Motorman.
In 2001, a current affairs journalist commissioned Whittamore to supply information about whether a paedophile was on a flight into Heathrow airport.
The programme, which for other reasons was never broadcast, was looking at whether people with UK convictions for child sex offences could get jobs giving them access to children in other countries.
Mr Thompson said: “The request to try and find out whether this particular paedophile was on the aircraft, I would regard as being justified in the public interest.”
He added that the Motorman papers also included a reference to “BBC wine blag”, which appeared to be an attempt by a newspaper to discover the corporation’s spending on alcohol.
Whittamore’s Hampshire home was raided by investigators from the Information Commissioner’s Office in March 2003. He was convicted of illegally accessing data and received a conditional discharge at London’s Blackfriars Crown Court in April 2005.
PA