Dame Janet Smith expects to publish her report into how Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall carried out campaigns of abuse over decades while at the BBC in the “second half of May”.
In a statement on the review’s website, she said the investigation has interviewed 375 witnesses in connection with Savile and more than 100 about Hall.
The statement said: “The review is discussing a timeline for delivery and arrangements for publication of the report with the BBC. Publication is currently expected in the second half of May 2015. As soon as a date for publication is known, a further update will be provided.”
The latest update on the review’s work says it has “been in contact” with 775people as part of the investigation.
It said: “The review has now finished taking evidence and it will not be accepting any new evidence.”
It has been reported that the Dame Janet Smith review is expected to uncover hundreds of victims and reveal a culture of ignorance which “protected” Savile.
Another report, published last month, said NHS hospitals had still not fullylearned the lessons of the Savile sex abuse scandal.
It said the depraved entertainer was given “endorsement from the very highest level of society” after then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher appointed him in an official fundraising role at Stoke Mandeville Hospital where he raped or assaulted at least 63 patients, staff and visitors.
Savile was given open access to the Buckinghamshire hospital while volunteering as a porter from 1969, and despite claims about his horrific behaviour being widespread by the early 1970s senior staff were never told of his “wicked” crimes, many of them against desperately ill children.
Barrister Kate Lampard, whose review of Savile’s offending across NHS institutions made a series of recommendations, said the access he was given offered him the “opportunity to commit sexual abuses on a grand scale for nearly 50 years”.
It’s A Knockout host Hall was jailed for two-and-a-half-years last year afterhe was convicted by a jury at Preston Crown Court of indecently assaulting agirl under the age of 16 and earlier pleading guilty to another indecent assaulton the same girl when she was 13.
He was already serving a 30-month jail term after he pleaded guilty in 2013 to indecently assaulting 13 other young girls, aged between nine and 17, over a 20-year period.
Members of the review visited the court during Hall’s trial and also visitedthe Shepherds Bush Empire Theatre, which was owned by the BBC, and Television Centre.