Stars who kept their pay secret
Did they use loophole to stay off rich list?
THE BBC faced questions last night after some of its most high profile stars were missing from its ‘rich list’ of top talent due to a loophole. David Dimbleby, Mary Berry, Sir David Attenborough and Top Gear host Matt LeBlanc were all absent from the roll of those on more than £150,000 a year.
The Corporation’s agreement with the Government, which states it must publish top salaries annually, only requires talent directly funded by the licence fee to be revealed. It means a string of top stars who are paid directly by production companies or via its commercial arm BBC Worldwide did not have to feature on the list.
However, this loophole did not explain the absence of all of the BBC’s famous faces.
Some broadcasters did not have their salaries revealed purely because their earnings are below the £150,000 cut-off.
The production loophole explained Question Time host Dimbleby’s omission, as the panel show is produced by independent firm Mentorn Media.
For his role in the BBC’s election coverage, Dimbleby – who has worked for the BBC for 50 years – is likely to be paid directly by his production company, from which he takes a salary. It means that while he may be one of the highest- paid employees, he need not declare it. But while Dimbleby’s earnings were not on the list due to this mechanism, his brother Jonathan – who has hosted Radio 4’s Any Questions? for three decades – did not appear for another reason. The radio broadcaster’s pay is not above the £150,000 threshold.
With Chris Evans topping the list of the high earners with his £ 2.25million salary, his Top Gear co-host LeBlanc would also be expected to feature prominently.
But LeBlanc is paid through BBC Worldwide, meaning his pay package was also omitted. BBC stalwart Sir David, 91, is also paid this way.
One of the BBC’s most successful shows, The Great British Bake- Off, also escaped a public wage declaration.
The series is created by Love Productions. As such, judges Miss Berry and Paul Hollywood were both missing from the list. Mel Giedroyc was the only member of the show to appear due to other programmes she has done with the BBC, including Eurovision: You Decide.
While Graham Norton did make the list with his salary of up to £899,999, this sum does not include the income from his The Graham Norton Show, which is produced by So Television – meaning he will have earned significantly more.
Other famous faces did not find their salaries on the list because they are not paid above the £150,000 threshold.
Among the surprising omissions were Woman’s Hour hosts Dame Jenni Murray and Jane Garvey, Today presenter Sarah Montague, Watchdog presenter Steph McGovern, BBC Breakfast host Sally Nugent and Radio 2 DJ Sara Cox.
Paid through production firms
The tragedy of the BBC is that although it has a public service remit, its highly paid executives and many of its richly remunerated stars have forgotten what public service is supposed to be about.
Fifty years ago there was no confusion. People who worked for the Corporation knew they were engaged in a high-minded enterprise — to ‘educate, inform and entertain’ in the immortal words of its first director-general, Lord Reith.
There was an almost sacred pledge to the public underwritten by government. The BBC was granted the extraordinary privilege of a monopoly of national radio and huge dominance in television, and given a guaranteed form of funding via the licence fee, so that it was immune to commercial realities.
In return, Auntie was called upon to supply the kind of programming which independent, profit- driven broadcasters might not dependably produce. Part of the deal was that the people who worked for the BBC were not in it for the money.
The publication yesterday of the BBC’s top presenters’ salaries shows how well and truly the old ideal of public service has been shattered. Indeed, it has been consigned to history.
Although the Corporation is still blessed with the unique advantages conferred by the licence fee, and retains an all-powerful position in British broadcasting, it has reneged on its side of the bargain. Some of its so-called stars are being paid grotesque amounts of cash.
One is tempted to say that our privileged public service broadcaster is behaving like any commercial organisation. But, actually, it’s not true. No company with its eye on the bottom line would bestow enormous sums on the undeserving and the mediocre.
The argument trotted out by Tony hall, the BBC’s directorgeneral, that Auntie is obliged to pay competitive salaries, and is subject to market forces, is utterly bogus. In many areas the BBC is the market because it enjoys no real competition. This is most obvious in radio. LOOK
at Radio 2’ s Chris evans, paid £2.2£2.5million in 2016/17, in large part for his radio work. If this wacky and excitable character were to leave his present perch, he would be hard pushed to find a job at another radio station on a quarter of the salary. There are no remotely comparable national commercial stations.
The same point could be made about nearly all of the BBC’s radio stars, and many of its reputed heavy-hitters on television. Their salaries could be drastically reduced and they still would not leave because, despite Mr hall’s scare stories about poaching, they aren’t wanted elsewhere.
Of course, I don’t doubt that there are some highly paid BBC stars who warrant their salaries, and could walk into equally well-paid jobs in the private sector. But I suggest they constitute a minority.
What has happened is that the BBC has gradually jettisoned its old public service ethos. But instead of conducting itself along the lines of a tightly run body in the private sector, it resembles a lavish Renaissance court in which huge gifts are showered on unworthy hangers-on.
The scandal is that these often excessive salaries are being paid by ordinary licence payers who have no choice but to fork out £147 a year to own a television, even if they have no desire to watch the BBC.
Bit by bit over recent decades the ideal of public service has withered and almost expired, not just at the BBC but throughout many of our once-cherished institutions. Greed has won out over duty.
It has also happened at sometimes third-rate universities where vice-chancellors with no great qualifications pocket vast salaries that would have been unimaginable 30 years ago.
They, too, invoke ‘market forces’, though most would find it difficult to find a comparable job on half the pay.
Universities, like the BBC, were once places where people did not seek jobs in order to get rich. The average salary of university heads last year was £280,877. eleven of them got pay increases of up to 13 per cent, despite falling student numbers.
Bath University — not, let’s face it, a world- famous academic institution — boasts the highest paid vice-chancellor in the country in the shape of Dame Glynis Breakwell. her salary and benefits (which include a Georgian mansion in the city) amount to £451,000. She claims — she would, wouldn’t she? — that she’s worth it.
The irony is that at Bath and other universities, most lecturers and professors get by on relatively modest pay. It is the new administrative class that has enriched itself. There are 67 staff at Bath (a small university, by the way) earning more than £100,000 a year.
It’s a similar story in the Nhs, where the number of managers has exploded in recent years. They, not the medical staff, now set the moral tone of hospitals. The concept of public service has been so forgotten that in the worst cases, such as Mid-Staffordshire, hundreds of deaths were covered up.
And in the civil service, standards have so slipped that mandarins are now fixated on landing plum jobs in the private sector when they retire. On Tuesday, the National Audit Office claimed top civil servants are exploiting contacts to take up lucrative new posts, and ignoring rules designed to stop them. AT
The BBC there are many further down the food chain who are not well remunerated. Unlike many overpaid stars, these foot soldiers might earn more elsewhere. In some of them, the ideal of public service still burns.
It’s those at the top of the lumbering and anachronistic leviathan that is the BBC who have betrayed the old values. Don’t forget, amid all the justified hubbub about overpaid stars, that the Corporation also employs, at the most recent count, 98 senior managers earning more than £150,000.
These people, whether on or off the screen, want the advantages of working for an organisation which has a guaranteed income and enjoys an entrenched position in British broadcasting.
They seek the greater job security which working for Auntie entails, in comparison with most similar organisations, and the generous index-linked BBC pensions. But they expect, in addition to all these special perks, stratospheric salaries which many of them could not obtain if they were to take the risk of trying their luck in the private sector.
There was much wild talk yesterday from the likes of Tory MP Anna Soubry and former BBC honcho Michael Grade about the supposed inadvisability of publishing these salaries.
Miss Soubry’s claim that it amounts to an invasion of privacy is wrong-headed, while Lord Grade’s contention that it will lead to a bidding war for the BBC’s stars from other broadcasters is likely to be mistaken for the reasons I have touched on — though inside the Corporation there will doubtless be much clamouring for more money among those who think they are underpaid.
That is why these figures cast a shaft of light on the BBC. They tell a melancholy story, which is that the people who run the organisation do not possess the values of service and self-denial of those who founded it nearly 100 years ago.
Needless to say, the Corporation will go on defending its exceptional privileges. This behemoth not long ago saw off the weak-minded Cameron government and won a renewal of its charter until 2027, without having to concede any significant reforms.
But as it becomes clear it has forsaken the qualities that sustained it for so long — and differentiated it from those broadcasters which have to survive commercially in the real world — the licence-paying public will increasingly ask: What is the point of Auntie?