BBC salaries and the gender red herring

REMEMBER how those sanctimonious BBC bosses howled in protest when the Government first insisted they should disclose their top presenters’ pay?

The rich list would be a ‘poachers’ charter’, they said, with stars fleeing in droves to accept better offers elsewhere.

Well, a year has passed since the first list was published. Yet who can name any BBC figure who has left for the commercial sector – apart from Radio 4’s Eddie Mair, who is leaving in a huff after refusing to accept a pay cut which might have let a (possibly less talented) woman get more?

Now the BBC employs other tactics to divert public attention from the fact it pays staff (of both sexes) well above market rates. Disingenuously, the Corporation’s spin doctors have presented a genuine scandal about widespread overpayment as a phoney row over the ‘gender pay gap’.

Which brings us to yesterday, when the Corporation boasted it had reduced the disparity between men’s and women’s pay from 9.3 per cent to 7.6 per cent.

The question is: has this been achieved by cutting the pay of overpaid men – or by paying overpaid women more? Shockingly, there is no way of telling from the 2018 list.

This is because scores of presenters are now paid through the Corporation’s new commercial arm, BBC Studios, which is exempt from the duty of disclosure. Thus, licence fee-payers are kept in the dark.

How bitterly ironic that a government initiative intended to make the BBC rein in its excesses may well have succeeded only in inflating wages further.