WAGES ARE A SIN
BBC editor refuses £45k rise in equality row
TOP salaries at the BBC are unacceptably high, journalist Carrie Gracie said yesterday.
She revealed she turned down a £45,000 rise in the fight for equal pay and said she had been moved by public support since resigning as BBC China editor.
She insisted that accepting the rise would have meant colluding in “unlawful pay discrimination”.
Gracie presented BBC Radio 4’s Today programme as normal yesterday but due to impartiality rules, she could not be interviewed by co-host John Humphrys – the BBC’s highest-paid news presenter with a salary of more than £600,000.
Freelance Jane Martinson was drafted in instead to interview Gracie on Woman’s Hour.
Gracie told her the BBC had offered to raise her salary to £180,000. But she added: “I was interested in equality and I kept saying to my managers that I didn’t need more money, I just needed to be made equal.”
Gracie, who has been with the BBC for 30 years, described the pay offer as a “divide-and-rule, botched solution”.
Explaining her decision to resign, she said: “I couldn’t go back to China and collude knowingly in what I consider to be unlawful pay discrimination. Nor could I stay silent and watch the BBC perpetuate a failing pay structure by discriminating against women.”
BBC Women, a group of 150 broadcasters and producers, said up to 200 women have made complaints about pay.
But a BBC spokesman said an independent audit had shown “no systemic discrimination against women”.