What does the BBC have to hide?
MPs lash out as many top earners left off salary list
‘We are not getting the full picture’
THE BBC was accused of betraying the public last night as the pay of many of its top earning stars was kept secret in a process that came under fire from MPs.
Despite the broadcaster’s repeated pledge to be more transparent, yesterday’s list of those earning more than £150,000 included 32 fewer names than last year.
Many of them have been moved to the organisation’s secretive commercial arm with the result that the public may never be able to learn their pay again.
Highly paid stars including Strictly Come Dancing’s Tess Daly and The One Show’s Matt Baker have now vanished from the rich list, despite earning six-figure sums.
As the corporation battles an ongoing gender pay crisis, only 22 out of 64 people on the list were women and none was in the top 12 earners.
Eight new female presenters appeared on the rich list after protests last year and the high-profile resignation of China editor Carrie Gracie, but the top woman was still paid £1.4million less than her male counterpart.
Director general Lord Hall was heckled by his staff at a Press briefing during which workers accused the BBC of being ‘disingenuous’ and providing ‘unsatisfactory’ answers to questions. And some staff were said to be furious that their pay had been revealed while the pay of others had been kept private.
Only 64 people were included in the report for 2017/2018 compared with 96 in the list for 2016-2017. An unknown number of salaries have been wiped from the figures because rules allow the broadcaster to withhold figures on anyone being paid through the organisation’s commercial arm, BBC Studios.
Of those on the list last year, 24 have now had their pay hidden because the programmes they work for moved to BBC Studios. Others have left the corporation.
Anyone working through a production company is allowed to have their pay kept secret and BBC Studios was spun off last April so the corporation could start selling shows to rival broadcasters and compete more effectively with giants such as Netflix.
Shows created by BBC Studios include Strictly Come Dancing, The One Show, EastEnders and Casualty.
It emerged that Mary Berry, who is a new entry on the rich list, was handed up to £199,999 just to agree to work with the BBC, it was not a wage for any of her shows.
The 83-year-old TV cook fronted three BBC shows – including Classic Mary Berry and Britain’s Best Home Cook – in the last tax year, but all were made by independent proshould duction companies, meaning her pay for them was not on the list.
Instead, her fee is what she receives for being ‘talent that you would associate with core BBC programmes’, a spokesman said.
The total bill for the BBC’s executive committee rose by £442,000 to £4.1million for 11 staff. Last night Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said: ‘Given that we’ve got the football today and the furore over the Brexit White Paper, it’s a brilliant day to bury bad news for the BBC.’
Damian Collins, chairman of the Commons digital, culture, media and sport committee, said: ‘It is hard to say what meaning we place on the figures the BBC have announced at all because we are just not getting the full picture, either on the amount people are earning or the disparity of pay between men and women. There are a load of key people who have been taken off the books.’ Gregory Campbell, Democratic Unionist Party MP, said the new format ‘negates the entire process and betrays what they promised the public last year’. He added: ‘Opening up a diversionary route through BBC Studios to keep income of some presenters secret negates the whole point [of this].’ But Lord Hall, who is paid up to £459,999, said: ‘We are not hiding anything. On the public service side we are going to degrees of transparency that we’ve never been to before. The other side of what we do is in the commercial sphere
and we want to have a BBC Studios which is really adding value by bringing in money, which means the licence fee goes even further.’
He added: ‘You don’t ask of ITV studios… you don’t ask of someone of the American companies.’
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.