10 women set to sue BBC over pay
MORE than 100 BBC managers are on a second ‘rich list’ of staff at the broadcaster who earn more than the Prime Minister.
While the list of best-paid stars drew most attention yesterday, the BBC was also forced to reveal the extent of its largesse to executives who work behind the scenes.
The Corporation said that 106 staff and a dozen contractors each received more than £150,000 last year, led by director general Tony Hall on £450,000.
And that did not even include BBC Worldwide chief Tim Davie, who is on £682,000. He was exempt because BBC Worldwide is a commercial entity.
The rich list helped to push the BBC’s wage bill above the £1billion mark and plunge the Corporation firmly into the red. It overspent by £129million last year, despite a £127million boost to its income.
But the sky-high salaries and overspending were not the only controversies relating to the second rich list .
In a revelation that will spark further anger over the BBC’s gender pay gap, fewer than a third of those on the 106strong roll of top-paid staff were women.
Deputy director Anne Bulford, director of BBC content Charlotte Moore, and HR director Valerie Hughes-D’Aeth stand out as three of the biggest-earners, on £435,000, £325,000 and £310,000 a year.
However, most of the other top-paid executives are little-known men each raking in six-figure sums.
Stuart Page, director of product and systems, Bruce Malcolm, Scotland’s head of service development, and Richard Cooper, controller of digital distribution, collected up to £200,000 each.
Other big earners included James Purnell, the former Labour Cabinet secretary turned director of radio and education, on £295,000 a year, and Bob Shennan, another director of radio, close behind on £271,000.
Ian Haythornthwaite, a director of finance who has such a tight grip on the detail he once claimed a £3.90 tram fare on expenses, received £241,000.
It is a depressingly similar picture to the one painted by the rich list of top talent, which revealed that many wellknown women earn less than £150,000 while men that viewers had hardly heard of raked in hundreds of thousands.
Nearly half (48 per cent) of BBC staff are women but they only outnumber men on the lowest rungs of the ladder. Men outnumber women two to one on the top management ‘grades’.
Even with this gender pay gap, the BBC boasted that its workforce is ‘more inclusive than its ever been’. It also tried to insist that it is saving money.
Lord Hall highlighted the BBC’s ‘record on efficiency’ on Wednesday, claiming that the corporation had made £172million in ‘efficiency savings’ across the year.
‘We are over-delivering against savings,’ he said.
The BBC annual report in front of him disclosed that the Corporation had overspent by £129.1million after it hired 28 extra staff – bringing its headcount to 19,254 – and lavished cash sending more than 450 workers to the Rio Olympics.
Anne Bulford, the deputy director general, admitted that the number of staff had risen but insisted that the ‘underlying’ headcount had fallen.
She said the BBC axed more than 500 jobs last year to save money, but that it then recruited even more than it had got rid of because of various new projects. It went on a hiring spree as it expanded the World Service into different countries, tried to bring out- sourced jobs in-house, funded apprenticeships and bolstered its technology unit.
She also insisted that the overspend did not count as an overspend because it was ‘planned’.
‘The BBC operates to break even over time and in different years…last year we recorded a surplus, this year we recorded a deficit of £129million. That’s planned. And the reasons for that is 2016/17 [sic] was a very big sports year.
‘We had both the euros and the wonderful Olympics from Rio.’
‘More inclusive than it’s ever been’
NO wonder the BBC fought tooth and nail against publishing its stars’ pay. Two days later, the infighting among presenters, the gender pay row and the public backlash are going strong.
With household names attracting most attention, another alarming set of BBC figures almost went unnoticed. It now has 106 – 106! – managers earning above £150,000, with ludicrous titles such as Integration Lead, Analytics Architect and Head of Change. What they do is anyone’s guess.
It also emerges that many stars are not on the list because they are paid by private production firms or BBC Worldwide. Worse, some who do appear use personal companies in a way which lets them avoid tax – a practice the BBC vowed to end.
More importantly, this list is a reminder of the real problem with the Corporation: It is quite simply far too big. If it didn’t exist, no one would dream of setting up something so monolithic, bloated and bureaucratic.
The BBC dominates our TV, radio and the internet, with its gargantuan website almost single-handedly having destroyed local newspapers.
It is bad enough that this behemoth imposes a politically correct, metropolitan liberal agenda on licence fee payers.
More worrying still, although it is weakened by its byzantine bureaucracy, this sclerotic and wasteful Corporation still has the size and monopoly power to distort the market and block competition from rivals.
The BBC enjoys the advantage of the English language, and – with better leadership – might have been able to rival US streaming giants such as Netflix by selling Britain’s creative talent around the world.
Last year, as he renegotiated the BBC charter, David Cameron had an opportunity to drag the Corporation into the 21st century. He could have cut the licence fee sharply, while preserving the kernel of its services, the main radio stations and BBC1 and BBC2.
The rest could then have been privatised, unleashing a great wave of talent on the free market to create great British programmes. More to the point, the BBC would have been free to take risks and pay its stars whatever it wanted. Instead, it remains wedded to a funding model which is both horribly antiquated and, with modern technology, frankly unsustainable.
A once- in- a- generation chance was squandered, and the BBC remains stuck in the past.