BBC begs Huw to cut £600k pay
Newsreader is dragged into gender row... as the woman who spoke up is silenced on Today
THE BBC has asked newsreader Huw Edwards to cut his near-£600,000 salary as it scrambles to fend off a legal row over the gender pay gap.
As the Corporation grappled with the resignation of China editor Carrie Gracie, Media and Technology Editor it emerged that key female presenters including Europe editor Katya Adler had been handed pay rises. On a day of chaos:
Miss Gracie’s resignation dominated Radio 4’s Today programme – but, as a show presenter, the Scot was not allowed to discuss it;
The Equality and Human Rights Commission said it could take action if the broadcaster had broken the law;
The BBC admitted a long-awaited report into presenter pay had been hit by delays;
Scores of high-profile women, including First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, backed Miss Gracie;
BBC staff were warned they could not report on Miss Gracie’s pay row if they had backed her publicly.
Miss Gracie, who earned £135,000 a year, quit in protest at widespread ‘pay discrimination’ – turning down a £45,000 raise – and has moved to another role in the newsroom.
She accused the BBC of a ‘secretive and illegal’ pay culture and said she ‘no longer trusts bosses to give me an accurate answer’. She said she had warned director-general Lord Hall last August that she would resign if the broadcaster did not pay men and women the same for the same jobs.
The 55-year-old was furious that North America editor Jon Sopel was paid up to £250,000 and Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen up to £200,000. Miss Adler – the fourth international editor – earned less than £150,000 before her pay rise.
Miss Gracie, who is fluent in Mandarin, said she rejected the £45,000 pay rise as she would not ‘collude in unlawful pay discrimination’.
The presenter was born in Bahrain while her Scottish oil executive father was on assignment there.
She was educated in Aberdeenshire and Glasgow before studying at the University of Edinburgh.
The BBC has kept secret details of which women had pay rises – but the Mail revealed last year that Newsnight host Emily Maitlis had her salary hiked by more than £50,000.
Now it appears BBC bosses have also tried to tackle the gender pay gap by cutting pay for its male stars.
Bosses have asked Edwards to take a sizable cut, amid concerns that his salary for the News At Ten looks dramatically out of kilter.
Last night, the 56-year-old was still locked in negotiations. As he is on a permanent staff contract, the BBC needs his permission to cut his pay.
Today programme host John Humphrys has admitted he took a pay cut shortly after the BBC rich list revealed he made up to £650,000 a year.
These cuts and selective pay rises for female staff were designed to quell anger – but yesterday it became clear they have backfired.
The BBC was forced to publish pay details for its 96 highest-paid staff last summer, and has spent the past six months urging presenters to be patient as it examines the problem.
It commissioned a major audit of presenter pay at all levels with a report supposed to be published before Christmas, but insiders say it is now on course for the end of this month. They claimed there was no reason for the delay other than the complexity of the work. An insider said: ‘This whole thing about equal pay for equal jobs is really difficult because we don’t work in a toothpaste factory.’
Yesterday, well-placed sources said the delays and silence had made staff even angrier. One newsroom source said: ‘How did they allow things to get to this state? It’s amazing how badly this has been handled. They keep kicking it into the long grass – and now it has got out of hand.’
Another said: ‘They’re so terrified of things getting out that they don’t explain things properly.’
Miss Gracie revealed the only call she had received from BBC chiefs since the story broke was to ask if she would still front the Today programme yesterday. Senior sources said bosses were hopeful they could persuade Miss Gracie, who lived 5,000 miles from her teenage children while in Beijing, to remain China editor.
Yesterday BBC news director Fran Unsworth warned staff impartiality rules meant they could not report on the issue if they tweeted in support of Miss Gracie. The BBC said it performed better than many organisations on equal pay and an audit had found no systemic discrimination.
‘ILLEGAL PAY GAP’ STORM HITS BBC Yesterday’s Daily Mail
RADIO 4’S FLAGSHIP SHOW IMPLODED IN A SOGGY MORASS OF SMUGGERY
CARRIE Gracie! Carrie Gracie! Everyone was talking about Carrie Gracie yesterday, with those readers and listeners not fully up to speed soon capsized in a squall of confusion.
Though she may sound like a stricken trawler that’s lost its catch, she is in fact the estimable former BBC China Editor who has quit her position over the gender pay gap at the Corporation. She’s totally had it, she’s burned her chopsticks, she is outta there – and who could blame her?
Jeremy Bowen the Middle East editor gets more, Jon Sopel in America gets more, and Lord only knows what John Simpson gets for wafting about in a burka being pompous, but it is certainly not going to be thruppence less than our Carrie, that’s for sure.
So far, so fem. However, things started to get perplexing after Miss Gracie, 55, published a blistering open letter on her blog, declaring ‘enough is enough’.
She also accused the BBC of an ‘illegal and secretive’ pay culture, and vowed she would not return to China unless the mess was sorted out.
Then she calmly continued providing holiday cover on the Today show – and BBC R4’s flagship news programme promptly imploded in a soggy morass of self-righteousness over impartiality rules.
As her own story led bulletins and newspaper front pages yesterday morning, BBC guidelines meant that Carrie Gracie could not talk directly about the Carrie Gracie situation, except for a brief thanks for the support she had received from other women, which illuminated the ‘depth of hunger’ for equal pay.
So in the studio, her co-presenter John Humphrys had to read headlines about Carrie Gracie as Carrie Gracie listened in alongside, then interview Mariella Frostrup about Carrie Gracie, while Carrie Gracie sat silently next to him.
Mariella did not disappoint. This Marie Antoinette of the airwaves phoned in from her country residence in a fashionable area of Somerset to boast that she is ‘an old socialist’, and ‘the child of a Seventies feminist’.
She added that she personally had always been paid well by the BBC. Which was nice.
The Open Book (R4) presenter then would not accept John Humphrys’ assertion that she’s handsomely rewarded because she is ‘a star’, nor his conjecture that when it came to high-profile talent like her, it’s much more difficult for the BBC to calculate the rate for the job.
‘I think that if you work for the BBC you turn your back on the market,’ said Miss Frostrup.
Mariella – and others like her – might insist she is not a star, nor interested in market rates, but she employs three agents to exploit her celebrity; a literary agent; an after-dinner speaking agent (current rate £5,000£10,000 per speech) and a voiceover agent who sells her ‘smooth, sexy and warm’ tones to promote everything from crisps to face cream to the Guardian newspaper.
Yet all this hypocrisy did not stop her tartly stating that her Open Book programme earned her ‘a tenth’ of what Mr Humphrys grosses for his combined television and radio work, plus his 50 years’ of service at the BBC (£650,000). Shouldn’t loyalty, popularity and expertise count for something?
To be honest, I thought LetThem-Eat-Cake’s remuneration – around £65,000 if my sums are right – for an unchallenging 30minute weekly discussion programme about novels was more than generous.
SuCH unhelpful conflation between what celebrities earn and what correspondents earn at the BBC only confuses the important gender gap issue, while refusal to accept that market-driven economics do have a role to play does not help those who truly are being discriminated against.
Meanwhile, Miss Gracie seems like the kind of woman the BBC should be cherishing, not alienating. Clever and dedicated, she has worked for the Beeb for more than 30 years and speaks fluent Mandarin: she earned £135,000 per annum for working in Beijing. Her ex-husband is a Chinese rock drummer who speaks little English – but obviously fluent drum – and appears to be the primary carer for their teenage children at the family base in south-west London.
In September 2011, she left the BBC to have cancer treatment, but returned to work the following May. Now, she’s resigned from her position, leaving calamity in her wake.
The final surreal twist yesterday came once 9am had passed, at which point Miss Gracie was allowed to transition from Today presenter to Woman’s Hour guest where – free at last! – her words spilled out in a gush.
She was very touched, she said, by those BBC women who had tweeted their support, including Clare Balding, Kate Silverton, Kirsty Wark and Sarah Montague.
Yet the farce continued. Since Woman’s Hour host Jane Garvey has been an outspoken critic of the BBC pay structure, impartiality rules meant she could not interview her chief guest, and someone had to be drafted in from the Guardian to do it.
Later in the day, an edict from new head of BBC news, Fran unsworth, decreed that all those Beeb women tweeting their support would also be banned from reporting or presenting items on the pay gap issue.
This means that only men at the BBC, most of whom have kept a deafening silence on the subject, will be allowed to talk about it. Progress!
For the moment the good ship Carrie Gracie sails onwards in rocky seas, and we pray for all those aboard.