New BBC chief takes a wage cut
APPOINTMENT: The new Director-General of the BBC had been out-earning his predecessor by £150,000 a year.
Tim Davie, 53, ran BBC Studios, the corporation’s commercial arm, for the last eight years and was its highest-paid executive. He will take a pay cut when he replaces Lord Tony Hall, the BBC said.
THE NEW Director-General of the BBC had been out-earning his predecessor by £150,000 a year, it emerged yesterday.
Tim Davie, 53, has been running BBC Studios, the corporation’s commercial arm, for the last eight years and was its highest-paid executive. He will take a pay cut when he replaces Lord Tony Hall, the BBC said.
Among his first challenges will be to fight for the retention of the licence fee, which was questioned by Boris Johnson during the last election. Decriminalising nonpayment has also been mooted.
A former Director-General, Greg Dyke, said other options were possible. “You can have other means of funding – but not commercial means,” he told The Yorkshire Post.
Mr Davie had briefly been the corporation’s interim boss seven years ago, following the resignation of George Entwistle during the Jimmy Savile crisis.
Currently the corporation’s highest-paid executive, he had been considered the favourite to replace Lord Hall, whose exit comes at a turbulent time for the organisation, with controversy surrounding equal pay, free TV licences for the over-75s and competition from streaming services such as Netflix, as well as the ongoing coronavirus crisis.
Mr Davie, who is 53, earned £600,000 in 2018-19 but the BBC said he had agreed to be paid £450,000, the same fee as Lord Hall, until August next year, when his salary will rise to £525,000.
Educated at Cambridge, he joined the BBC as director of marketing in April 2005, having begun his career as a marketeer at Procter and Gamble, working on male toiletries. He was then UK marketing manager and later a vice-president at PepsiCo.
In his first statement as Director-General elect, he warned that the corporation “will need to accelerate change so that we serve all our audiences in this fast-moving world”, adding that the BBC would “continue to reform, make clear choices and stay relevant”.
He has not fought shy of controversy in the past, leading the corporation’s proposals to shut down its Asian Radio Network and the digital station 6 Music, 10 years ago. Both were eventually saved, following a highly vocal public campaign.
Among his top priorities as director-general will be leading the BBC’s response to Conservative demands earlier in the year for it to be scaled down.
Mr Davie is himself a Conservative, having stood for the party in the Hammersmith council elections in 1993 and 1994 and served as deputy chairman of the local branch.
However, one of his predecessors has predicted that the Covid-19 pandemic would silence the corporation’s most vocal critics.
Mr Dyke, who was forced to resign in 2004 over the corporation’s coverage of the Hutton Report on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, said: “The Government clearly had its knives out for the BBC at the beginning of the year and what they have now discovered is that it’s to the BBC that people turn at times of crisis, as they always have done.
“I think those in Government who wanted a fight will now see the value of a national broadcaster and put the knives away.”
Lord Hall previously warned of a potential loss of £125m for the BBC as a result of the pandemic.
We will need to accelerate change so that we serve all our audiences.
Tim Davie, new director-general of the BBC.