Chris Evans, revealed yesterday as the BBC’s highest-earning entertainer, is not really paid by the executives at the corporation. He is paid by the occupants of 15,000 households whose licence fees add up to his £2.2 million salary. He may well be worth it, but his paymasters have a right to know what he is getting. That is why the BBC should halt moves to shield more of its employees’ salaries from view. It should also do more to cut the cost of its backroom operation.
As many as 96 creative staff are paid more than £150,000. The highest earners, Evans and the Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker, get more than £1 million. Also on the list is Alan Yentob, a 70-year-old veteran who still draws a salary of more than £200,000 despite having stepped down as creative director in 2015 after scandal engulfed the Kids Company charity of which he was chairman. Even then, the headline figures tell only a fraction of the story. Many BBC stars also sell books, appear in commercials and speak at after-dinner events. The money they make through independent production companies remains undisclosed, too. BBC talent clearly does not go hungry.
Of course good talent deserves good pay. High salaries can be justified where they represent the going rate in the market and the BBC really would lose people to a commercial broadcaster if it were to offer too little money. Presenters’ pay will sometimes meet that test. Rarely, however, can the same be said of the BBC’s many managers and other staff. When Lord Hall of Birkenhead became director-general in 2013, he acknowledged that senior salaries were a “very big issue”. He wanted to put an end to a culture in which, in the words of the former chairman Lord Patten of Barnes, there were “more senior leaders at the BBC than in the Chinese communist party”.
The bureaucratic bill has fallen but it is still too high, costing the licence fee payer more than £40 million a year. There are almost as many “senior managers” as creative staff on £150,000 or more, and a further 23 “other staff and contractors”. It is doubtful that they are all worth that money. Many have job titles that will mystify anyone unfamiliar with the BBC’s idiosyncratic new-managerial culture, including “identity architects”, “analytics architects” and “service architects”. The corporation has consistently missed its own target to get senior managers down to less than 1 per cent of the workforce. This year’s annual report promises to “work toward the definition of a new senior leadership group” in the hope of meeting the target or, more accurately, circumventing it with revised definitions.
The BBC was right to focus attention on the gender balance of its highest earners. Only a third of the recipients of top salaries are women. This should be addressed quickly. It is not the only worrying aspect of the publication of earnings, however. This is thought to be the last time that top presenters’ salaries will be open to public view. The BBC intends to shift many salaries into the accounts of BBC Studios, a commercial subsidiary subject to even more feeble transparency rules.
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The revenue the BBC gains from licence fee payments is public money raised with a hypothecated tax. The government sets the level of that tax, but the public cannot hold ministers to account unless they know how their money is spent. That information should stay in the public domain, where it belongs.