When I started working for the BBC nearly 30 years ago, what I was going to get paid never even came up for discussion. I was just starting out as a freelance radio news presenter, with nearly 20 years’ experience as a journalist under my belt (including more than a decade on this newspaper), and I was simply paid per programme. The BBC set the rate, I accepted it, and that was that.
It never occurred to me that had I been a woman, they might have offered me less. My earliest records date from 1991, when I was paid £260 for presenting an edition of The World Tonight on Radio 4, and £235 for Newshour on the World Service. So if I had presented three programmes a week for 46 weeks a year, I would have earned between £32,430 and £35,880 per annum, roughly equivalent to between £67,000 and £75,000 today.
Compare and contrast. John Humphrys, king of Today, is paid more than £600,000 a year – or at least, he was in the year up to last April, and that did include his duties on Mastermind. He says he has taken a sizeable pay cut since then, although to judge by his secretly recorded off-air comments to a colleague, he did so less than willingly. Jeremy Vine of Radio 2 is on more than £700,000, and Eddie Mair of the PM programme is on more than £300,000.
Q&AHow does BBC pay compare to its competitors?
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The reason the BBC was told to publish the list of top earners was to demonstrate whether it is delivering value for money - in other words, whether it pays in line with the market. Given that no other broadcaster publishes the pay of its stars this is difficult to prove, but Tony Hall, the director general, insists the BBC aims to pay people at a discount to the market while Gary Lineker, one of the top earners, insists he has been offered more lucrative deals to leave. One publicly available pay deal is for Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, who gets £1.5m a year - which would put him second on the BBC’s list behind Chris Evans.
The BBC pay scandal is really three scandals in one. First, there is the gender pay gap, due to there being far more men in senior positions than women. Interestingly, many of the most impressive bosses I worked for were women, including the head of audio and music, Jenny Abramsky; the controller of Radio 4, Helen Boaden; and the head of World Service news programmes, Liliane Landor.
Second, as the Carrie Gracie episode has revealed, there appears to be gender discrimination, which would be illegal and would result in women like Sarah Montague and Ritula Shah being paid substantially less than their male counterparts for doing the same job.
And third, there is the undeniable fact that some of the BBC’s most senior journalists, most of them men, are being paid grotesquely inflated salaries for which there is absolutely no justification. It gives me no pleasure to write this; they are, after all, my former colleagues and many of them are extremely good at their jobs, but take them into a quiet corner somewhere and they will admit that I am right.
Full disclosure: when I left the BBC in 2012, I was being paid £135,000 a year to present both The World Tonight and Newshour. I did not complain that I was overpaid (does anyone?), nor did I check whether my female colleagues were on the same rates. I now know that they were not, and I deeply regret that it never occurred to me to ask.
But nor did I ask how my pay compared with, say, Eddie Mair’s. If I had known he was getting more than twice as much as I was, I might well have felt hard done by, even though I am among his most devoted admirers.
So why has BBC journalists’ pay gone haywire, and what can be done to put it right? Until recently, most news presenters were freelances who negotiated their own pay, either directly or through their agents. Correspondents, on the other hand, were employees, on set salary scales.
It is no coincidence that the BBC’s two male international editors, who are both paid substantially more than ex-China editor Carrie Gracie or Europe editor Katya Adler, have both worked previously as presenters (North America editor Jon Sopel on The Politics Show, and Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen on BBC Breakfast). Neither will have taken a pay cut when they returned to reporting. True, Gracie has also worked as a presenter, but only on the News Channel and the BBC World Service, where pay levels are far lower than on BBC1 or BBC2.
I used to have some sympathy with the BBC’s argument that it has to pay “market rates” to keep its best journalists on board – but I have changed my mind. If a senior BBC journalist is offered a better-paid job by a rival broadcaster, I now think the response should simply be: “Good luck.”
Did the BBC suffer grievous harm when economics editor Robert Peston jumped ship to join ITV? Or when both Nick Robinson and his successor as BBC political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, moved briefly from the BBC to ITV before being enticed back again?
The truth is it managed just fine, for the simple reason that there are dozens of equally talented, younger journalists only too happy to step into the breach.
Does Kuenssberg “deserve” more than £200,000 a year? Does Robinson, now on the Today programme, “deserve” more than £250,000? Perhaps it is unfair to single them out. So what about Andrew Marr on more than £400,000? Or Huw Edwards on more than £550,000?
I have worked with – and respect – all of them, and although I have never discussed pay with them (God forbid!), I strongly suspect they would find it hard to defend what they are paid. Humphrys, to his credit, admitted as much when asked to explain his own salary. “I’m not sure I could explain it, to be absolutely honest.”
So the answer is simple: full pay transparency, and a pay cap for all BBC journalists, male and female, whether in the studio or in the field, of £150,000 a year, with extra allowances payable for exceptional difficulty or danger (Bowen, Lyse Doucet, Orla Guerin, Quentin Sommerville, and, yes, Gracie). And with apologies to some of my better-paid former colleagues, if it means you have to take a sizeable pay cut, by all means try your luck elsewhere. It is time to stop trying to defend the indefensible.
Robin Lustig is a former BBC news presenter