BBC Trust Chairman Lord Patten today criticised what he calle the “toxic” salaries senior executives at the corporation. He told the Andrew Marr programme on BBC1 that these were unpopular with viewers and licence fee payers, and said it “does seem to fly in the face of public service ethos.” He indicated that the BBC is about to make some announcements regarding this in the next few days.

“First of all there’s the pay level at the very top; secondly there’s the number of people who get more than £150,000; thirdly there’s the number of people who are deemed to be senior managers; and fourthly there’s the whole issue of fairness across the board, with senior managers getting some deals which don’t apply to others. We can deal with all that and if we do so, we will deal with one of the most toxic reasons for the public’s lack of sympathy with the BBC as an institution, even though they like enormously what it does.”

Lord Patten hailed research by Will Hutton of the Work Foundation into a Government proposal to limit top public servants’ pay to no more than 20 times that of their lowest paid staff. He said: “I will be looking very closely at what Will Hutton said about top pay in the public sector - there were some very good ideas.”











July 3rd, 2011 - 17:01 UTC
by A.Sennitt
(Source: Evening Standard)