Oh dear, Prime Minister! Nearly 100 Beeb bosses make more than you The BBC has given up trying to cut the number of its employees paid more than the British Prime Minister, the UK's National Audit Office has discovered. The public sector spending watchdog also found that the state broadcaster hasn't sacked enough people yet and should consider chinning off more freelancers and agency staff to …
Given how the BBC is going downhill, with its news site having so few stories, still using Flash , BBC3 made digital only (it had lots of real crash & burn dross but a few really good shows, & having it available on the telly made it more likely to accidentally stumble on a gem than having to hunt stuff down on the web), politics coverage even more massively government sycophantic than usual, then I doubt any of the managers earn their money (nor do most politicians though)
Give em all a stint at something a bit more down to earth, clearing fatbergs from sewers, working as a care assistant to doubly incontinent patients etc, all at relatively crap money to give them a hint of proper jobs & pay
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Don't confuse cause with effect. News coverage still hasn't recovered from the dreadful reign of Greg Dyke but, all in all, I think the BBC does a good job. The Tory press has lobbied heavily against the news website, which did used to be excellent and is now more of an also ran.
How much oversight does the BBC need? There's the trust, the NAO and Ofcom and who knows what else. All that costs a pretty packet. As do all the reorganisations that these calls for change inevitably lead to. It could really benefit from being left alone by the politicians after the next charter renewal. But I suspect there is little chance of that: Tory HQ probably won't rest until the BBC just does some cricket and Strictly. After all, when the workhouses come back people won't have time for independent media.
"but £150k seems a little on the low side for the leader of a G8 country."
Totally. She's doing such a spectacular job. She deserves way more than that. She needs an 'Air Force One' too. And perhaps a boat. A nice one. If she wants, I'd be more than happy to sacrifice my first born. Or cut off my penis. Whatever she wants by way of recompense, she can have. Deserves it.
"All MPs should be paid the average income of their constituencies. That is the only way to get them to concentrate on raising the average salary of all.
Please note this is NO WAY NEAR £150K."
Hey that's my idea! I'm delighted someone else has thought of it too :)
Though I would suggest the median *private-sector* income of their constituents as the benchmark or they would just goose their numbers by spamming high paid public sector jobs in their areas.
Barack Obama was paid $400K/yr as president. He's arranged for his first speech, and will be paid....$400K.
Teresa May won't rate £150K per speech but I'm sure she'll do fine, or get herself appointed to the board of a few companies where they each pay something like that for about 10 days of work a year. There will surely be a book deal and she'll get a million pound advance or something like that for "The Inside Story of Brexit" or whatever.
Nice work if you can get it.
That's kind of the problem though. The fact that company X might give you a huge chunk of money when you leave office means that you're more likely to look favourably on them now, just to guarantee your big money payouts. If you know Goldman Sachs is going to pay you $400k for a half-hour speech after you leave office, odds are you're going to be good to Goldman Sachs IN office.
Like it or not, actually paying politicians well from the state's purse is a good way or reducing corruption, since otherwise they'll sell influence. We know this is true, simply because we tried it the other way - Britain didn't pay MPs at all until 1911, and so those who got sold influence at epic scales. It also helps to offer a salary that's competitive with private industry - after all, why take your PPE from Oxford and go and be MP for Dulwich if you could be an exec at BP for four times the money? We hate upping MPs salaries, and then we complain about the lack of talent in politics as if it's completely unrelated. It's really not, unpopular as it is to admit that.
"Like it or not, actually paying politicians well from the state's purse is a good way or reducing corruption, since otherwise they'll sell influence."
I doubt it. However much you pay them while they're in office there's still the same scope when they leave.
You'd eliminate the possibility of someone poor running for office. Do you only want the independently wealthy? If you paid minimum wage there's no way the average guy making an average salary would take a big pay cut to be an MP/congressman, he couldn't afford it.
What you need to do is make it a lot harder to cash in from the experience by lobbying etc. You can't stop them from writing books or giving speeches, and someone who reaches PM or president is always going to be in demand for stuff like that. You just don't want a former MP/congressman making a half million a year as a lobbyist wining and dining his former buddies, making them promises "if you support our stuff now, we'll take care of you with a cushy job once you get voted out or decide you're sick of campaigning and want to get rich".
£150k seems a little on the low side
It doesn't seem to have crimped the sartorial expenditure of our most recent leaders. You'd almost think it was pocket money...
Because really, 'paid more than the PM' is a daft measurement by anyone's count. Even the PM isn't paid entirely in cash, after all; s/he gets a plumb townhouse in the middle of London and a grace and favour mansion in the country, free transport to, well, everywhere on the planet, massive personal security provided round-the-clock...
So really, £150k is a completely arbitrary number, with no reference to comparative costs in the private sector in the same industry. Who the hell agreed it as a performance indicator?
Also, a former PM gets a 70k/year pension (up to 50% of salary, basically) in exchange for about 7 years* in the job. This is, I believe, payable from the day they leave. Plus you get a security detail and a driver for life. Other wealthy people have to pay for services like that.
This isn't an unusual arrangement in international terms, but if you work out the private-pension contributions that'd be required for such a retirement income, and then scale them back to even ten years of contributions.
(* a mental back-of-envelope calculation of the average UK PM's term in office since Margaret Thatcher, but as she and Tony Blair both managed 10 years, they're undoubtedly skewing the average upwards).
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The problem would solve itself if all the fools who keep handing over their tv tax money every year stopped doing so,the BBC would then have to rely on money raised by selling its (our) back library of old media,has to be old stuff cos nothing new is worth much.
How about the BBC pays the gov £2b per year for ten years,then they can go for an ipo of the entire Corp,but no tv tax.treat it like everything else public that we thought we owned but don't anymore,I'm sure the Germans/French/murdoch would jump at the chance of buying up more of the UK..
I can think of dozens of solutions to the BBC,Dale at one end of spectrum,firing squads at the other..
"greater personalisation of BBC content"
I helps to spell that out: "greater personalisation of British Broadcasting Corporation content".
The essence of broadcasting is that it isn't personalised. Whet they're pu to is a contradiction in terms. So they can save money there. Or are they selling the collected data that's the essence of personalisation?
What's so magical about £150,000? That fact that we (vastly) underpay our politicians should have no bearing on the earning potential of Beeb execs.
How many Sky employees earn more than £150,000? How many ITV employees? Don't know? Don't care? Then why do you give a flying fuck how many Beeb employees do?
If they were being paid as much as FTSE CEOs - then we'd have a right to be angry.
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