Counting house

Finally, some new salary stuff from the BBC, in response to their ever-growing Freedom of Information request inbox (2,105 made in 2014 - just over eight every working day).

The average salary in BBC News. of those graded on Bands 2 to 11, was £62,012, as at 30th June 2014. My readers at the Mail will note that this is, at least, slightly below the basic for an MP.

It does not, however, not include staff paid on a Special Personal Salary - 473 of them, all likely to be on rates above the top of their nominal grade. The BBC says it won't publish those details: "Salaries for staff on SPS conditions are individually negotiated and as such the published roof doesn’t apply. This means that the recipient has an all-inclusive salary that buys out their entitlement to other allowances". I suspect this non-disclosure will be challenged.

The average also doesn't include the salaries of the 103 employees paid as Senior Managers. There's one Senior Manager for every 70 workers. Between March 2013 and June 2014, the number of Senior Managers fell by 4. Spookily, the number of staff graded 11 ("SM3" as the unions like to call it) grew by 8.  If you add them in to the mix, there's a well-paid manager for every 27 workers.

As we've noted in this blog, there's been a steady exodus of staff taking redundancy deals in the past month. But in these new figures, total News employees grew (albeit only by 5) between March 2013 and June 2014, to 7278. Director James Harding clearly had some catching up to do on his savings targets.