Delayed reward at the BBC

When I joined the BBC in the seventies, the UK was living in a world of annual pay rounds and negotiations, sometimes followed by strikes. In the calendar of these deals, the BBC was often first to make the newspapers, reaching a deal in August or September. Ford was another big employer who settled at that time of the year. Then an astute HR Director moved the BBC's deal time to December - which took some newspaper heat off, and meant, heading to Christmas, that many staff were less minded to strike. (Later another director tweaked the system so that we were paid half way through a month, rather than at the end - this meant two pay cheques in a fortnight one Christmas !)

Now we're in a pay cut round - with scrutiny on BBC salaries, compared with those of the Prime Minister, public servants, quango heads and commercial media companies. This will resound next week with the publication of the Annual Report. Cutting the number of senior managers more quickly, freezing the top salaries, and/or working one month without pay won't cut it with Fleet Street, so there'll be headlines. But someone quite clever has bought the BBC time - hidden in Sir Michael Lyons' hair shirt speech on Wednesday is a promise of a reformed pay system in 18 months' time. That means others can get on with slashing salaries, while the BBC waits for what it hopes will be economically easier times.

Earlier in the week, Caroline Thomson said new senior managers would in future be recruited at rates "tens of per cents" lower than commercial equivalent salaries. This is old news, from the last go at dealing with the issue of top pay (see Page 12 of this document) in October 2009. The issue about discounting is the quality of information you get from other companies, themselves now looking to cut costs. The BBC can also be quite cute about stats - there are senior managers, people doing important working managing others, and Senior Managers (a job grade). There are other grades with different benefits that can be used to pay people quite well.

Meanwhile a reformed pay system can't simply be built on a discount to the market. The long grass is very useful for this sort of difficult stuff - especially when the great BBC gold watch, the Pension, now looks pretty tarnished. Could this astute play-for-time be the work of Director of Reward Robert Johnston (salary £183,750, total package £196,550) or Director of BBC People Lucy Adams (salary in June last year £320,000) ?