Women on top

In the PR battle over equal pay at the BBC, BBC Women coming bouncing back this morning with the publication of their evidence to the DCMS Select Committee, with 14 case studies and six pages of argument.  The NUJ written evidence is also in; but there's nowt, as yet, from the BBC.

The BBC "big, bold pay modernisation" looks, until we get more detail, like a simple cap, at £320k on pay for news presenters, at least in their principal employment.

The 14 cases, across news, sport and regional news, look convincing. They create a picture of managers unwilling to budge when confronted.

Each BBC manager gets a monthly update from finance of the pay of people on their departmental code (usually to check they're not still paying someone who's left.) Each BBC manager sits down annually with HR to discuss salary adjustments in the August pay round, distributing the meagre 1% set aside for additional reward. Local HR and local BBC managers know when things are unequal - but are left on their on to find cute ways of sorting issues. You can't build your own fund to deal with unequal pay - budget savings go back to the centre, and can't be carried forward. The only way to produce money is to leave posts empty, run with freelances, and hope your output doesn't suffer. Or to look for long grass.

Since 2015, News HR has been run by Dale Haddon, who came from the Post Office, and commissioned research to show that BBC hacks were overpaid eighteen months ago. Under James Harding, presenter pay has been the domain of his former Times sidekick, Keith Blackmore.