Drain

I reckon whatever contingency BBC News built in to its budget for this year (not a habit with James Harding, I surmise) has gone.

At the weekend, Carrie Gracie revealed to the Sunday Telegraph that she'd been offered £105k in back pay (not accepted) in a bid to resolve her equal pay grievance as China Editor. That's just for three years. Lord knows how much Sarah Montague is due, and there'll be dozens more doing their own calculations on the basis of the Gracie offer.

Also in The Telegraph, a letter from 170 anonymous BBC presenters, trying to call the BBC's bluster over personal service companies, adamant that the managers forced them to work that way, and therefore must take some of the financial responsibility for the HMRC's claims for back tax.

‘Presenters were told that if they did not form a PSC, the BBC would no longer give them any work. Many of them did not want to set up a PSC but felt they had no choice To suggest that working through a PSC was a free choice is simply nonsense – and the BBC knows it is untrue.' 170 times.

Are we going to get 170 denials ?  The BBC refers back to a Deloitte report it commissioned in 2012, which, it says, found no evidence of tax avoidance, or individuals being forced to move from staff contracts onto PSCs. Note that leaves out the question of 'freelances', of which there were many.

The Deloitte report sampled just 108 contracts, out of 3272 already on PSCs; the BBC's freelance on-air population at the time was over 45,000. The Deloitte report says the BBC had, at that time, a clear policy of engaging on-air talent through PSCs "where contracts are likely to exceed six months in duration or over £10k in value, rather than engaging them as employed or self-employed following the application of employment status tests".

Is a 'clear policy' enough of an arm-twister ?