Not fair ?

At the same time as the BBC publicly announced its latest pay offer (billed as 'right and fair'), it also told staff it would seek a court review of its contributions to the BBC Pension Scheme. 

It wants to pay less, starting in 2024: "Reform of our UK pension provision is needed to reduce the burden on the licence fee and address the disparity between BBC colleagues".  It clearly wants to go back on a deal struck in 2020 to address the fund's deficit by 2029: under that deal, the BBC adds £75m in 2023, £94m in 2025, £102m in 2026, £110m in 2027, £118m in 2028, and £83m in 2029, on top of its regular employer's contributions. (Spookily, the BBC paid two year's money in one go in the middle of the pandemic, coughing up £95.4m in March 2021). 

Who's fronting this call for a review ? The COO ?  The CFO ?  No, Tim Davie has lighted upon trusties Rhodri Talfan Davies, Director of Nations and BBC Cymru/Wales, and Gautam Rangarajan, Group Director of Strategy and Performance, who say they're “not proposing any specific changes at this stage”, which seems an odd way to approach the High Court.  So far there's no comment from the BBC management trustees of the Pension Scheme: Martyn Freeman, COO BBC Studios; David Jordan, Director, Editorial Policy and Standards; Glyn Isherwood, soon-to-depart Chief Finance Officer; and Peter Johnston, Director BBC Northern Ireland, currently rolling out impartiality. 

We have heard from one other trustee, David Gallagher, a Radio 3 producer and NUJ rep, who's resigned to fight the move. He said the plans were “unethical and unjustified”. 

"BBC management's communications appear to be trying to plant the idea (without ever stating it outright) that the only way of improving pensions for staff who've joined the BBC since 2010 would be by cutting the pensions of staff who've been here longer."

"This BBC management-created 'inconsistency' follows a playbook that they've used repeatedly. Their trick is to change the rules so that new BBC staff get a worse deal than existing BBC staff. They've  already done this three times with pensions, in 1996, 2006 and 2010: each time new staff got significantly worse pension provisions than existing staff."