BBC spends £277m on redundancy payments in seven years

Staff received payouts as high as £949,000 for both compulsory and voluntary redundancies.

By Emily Wight Published 17 April 2012

Photo: Getty Images

New figures show that the BBC spent £276,833,465 in redundancy payments in the past seven years.

A Freedom of Information request by the Guardian reveals that nearly 6,000 BBC staff took an average of £46,200 between March 2005 and February 2012, with the highest-paid member of staff, who the BBC refused to name, receiving £949,000. The same amount was paid to the former deputy director general Mark Byford, who left in June last year.

£66.4m was paid out between March 2011 and February 2012 alone. The redundancies were both compulsory and voluntary.

A statement from the BBC said: "Since 2005, the BBC has made significant reductions in its headcount as part of overall efficiency savings. While this has necessitated some one-off redundancy costs, this is outweighed by the cumulative savings achieved over this period of £2.7bn."

Delivering Quality First, the BBC's cost-cutting initiative, will lead to several thousand more redundancies.

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Tags: media BBC

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3 comments

Wed, 2012-06-13 17:26 — Andrew Chapman (not verified)

This is quite a good article. Many new questions emerge to the surface, all you need do is to read further information about the issues. Only then one can form a final view on a particular subject. Otherwise everything is seen only in the dimension of cum more black and white. The natural logic of evaluating things before vstavane skrine they were properly cognitively processed is a horrible mistake, made by those less intelligent. People should not throw away their common slovakia sense easily. Anything and everything deserves appropriate time for making judgements.

Wed, 2012-04-25 10:00 — Barrie J (not verified)

It is impossible to have any confidence in any of the BBC's operations.
It's programme output is turgid crap and it's news coverage puerile.
The licence fee is theft.

Tue, 2012-04-17 19:13 — Indu Pendent

One of the benefits of working for a highly unionised business is increased payouts on termination. But society are large is penalised for it. (Unions 1, Rest of society 0)

£46k average is an obscene joke. The going rate even back then for volunatary terminations is = pay in leiu of notice + notice pay as compensation + statutory redundancy + employers enhancement (typically 1 to 4 weeks pay for each year of service). So someone on 1 months notice @ £25k average and 8 years service should have been getting about £10k to £15k. So where does the BBC's £46k licence fee payers money come from?

This is a very strong argument for breaking up the BBC into specialised areas and allowing more private involvement whilst retaining the independency of its editorial.