Confidentiality agreements between the BBC and top radio stars are preventing full scrutiny of the way it spends public money, a report from an influential group of MPs has revealed.
The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee said yesterday the BBC appeared to be paying some of its best known radio presenters, including Jonathan Ross, Chris Moyles and Sir Terry Wogan, more than twice what commercial stations pay theirs.
The BBC refused to provide the National Audit Office with a breakdown of presenters' salaries for a selection of radio shows unless the public spending watchdog signed a non-disclosure agreement, the committee said.
It spent £605m on its radio services in 2007/08, or around one fifth of its spending and was engulfed in controversy over the £18m deal over three years reportedly signed with Ross, who presents a Friday night TV chat show and Saturday show on Radio 2.
Radio 1 breakfast show host Moyles is said to be on £630,000 a year while Radio 2 star Wogan is reportedly paid an annual salary of £800,000. It took repeated requests to the BBC for it to reveal that Ross was paid £6m a year.
But while the salaries of Moyles, and Wogan have come under scrutiny and some of the money-spinning deals have been made public, it continues to refuse to disclose other salaries.
Around 40 BBC television and radio stars are reportedly earning more than £1m a year including Graham Norton, reputedly on £2.5m a year, and Jeremy Paxman, who is said to earn £1m a year.
Edward Leigh MP, the chairman of the committee, said it was "disgraceful" that the BBC could dictate what the watchdog could inspect when public money was at stake.
The report on the efficiency of radio production at the BBC said the government should arrange for the watchdog to have legally-guaranteed right of access to the BBC's expenditure, including presenters' salaries, as it does for other publicly-funded bodies.
Mr Leigh said: "The National Audit Office has a statutory right to examine the details of expenditure in any government department. It has no such right of audit access to the BBC, despite the fact that the corporation is funded with over £3bn of public money each year.
"One consequence of this highly unsatisfactory arrangement is that the BBC would not provide the head of the National Audit Office, the Controller and Auditor General, with a breakdown of the presenter and staff elements of radio programme costs, unless they agreed to constrain discretion to report to parliament on what they saw.
"Very few will find acceptable any such constraints on the National Audit Office's ability to investigate how a publicly-funded national institution spends our money. It is disgraceful that the National Audit Office's lack of statutory audit access to the BBC puts the corporation in the position to dictate what the spending watchdog can and cannot see."
The report found that programmes such as Wake Up to Wogan on Radio 2 cost on average twice as much per hour as the most expensive commercial breakfast show.
For the corporation's breakfast and "drivetime" shows, presenters' salaries accounted for around three quarters of the total staff costs.
The MPs said the BBC's main value for money test, the so-called "cost per listener hour", which takes the size of audience into account, risked creating an inflationary wage spiral, and should be balanced with a range of other measures.
While commercial stations had been cutting hourly rates for presenters in response to falling advertising revenues and an increasingly fragmented audience, the BBC had until recently been increasing its rates, the report said.
The BBC Trust, the corporation's governing body, said it was "disappointed" the NAO would not sign the non-disclosure agreement.
Jeremy Peat, a BBC Trustee, said: "The Trust is committed to ensuring value for money for licence fee-payers. That's why we have commissioned a series of such studies from the NAO and others."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article