BBC Pay Salaries: Gary Lineker still highest paid star despite cut

The highest BBC pay salaries still go to Gary Lineker and Zoe Ball, despite them both taking a pay cut.

Lineker remains the top earner even though he agreed to a cut of nearly £400,000. The broadcaster’s annual report shows the Match of the Day host’s earnings fell from £1.75m to £1.36m in the 2020/21 financial year. The second highest paid star is Radio 2’s Zoe Ball, who earned £1.13m after offering to take a reduction in pay towards the end of last year. Her current salary is now £980,000, a 28% decrease from the previous year.

BBC Director General Tim Davie says most of the negotiations with top stars over their pay were “mutual and constructive”. The corporation are willing to do what it takes to get more value, even if it means making tough decisions. They will now “maintain restraint in pay across the top talent” and “continue to look for efficiency” savings in the future.

Broadcasters earning over £150,000 had wages reduced by £2.2m. This resulted in a total wage bill of all stars dropping by 10%, down from £144m last year to £130m.

Five of the six highest BBC pay salaries, including Steve Wright, Huw Edwards and Fiona Bruce, are now less than last year’s earnings. However, 5 Live presenter Stephen Nolan, in joint-fifth place, saw a salary increase of £15,000.

Pay gaps

There remains four women in the top 10 earners, including Vanessa Feltz and Lauren Laverne, alongside Ball and Bruce. A total of 31 women feature on the list, while there are 40 men, showing a 44%/56% split. This is despite previous director general Tony Hall’s pledges to close the gap by 2020.

Another thing to stay the same as last year is that all of the top 10 earners are white. The overall employee pay gap has widened slightly for minority groups, even though it is up by 2% from last year. Only 20% of all presenters earning more than £150,000 are from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Covid cancellations also contributed to the BBC making savings last year. The UK host of Eurovision coverage, Graham Norton, who also left his Radio 2 show last December, dropped out of the top 10. Sue Barker and John McEnroe were also hit as Wimbledon did not go ahead in 2020 due to the pandemic.

Mr Davie admitted “quite a lot” of “little reductions” because the majority of major sporting and cultural events did not happen last year. But he maintains that most of the pay cuts were “structural”.

The government have enforced that the BBC must publish the identities of those earning over £150,000 each year. This is something done since 2017, and Lineker has topped the list every time. However, some spend is omitted from the list as it comes under the corporation’s commercial arm, BBC Studios, which does not need to publish the information.

However, many stars do not appear on the list because the corporation’s commercial arm, BBC Studios, does not have to publish its talent spend.

What else does the report say?

The report also shows the number of senior leaders at the BBC has fallen from 253 to 241. And the total workforce has seen a 6% decrease, with a reduction of more than 1,200 people.

Meanwhile, BBC iPlayer audiences are up by 28% compared to last year. The digital service attracted a record number of 6.1 billion streams.

Nine out of 10 adults use the BBC every week, spending an average of 18 hours and two minutes watching, listening or reading. This is a rise from last year’s average of 17 hours 45 minutes. However, the same cannot be said of younger age groups, with numbers falling significantly.

80% of those aged between 16 and 34 used the BBC every week, with 51% of them watching TV, and 47% listening to the radio. The audience of people aged under 16 using the BBC every week was 77%.

BBC Studios suffered a 10% drop in sales, and 17% decrease in profits. Although their reduced figures were because of pauses in production and constraints during the pandemic.

BBC chairman Richard Sharp commented on their work throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. He says the “speed and agility of the response” to the crisis the nation faced was “exceptional”. “Almost overnight” they “reconfigured all the BBC’s output around the most urgent needs of the country”. This clearly demonstrates the importance of fulfilling the BBC’s “core mission to inform, educate and entertain”.

Despite pressures of inflated production prices and competition from global giants, “the BBC has proved itself to be resilient and relevant and competitive”.

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