The BBC paid out more than £228million to staff for working unsociable and unpredictable hours, fuelling worries it is wasting licence fee payers’ money, according to a report on DailyMail.
The revelation comes just a day after MPs slammed the corporation for being profligate with public cash.
Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show that thousands of BBC employees take home an average of almost £4,000 on top of their basic salaries, as a reward for working irregular hours.
In an average year, 7,941 BBC employees claimed £31.2million of unpredictability allowances, meaning they took home around £3,929 each.
Many workers make multiple claims, and in some cases staff are able to claim night pay and unpredictability allowances for the same shift – helping some BBC employees to bump up their salaries by a third.
The corporation said that the lavish bonuses were necessary to keep the BBC’s news operation going through the night. A BBC spokesman said: ‘It’s impossible to broadcast 24 hours a day, seven days a week without employing people to work through the nights.
‘Like most organisations we reflect this in our pay structure – however, we’re always looking to make savings and unpredictability allowance has come down by £4million since 2010.’
He added: ‘In that same period pay restraint, combined with headcount reductions, has to date saved the BBC £150million per year.’
HQ SOLD TO ‘TAX AVOIDER’
MPs have attacked the BBC for its ‘shocking’ decision to sell Television Centre to a firm they say was ‘a tax avoidance scheme’.
In 2012, the corporation sold its West London headquarters to Whitewood, a consortium of businesses which channels its funds through Luxembourg.
Margaret Hodge, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, asked BBC executives ‘what on Earth’ made them agree to the £200million deal.
‘This was clearly a tax avoidance scheme,’ she said, adding: ‘You are a public body and my view is when you dispose of what effectively are public assets there is a responsibility on you to ensure the people you deal with do not avoid tax.’
Anne Bulford, who became the BBC’s finance chief after the deal, said the corporation had taken ‘full legal advice’ and concluded that Whitewood was not doing anything illegal.
A spokesman for Stanhope, one of the firms involved in Whitewood, said the consortium was ‘a perfectly lawful vehicle for transactions of this nature’.
However, MPs branded the payments unnecessary. John Hemming, Liberal Democrat MP for Birmingham Yardley, said: ‘The BBC often unnecessarily puts someone in live situations when the story could be told just as well without doing that.
‘If it weren’t paid by an effective poll tax, it might be different. The BBC tends not to be driven by the need to be efficient.’
Yesterday, the Culture, Media and Sport select committee was scathing in its criticism of the BBC’s approach to spending public money.
In a major report entitled Future of the BBC, it painted a devastating picture of an organisation that has blown millions of pounds trying to be ‘all things to all people’ – including £100million on its failed Digital Media Initiative technology project.
MPs ordered the corporation to give the National Audit Office unfettered access to its books, to ensure it doesn’t squander funds in future.
But today’s revelations are unlikely to help restore confidence in the corporation’s spending habits.
The committee also said that the £145.50-a-year BBC licence fee should be scrapped by the end of the next decade, and replaced with a combination of a blanket household levy and a subscription fee for niche services.
It also called for the abolition of the BBC Trust, the organisation’s governing body, claiming it was ‘too close’ to the corporation and ‘blurred accountability’.
