Licence payers will fund BBC bosses massive pension annuity incomes. Or are they bigger than massive? Two BBC bosses have racked up the biggest pension payouts in the public sector, together worth over £14m. Mark Byford, 51, who is the deputy director general, is to receive a pension income of at least £229,500 a year from a fund valued at around £8m. This could rise to over £10m if he works at the BBC until 60, and Alan Yentob, 62, both the arts presenter and creative director of the BBC, has accumulated a pension fund worth £6.3m, giving an annual income of £216,667 for the rest of his life, according to recent research.
Until now it was widely thought that Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, had Britain’s largest public sector pension arrangement. His pension fund is valued at about £5.7m, paying an income of £198,613 a year.
Vince Cable, Liberal Democrat, stated that as more and more massive public sector pension arrangements are revealed, it only strengthens the case for some reform. Taxpayers really can’t afford to be paying lavish pension incomes for executives who are already very well paid. For teachers and nurses these pension schemes can deliver an appropriate pension in retirement, but these figures show that they can deliver overly large retirement packages for senior executives. This weekend it also emerged that our beloved BBC has for the past ten years or so rewarded senior executives with lavish leaving parties, with one farewell do apparently costing more than £150,000. The extravagant send-offs were not disclosed recently when executives’ expenses were published.
In addition to all this The Sunday Times has uncovered evidence that Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director general, has a second “hidden” pension worth around £2.9m. No details of this pension, accrued between 1979-2001, appear in the BBC’s most recent set of accounts. They record only the pension rights he has accumulated since his appointment as director general of the BBC in 2004, after a short spell at Channel 4. Similarly, the BBC makes public only the pension fund earned by Jana Bennett, the director of BBC Vision, since she returned to the corporation in 2002. It fails to reveal the value of her pension pot accumulated from 1979-1999.
A leading firm of pension experts, Hargreaves Lansdown, calculated how big a pension fund an individual would require to buy a given value of annuity. The valuations took account of how long the individuals had worked at the BBC, their age and their current salary.
Naturally, the BBC stated that it’s irrelevant to talk about how much it would cost to buy these pension incomes on the open market because they are not there on the open market. But wouldn’t it have been interesting to see how big a pension fund, at today’s annuity rates, would have been required to fund such retirement incomes.
