High-profile BBC journalists and presenters such as Nick Robinson, Laura Kuenssberg and John Humphrys will have their pay made public as part of a plan imposed by the government while it renews the BBC’s royal charter. The draft charter is also likely to require that the BBC moves to smaller bands than £50,000 “in line with public sector best practice” in the future. The government’s disclosure rules only apply to those paid by the licence fee, which is expected to catch most of the best-known news presenters. The pay of senior BBC executives is already disclosed, with government sources calling the historic secrecy around presenters’ and actors’ pay “an anomaly”. That will be seen as a victory for the BBC, which had warned of the risks of creeping political control.

Source: The Guardian September 14, 2016 21:00 UTC