BBC spends £300m of taxpayer cash on redundancy payments with average payout being £70,000
BBC workers have pocketed £336million in redundancy payments in the past ten years, figures reveal.
It comes despite the broadcaster being previously warned that the settlements “provided poor value for money and put public trust at risk”
Among recent exits were big name presenters Joanna Gosling, David Eades and Tim Willcox, who left voluntarily last year.
Their severance payments were among the 5,242 made since 2013, according to figures released under a Freedom of Information request.
They include 1,122 to former top bosses who got more than £100,000 each. In the past three years 2,267 staff have left with a share of £155million.
It means the average payout was worth almost £70,000.
The National Audit Office had said in 2013 that “weak governance arrangements led to payments that exceeded contractual entitlements, provided poor value for money and put public trust at risk”.
Andrew Allison, of campaign group the Freedom Association, said: “This is another example, in a long list of examples, of how the BBC wastes licence fee-payers’ money.”
John O’Connell, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “Overly-generous contracts for BBC bigwigs are costing licence fee-payers a fortune.”
A BBC spokesman said: “We have contractual obligations to fulfil when staff are made redundant.
“Our redundancy spend is now 30 per cent less than a decade ago after we introduced a cap on payments in 2013.”