OT: No Austerity in the BBC!

[James Wilkinson Sword]

Football is the most boring sport ever invented. Worse than golf!

[James Wilkinson Sword]

That defeats the point of being a charity.

[Cursitor Doom]

...and there never could be for this jaded assortment of talentless dullards who only got into the cushy positions they enjoy (at our considerable expense) through brown-nosing and virtue-signalling.

[Chris]

Naw.. get rid of the *lot* of them: men, women and the inbetweenies.

You want to see ancient scrag-end like Winkleman & Feltz with their junk hanging out??

[James Wilkinson Sword]

The remote control can be used to fast forward the ugly ones.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Depends what you mean by employed. You might employ a window cleaner, but you ain't normally responsible for paying his tax and NI.

Tekkies wouldn't normally make enough to be on that list.

The vast majority of my work as a freelance was for one company. The IR seemed happy enough with that.

[bert]

In article , michael adams writes

Expert on head-hunting are we?

>

[Scott]

You know and I know that window cleaners do not earn £150,000 so do not feature on the BBC list. I am asking you why some names - such as Chris Evans and Gary LIneker - are on the list and some - such as David Dimbleby - are not. You seem to be doing your best to evade the question.

I didn't ask about tekkies. I asked about freelancers. Again you are evading the question. If a presenter earns more than £150k as a freelancer does that name appear on the list of those earning over £150k?

Yes but this means you had other clients. My understanding is that if there is only one client the company is considered to be artificial and the payment is treated as earned income subject to deduction of tax at source.

[tim...]

I explained this earlier

It is not an issue of whether they are "employed", it is an issue of whether they are "contracted" to work on a program that is wholly made by the BBC or one which is made by an outside production company.

The difference being that in the first there is a know amount of money being paid to the talent, with the latter the amount for the talent is inseparable from the other production costs

tim

[tim...]

and how would they "negotiate" being shown at a different time to the other

8 PL games each weekend??

How would anybody get to negotiate which match got the extra revenue from being shown at "prime" time? (whenever that actually is)

tim

[tim...]

well of course there is

arguing otherwise is silly

tim

[JoeJoe]

Because he and the rest of them are shielded behind a production company (often with just himself, the wife and the 10 year old daughter as sole directors).

So in essence the slot on the TV or radio was outsourced to an external body that is paid for a ready-for-broadcast package. In this case the presenter is not employed by the BBC, and therefore the BBC do not have to report their salary.

This is somewhat different from the old trick used by many BBC "stars" who were (are?) BBC employees for all intent and purposes, but instead of being paid directly, set up companies with themselves as sole directors and beneficiaries and asked the BBC to pay the company instead, hence substantially reducing their tax burden.

[JoeJoe]

The reason employee of state-owned companies or civil servants were/are paid less is/used to be a trade off with having many exclusive benefits reserved only for them instead, namely: generous final-salary pension, longer paid sick leave, longer paid maternity leave, longer holidays, etc, etc They are also all but un-sackable, regardless of their ability to perform the job for which they are paid.

I can still remember the two who finished at the bottom of our class at university who ended up working for the council and the university, as that was the only option they had - the jobs the rest of us took paid very substantially better, but we didn't have the job security.

Unfortunately this is how it used to be historically, but since New Labour civil servants (and the BBC for that matter) have managed to have the cake, and eat it. The level of salaries in the public sector has exploded in the last 20 years or so, and although this resulted in attracting better quality people into the service, it is still primarily made up of people who will not last a minute in the real world.

[charles]

While the top people in the public sector are being paid more, there is still a lower end problem. Salaries there are not enough to attract decent staff. As one of my friends said of a department at our County Council "They're so incompetant that they must rehearse at it".

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I'm not. And that has been already answered. The BBC contracts Dimbleby's production company. That company pays Dimbleby.

What I was trying to tell you was that talent isn't normally on PAYE. Most are not actually employees in the legal sense of the word. Although some may be.

Freelance is just a term that can be applied to anyone who works for a company but isn't staff.

You think every actor who appears on Eastenders or Casualty etc on a regular basis is BBC staff?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Wonder what the market rate is for a 'bert'? ;-)

[Mark]

I doubt this still applies.

But they still need to earn enough to live on.

The latter is just a guess. As I suggested before, higher salaries do not necessarily attract better people.

[Mark]

--snip--

Can a 10 year old become a director?

Yes, A tax avoidance scheme.

[Mark]

I think there's one on Freecycle.

[bert]

John Birt the former DG was paid in this way so you can't be surprised everyone else has copied. It's HMRC who should be clamping down on this.