The BBC are great advocates of the Minimum Wage and this piece of analysis provided in this FOI request provided by B-BBC reader Alan may explain why;
“BBC researchers or admin staff are clearly well rewarded for their endeavours.
Looking at a BBC reply to a freedom of information request it stated that:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/foi/classes/disclosure_logs/rfi20101040_common_purpose_spend_200506_200910.pdf
‘As not all training is recorded centrally, in order to respond in full to your request the BBC would need to carry out an audit of each of its departments to check their local training records to ascertain how many BBC employees attended. As there are over 20,000 staff currently at the BBC, we estimate that to carry out this search would take more than two and a half days. Under section 12 of the Act, we are allowed to refuse to handle the request if it would exceed the appropriate limit. The appropriate limit has been set by the Regulations (SI 2004/3244) as being £450 (equivalent to two and a half days work, at an hourly rate of £25).’
Now dusting off the calculator and tapping away quickly tells me that £25/hour for an 8 hour day, 5 day week, 52 weeks a year would give a not too shabby salary of over £50,000.Not quite Jonathan Ross territory…but not bad anyway for shuffling a few files about. Also of interest might be this revelation about the BBC’s purpose behind sending people on ‘Common Purpose’ courses….
‘As background, Common Purpose training was provided as a structured exercise to assist senior editorial staff in building partnerships and developing knowledge, experience and contacts in their local area. This is consistent with the BBC’s public purposes (as set out in the Charter and Agreement), in particular “Sustaining citizenship and civil society” and “Stimulating creativity and cultural excellence”, both of which require editorial staff to have a thorough understanding of the social and cultural characteristics of their local area. Staff who attended the course reported that it had been both a really useful learning/training experience and had also opened up a huge network of contacts.’
Building networks, contacts, friendships, partnerships…..always something that would need very careful handling….ensuring that people do not become too close to that network, too reliant on it, or too subservient to it….doing its bidding rather than the network working for you.
That reminded me to query my local county council.
Re. the minimum wage, I propose a maximum cap on pension and redundancy entitlements to be written into the BBC (Privatisation) Bill. The cost of stripping away all the fat might otherwise make the flotation unattractive to investors. £10,000 pa pension cap and the same to get lost seems just right.
This would make a great additional bizarre chapter to any H2G2 book, though sadly Douglas Adams is no longer with us.
The £25/hr is the “loaded hourly rate” and includes not just the employee’s salary but the additional costs due to eg employer’s NI contribution, employer’s pension contribution, HR costs, line management costs, office accommodation and equipment costs, paid leave, and so on. Actual figures will vary but a typical finger-in-the-wind value for such attributable on-costs would be 100% of the salary. This is normal conmmercial practice.
On this basis the Beeboid doing the work would probably be getting around £25,000 in actual salary, which is pretty average. I’d say the BBC are charging a pretty fair price.