BBC Gender Pay: “We have either lost or settled every single case” DG Lord Hall tells Commons Committee in tough encounter with John Nicolson

The BBC Director General, Lord Hall, faced persistent forensic questioning on Gender Pay, Samira Ahmed and Victoria Derbyshire from the diversity champion SNP MP John Nicolson at a Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee hearing on 12 March 2020.

As well as conceding the BBC had never won a gender pay case, Hall said the Committee had been right to insist on pay transparency in the face of BBC opposition at the time.

This is the official transcript of the revealing interchanges.

John Nicolson:

Let me move on to gender pay, because a previous Committee here also recommended—in fact, it was my proposal—that the BBC should publish the pay of its presenters. I was lobbied quite heavily by the BBC not to advocate that. I thought it would show a significant gender pay gap and a small number of BME people at senior levels. Of course, that is exactly what it showed, and I know you have had some difficulty with female presenters, to put it mildly, since the pay was revealed. Can I ask you, how many gender pay tribunals are you currently fighting?

Lord Hall: Eleven, in the pipeline or that are going—

• John Nicolson: Have you won any tribunals that you have fought thus far?

Lord Hall: Well, we lost the Samira Ahmed case, which I think is probably what is in your mind. Can I make one comment on the Samira Ahmed case, which is—

• John Nicolson: Can we come back to that? I would just like to know how many you have settled so far?

Lord Hall: The number of cases that we have settled at tribunal: I haven’t got the answer to that—

• John Nicolson: Single figures? Double figures?

Lord Hall: Single figures.

• John Nicolson: Have you had a tribunal thus far and won it?

Lord Hall: Again, I can provide you with information on that; I will happily write to you to tell you—

• John Nicolson: You don’t know whether you have won any of them?

Lord Hall: Look, we settle some before they get to tribunal, but I am happy to go back and give you that data.

• John Nicolson: So you have either lost or settled every single case thus far?

Lord Hall: We have either lost or settled every single case, yes, quite obviously.

• John Nicolson: So you lost to Sarah Montague and you had to give her an out-of-court settlement.

Lord Hall: No, no.

• John Nicolson: Well, you gave her an out-of-court settlement.

Lord Hall: No, hold on.

• John Nicolson: That’s what she’s hinted.

Lord Hall: Sarah Montague did not go to tribunal. Sarah Montagu was settled, I have to say after some time, but amicably. She is a terrific presenter doing a great job on “World at One”.We came to a settlement with her.

• John Nicolson: It was an out-of-court settlement?

Lord Hall: It was a settlement done between ourselves and her.

• John Nicolson: Because she was taking action against you, wasn’t she?

Lord Hall: No, she was going through our process, which starts off informal and then becomes formal.

• John Nicolson: She described her settlement as an “out-of-court settlement”, which rather suggests that she was in the process of legal action.

Lord Hall: I am not aware that there was a tribunal date set or any of that in her case, but, again, I could find out for you. People talk about out-of-court settlements.

• John Nicolson: She is a journalist. She will use her language precisely, I am sure.

Lord Hall: We settled that properly—

• John Nicolson: For ￡400,000?

Lord Hall: For a sum that she can disclose, but I won’t.

• John Nicolson: She has disclosed it. You also, as you say, lost to Samira Ahmed, and you are now coughing up another ￡400,000 for her. Don’t you think it’s time you stopped fighting all those women, not least since you keep losing to them?

Lord Hall: Let me say that we have had 1,324 pay queries, of which we have resolved 97%. There are some still left to be resolved. The interesting thing about the Samira Ahmed case was that the judge said that the payment we should make to her was for something that was done way before my time, in 2008.

• John Nicolson: Was that in Lord Birt’s time?

Lord Hall: No. Can I just make a point, though? Most of these are about historical pay anomalies, and they are things that we are trying to clear up and get right. It is my job to get them done right. The tribunal judge said in the Samira Ahmed case that she was not making any claim or declaring a claim after 2018, because at that point we had in place proper ways of determining what a presenter should be paid. That is the most important thing: we have now put in place the right ways of judging how we should pay our presenters.

• John Nicolson: You say they are historical cases, but when we forced you to publish the pay, it showed not just historical discrimination, but ongoing, current discrimination. That is why so many of your female staff were outraged.

Lord Hall: No, I think most of the cases that have been dealt with are sorting out historical anomalies. Going back to what I was saying earlier about our HR system, we have been reforming and putting in place systems where we can be clear about who is paid what for what job. That includes presenters as well as the rest of the staff of the BBC. That means, for the first time, if you are a member of staff, you can now look at your pay and assess it against other people’s. There is a transparency there, above a certain number, so you can judge whether your pay is right or not. That is why we have had a lot of pay queries, most of which we have now settled.

• John Nicolson: I think a lot of the pay queries—

Clare Sumner: May I just make this point, Mr Nicolson? I am keen to say that our overall gender pay gap is a lot lower than the average gender pay gap, and it is continuing to come down. We have put a lot of work, and rightly so, into ensuring that that continues to be the case. Of course, we run an organisation of around 20,000 people, so those figures are really important. We have been one of the leaders among the media organisations, but also comparatively. Those foundation stones of our HR system are enabling us to bring down the gender pay gap, and that is really important.

• John Nicolson: But the reason a lot of these high-profile women realised how much less they were being paid than their colleagues was that we forced you to publish the pay, although you had not wanted to do so. As I say, what it showed was not just historical gender pay gaps. Take Sarah Montague, for example.

You may have been paying her less than her colleagues over many years, but, Lord Hall, you didn’t look at her pay and think, “Do you know what? That’s very poor”—by comparison with her colleagues, although it is a great deal of money by most people’s standards. You didn’t then say, “I’m going to have a really embarrassing conversation with Sarah Montague. I am going to call her in and tell her that she has been paid much less than her male colleagues.” It took this Committee to force that.

Lord Hall: It is a success for this Committee that it persuaded the then Secretary of State, Karen Bradley, that we should be transparent on on-air pay above ￡150k. There is no doubt about that.

• John Nicolson: Are you glad that we did that?

Lord Hall: Let me come on to that. As you remember well, I was worried that this would be a poacher’s Charter. I have also said to this Committee—you, sadly, weren’t there, Mr Nicolson—that I got that wrong. I think transparency is right.

I would put two caveats on that. One is that we have undoubtedly lost people because their pay has been known to other broadcasters, who have used that to take them away from us. That is happening reasonably often. Secondly, I ask you to think about the deterrence effect on people who are saying, “Do you know what? I am being offered similar pay outside, so do I want to come to the BBC where my pay is known by everyone?” There are some caveats to my welcome of the transparency.

To go back to the central point you are making, we have been reforming this organisation, with help from yourselves and others, to get to the point where we know why someone is paid x or why they are paid y. The thing about the Samira Ahmed case—quite apart from her being the talented journalist that she is—is that the judge recognised that in her judgment. It is important to say that, going forward, we now have proper criteria, not just for those behind the camera and the microphone, but for those in front as well.

• John Nicolson: So why did you allow it to go to the tribunal? Why didn’t you say, “This is unfair, and I am not going to allow it to happen”?

Lord Hall: The equal and opposite case, Mr Nicolson, is that I could come before you now, saying I would agree to this settlement—as you put it, this “out-of-court settlement”—without having tested it. We felt the amount was something we should test in the court. To be honest with you, we were surprised at the result.

• John Nicolson: I wouldn’t have said that, on a matter of justice, you should test it; I think you should do the honourable thing. I don’t think you should have forced her to fight this case.

Lord Hall: We have been doing the honourable thing throughout. I am not going to get into whether or not it was possible to settle with Samira Ahmed; that is a different issue. There are occasions when you should test these things through the tribunal. I would like to keep that to the minimum, and what I have been trying to do throughout this period, with these very difficult cases, is to ensure that we come to proper decisions and settlements with people on historic anomalies in their pay.

• John Nicolson: I suspect she was desperate to settle, because who would want to go through what she went through? It was just that you guys kept telling her that she wasn’t the same as Jeremy Vine, and she wasn’t prepared to stomach that.

Lord Hall: I don’t know what was in her mind, Mr Nicolson. I wouldn’t be so presumptuous to say.

• John Nicolson: I read what she says. I return to the point that some colleagues have mentioned a number of times about the “Victoria Derbyshire” show. In the context of the way that senior women have been treated in the BBC, and the sense of grievance that so many of them feel, I think it a terrible pity that the high-profile programme that you chose to axe was presented by a high-profile woman.

I have looked carefully at the criteria that Victoria Derbyshire and her team were given by her bosses, and they were threefold: to target underserved audiences, to break original stories and to grow the digital audience. My understanding is that the team, and Victoria herself, had been told repeatedly by management, until recently, that they had achieved these three objectives triumphantly. But, she and her programme, which covers very important social issues that I suspect the Government find most uncomfortable on a great number of occasions, have been dumped. The team have been told that it’s because they failed to grow the television audience, the non-digital audience, which she was never given as an objective.

Lord Hall: I have given my answer to others before, Mr Nicolson, and I haven’t got anything else to add. We are having to make difficult decisions, and this is one of them.