According to your editorial (24 November), the BBC has “one card to play: the ability to organise the arrangements for the over-75s differently”. What about the rest of its deck? Ending its profligate ways would be a good starting point. This could be followed by imposing a salary cap on presenters, while insisting on an equal gender pay policy, and also that no employees are paid via their companies for tax purposes. Which presenter could claim that earning, say, £200,000 a year, seven times the national average, was insufficient to fund a very pleasant lifestyle? Similarly, what is the point of a public corporation complaining about the lack of government funding if its pay policies encourage tax avoidance, deny millions to the treasury, and require years of enquiry by HMRC?
Then there is management pay; a report by the National Audit Office in 2017 revealed that the number of BBC managers earning over £150,000 was still increasing, despite the corporation’s pledge to reduce it by 20%. The BBC website is still listing well over 100 managers earning above that! Perhaps such profligacy could be forgiven if BBC managers were actually producing the goods, but popular programmes like Bodyguard and Dynasties are increasingly rare, “younger audiences are using the BBC less and less”, top sports events are being lost, and the sorely needed “watch-on-demand” culture is stifled by a fixation with outdated multi-channel broadcasting. Let’s not “squander nor diminish” the role of the BBC, but also not forget its mismanagement.
Bernie Evans
Liverpool
• Your piece regarding the future of the concessionary TV licence for the over-75s omits to mention the serious drawbacks of means-testing, while sadly reiterating the myths surrounding a phoney generational conflict. The concession was introduced because successive governments have avoided improving the UK state pension, and instead offered additional universal benefits. Our pension remains the bottom of the OECD league table.
The suggestion that a large number of wealthy pensioners have greedily applied for this concession is incorrect. Around half of all pensioners have an income of less than £12,000 a year, pensioner poverty is now rising and loneliness among the over-65s is becoming more and more serious. The BBC should never have been given the responsibility to fund this concession and the sooner it is returned to government the better. In the meantime, taxing the better off, regardless of age, seems fairer.
Jan Shortt
General secretary, National Pensioners Convention
• I am 84 and am grateful for the constant range of entertainment, information and companionship I receive from BBC radio and television. At less than £40 a quarter I feel it only proper to pay for this. However, the challenge comes in persuading the licence office to accept payment; I was repeatedly told that I did not need to pay. It was only after a struggle that they accepted this was indeed my wish. If it were made easier, I am sure that many better-off pensioners would willingly contribute.
Penelope Woolfitt
London
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