Huw Edwards, 62, could still retire on a BBC pension paying more than £300,000 a year despite his convictions for creating indecent images including of a seven year-old child. The Telegraph has more.
BBC Director-General Tim Davie on Thursday said the gold-plated deal would be “very difficult to claw back, nigh on impossible”, adding: “These are unfortunately the specifics of how it works.”
Only a handful of public-funded pension schemes, such as the NHS and police, are able to withdraw payments from members – and only in extreme cases.
Wayne Couzens, the police officer who kidnapped and murdered Sarah Everard, was stripped of his Metropolitan Police pension after the Mayor of London asked the Home Office to withhold it. Serial rapist David Carrick also lost his state-funded police pension.
Edwards was the BBC’s best-paid journalist last year after earning between £475,000 and £479,999 despite having been suspended and the broadcaster made aware of his arrest.
The 62-year-old pleaded guilty to three charges of making indecent images of children at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday and will be sentenced next month.
Edwards, who joined the BBC as a trainee in 1984, is likely to have been entitled to collect a pension paying two thirds of his final salary from the age of 60 – provided he never left the generous scheme.
BBC pensions are partially funded by the licence fee, which currently sits at £169.50 per household. The old pension scheme, which is now closed to new staff, is paid into by less than 40% of employees but accounts for over 80% of the company’s spending on pensions, according to the BBC Pensioners Association.
Economist Neil Record, a life Vice-President of the Institute of Economic Affairs, said: “The BBC operates a very generous defined benefit pension scheme for employees who joined before 2010.
“While the BBC is a funded scheme, unlike the vast majority of public sector pensions, long-standing employees like Huw Edwards will benefit from pensions much larger than are available today anywhere except the public sector.”
What’s really objectionable of course isn’t so much that a person may keep the pension he has accrued (imagine if we could have our savings confiscated by the state because we contravened its laws) than how ludicrously generous and unaffordable the licence-fee-funded BBC pension is.
Worth reading in full.
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“imagine if we could have our savings confiscated by the state…”
Oh, I don’t find that too difficult to imagine.
I certainly think private pensions are going to be raided at some point. For noble reasons of course. Supporting our NHS, the envy of the world.
Look at the last weeks so-called “Far Right” riots which, so far as I can tell, involved The Plod hitting people with big sticks who then reacted.
“Took part in the Far Right Riots did you Mrs Smith? Right, take her kids away, destroy her dog, confiscate her Pension and Saving, sell her home”
I do not understand the eagerness to rob the paedo of his salary and pension.
He earned them fair and square under the system that exists in the BBC.
That has nothing whatsoever to do with the disgusting crimes he has admitted and is being and will be punished for. He cannot after all show his face in public anywhere.
To follow the argument to its logical conclusion he should be made to repay every penny he has ever earned from the BBC over the period of his career and have everything he has ever bought with that money confiscated to pay the debt.
Complete tosh. I am bored hearing about it. Knee-jerks from jerks.
There is no line to be drawn under this argument.
Laws exist to punish people from their crimes. It seems some people are not satisfied with that. What kind of lawless country is this?
I agree, but he needs a jail term so he can’t enjoy all of that moolah. And I would withdraw the 40k raise he was given.
He should go to prison and get the very small amount of cash allowed to everyone else. 10 years should just about finish him, because he will need to be in solitary for his own protection. Just deserts!
Probably a reward for services rendered in the broadest possible sense of the term. You will get a bit fat pension just keep your mouth shut about the rest of the network. These are the people that rule you. Those that get their jollies from watching a child being raped. You might want to consider the news they present you with in the light of these facts just sayin’.
”You don’t need to be a pervert to work here but it helps.” BBC.
They all knew about Max Clifford they all knew about Savile. But if it is poor working class children or children in a home then who cares they can easily be expended to satisfy the lusts of the priviliged. Perhaps it will always be thus but then you listen to the BBC and they attempt to deliver some moral mesage. I know it is hard for boomers but you need to disabuse yourself of the idea that someone is respectable just because they wear a suit and speak on the BBC. They have been raping your children for generations.
The Algerian beat the Hungarian woman. Through to the semis. Evidently the definition of a woman nowadays, according to the IOC, includes those with XY chromosomes. At this rate it’ll be a women’s final involving two intersex athletes, or not women, basically;
”Under-fire Algerian boxer Imane Khelif beat Hungary’s Anna Luca Hamori in the women’s welterweight boxing quarterfinal of the 2024 Olympics on Saturday, as a gender eligibility row continued to rage in the backdrop.
Khelif, who was born and raised as a woman, identifies as a woman and is registered as woman on her passport, has been competing at the Olympics in the face of a backlash over her participation due to suggestions that she is genetically a man.
Hungary’s boxing federation and Bulgaria’s Olympic Committee lodged objections with the IOC on Friday over its decision to allow Khelif to compete. Hamori has also posted message against on her social media handles, which have since been deleted.
IOC president Thomas Bach reiterated the body’s support for Khelif in the daily press briefing in Paris on Saturday.
“We have two boxers who are born as a woman, who have been raised as a woman, who have a passport as a woman and who have competed for many years as a woman.
“This is the clear definition of a woman. There was never any doubt about them being a woman.”
https://deadline.com/2024/08/algerian-boxer-imane-khelif-wins-olympic-womens-boxing-quarterfinal-gender-row-rage-1236030947/
Not sure what “born as a woman” means – maybe no willy? But how you were raised and what your passport says is sod all to do with the matter at hand. I don’t know much about XY people but my gut feel tells me that if female-only competitions are to
mean anything then XY people should be excluded.
Yes I would agree as there has to be some standardized cut-off point and I’d say the sex chromosomes are a reasonable thing on which to call it. Otherwise there’s no point having a female category if they’re going to allow XY people in there who benefit from a performance advantage. There’s various types of DSDs ( Difference/Disorders of Sex Development ) and it’s only the 5-ARD one which apparently conveys this advantage in sports, which happens to be the same DSD that the S. African runner, Caster Semenya, has. It hasn’t been confirmed that this is what the boxers have but it’s said to be the most likely by experts. I shared a good post which gives a better explainer than I can do under one of the boxing articles. I’d say these boxers, or anyone else proven to have XY sex chromosomes, should go in the men’s categories. I don’t think there’s enough of them in any one sport to warrant their own category.
They would almost certainly not be competitive at an elite level against completely male athletes and that’s unfortunate for them but life isn’t always fair
Maybe you watched this 800m final at the Olympics in 2016, where basically these ‘intersex’ biologically male athletes stole gold, silver and bronze from the women;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psxr58zKi6g&ab_channel=Olympics
You can see how devastated Britain’s Lynsey Sharp was to have lost out on getting her bronze. She was 6th over the line but the 3rd woman to finish. I can only imagine how frustrating that must’ve been for the woman who should’ve got gold;
https://x.com/salltweets/status/1816299187652399455
Interesting- I wasn’t aware of that
Is he not already a pensioner, if he is 62 and his normal retirement age under the scheme was 60? Could have deferred it, I suppose, if not drawing his income as soon as he resigned. Looking on the bright side, he’ll be paying a fair bit of tax once it pays out. Likely to be one of the wealthiest inmates somewhere soon, depending on what the judge decides.
I’m sure he can afford financial planners who will have worked out how he can minimise his tax exposure
They don’t lock up their own because then he would have no disincentive to start singing like a canary. Consider their perspective in terms of how they view you. If they are happy that they get their jollies from raping children do you really think that they look at you in a tender-hearted fashion. There is nothing difficult to understand. They have laid their own character bare for you. You contiue to respect this man just because he is an establishment figure. Surely you can see the problem here.
Would have to see the terms and conditions of the BBC pension plan to make comment or rule on legality of denying him a pension based on conviction of anything, some of which he surely funded partially.
He will get no prison time and will be busy putting together further child abuse videos. If he lived on my street then I will be dealt with accordingly.
I wonder if he also got private medical cover from the BBC? If so, I can imagine the insurers clawing back the payments, if it can be shown he had a history of this behaviour before he suffered his collapse.
I’m getting the word “nonce”
Quite frankly talk of denying a person their Pension is an absurd argument. It is also an extremely dangerous path to tread.
“Do something we deem wrong and your Pension as well as your savings will be confiscated”.
Is that really what we want to tell Starmer to do? Which crimes do not count, which do and who decides?
Hi Will. Talking up the confiscation of private property rights, is not a good position to be in. They will come for yours next.
Headline: “…free to retire on…”
Text: “…could still retire on…”
Daily Sceptic or Daily Mail?
My understanding is that they were far more serious and depraved than ‘Indecent images’. He made and shared images of children being violated. I have heard it speculated that because the prosecut or is already saying there are “extenuating circumstances” -( when we all know that ‘mental health issues’ does not excuse this), he may not even be jailed. But this has to happen – even if it is a short sentence – as then real justice will take place at the hands of inmates.