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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