High-profile BBC journalists and presenters such as Nick Robinson, Laura Kuenssberg and John Humphrys will have their pay made public as part of a plan imposed by the government while it renews the BBC’s royal charter.

The Department of Culture will announce on Thursday that it has told the BBC it must disclose the salaries of the 109 TV and radio presenters who earn more than £150,000 a year, a figure far below that previously envisaged.

David Cameron had told the BBC before last June’s EU referendum that the pay disclosure should only apply to on-air talent earning more than £450,000 a year. But Theresa May, the prime minister, and Karen Bradley, the culture secretary, have chosen to reduce the amount, meaning that many of the corporation’s best-known journalists will have their pay announced.

It is expected that Kirsty Wark, Fiona Bruce and Jeremy Vine will be among those whose pay will have to be disclosed by the broadcaster. Others likely to be affected include Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman, who present Strictly Come Dancing. Initially their pay will have to be disclosed in £50,000 bands, though these will narrow.

The BBC has been highly critical of plans to force it to disclose what presenters earn, describing them as a “poachers’ charter” because it would give rivals a clear idea of how to woo some of their best-known names at a time when competition in television is intensifying.



Earlier this week, Channel 4 agreed to pay £25m a year to snatch the Great British Bake Off from the BBC – and the two broadcasters are now in a tug of war over the programme’s judges Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry.

However, the government is determined to introduce greater transparency to publicly funded bodies. The draft charter is also likely to require that the BBC moves to smaller bands than £50,000 “in line with public sector best practice” in the future.

A government source said: “Licence fee payers have a right to know where their money goes. By making the BBC more transparent, it will help deliver savings that then can be invested in even more great programmes.”

At present, the BBC discloses the amounts received by its most highly paid stars in wide income bands on an anonymous basis. The broadcaster’s latest annual report revealed that the number of BBC stars earning from £500,000 to £5m a year fell from nine to seven last year. These seven, likely to include Gary Lineker and Chris Evans as well as Graham Norton, shared £6.6m in total, a decline of 25% compared with the total for all those earning more than £500,000 in 2014-15.

The government’s disclosure rules only apply to those paid by the licence fee, which is expected to catch most of the best-known news presenters. The pay of senior BBC executives is already disclosed, with government sources calling the historic secrecy around presenters’ and actors’ pay “an anomaly”.

Actors and on-air talent paid for by the BBC’s commercial arm or under co-production deals could still avoid the disclosure rules in theory, as will all on-air talent working for the BBC’s commercial rivals. Two of the main presenters of Great British Bake Off, Berry and Hollywood, for example, are not thought to be employed directly by the BBC but by Love Productions.

The charter document will also finalise plans to reform the BBC’s governance. On Tuesday, the BBC’s chairman, Rona Fairhead, announced that she would not be staying on after Theresa May decided that an earlier agreement that she should remain in post until 2018 would not be honoured and there there would be an “open and transparent process” of recruitment which the DCMS said would start “in the coming weeks”.

Ministers are expected to confirm they only intend to appoint up to five board members, including the chair and up to four members representing the nations and regions. A new, single BBC board, replacing the old two-tier BBC Trust and executive board, will include five other “independent” board members and four other corporation executives – meaning that government appointees will be in a minority.

That will be seen as a victory for the BBC, which had warned of the risks of creeping political control. But the defenestration of Fairhead has left bad feeling among some of the outgoing trustees, some of whom have told the Guardian of their “absolute outrage” over her treatment.

Although the decision by Cameron to allow Fairhead to extend her contract in May after a behind-the-scenes deal was widely criticised, reversing the decision a matter of months before the end of the existing trust has proved equally controversial.



One trustee, who did not want to be named, said: “This is quite simply an affront to and massive erosion of the independence of the BBC.

“This ground zero approach seems to be Theresa May’s trademark … This is not just utterly brutal to [Fairhead], it’s bad for the BBC. There is a vital distinction between a national and a state broadcaster and this regime has simply decided to appoint its own person to the job.”

Given the surprise over Fairhead’s departure, which will only happen once the trust itself is wound up early next year, few names have emerged as favourites for the job. In the past, former ITV’s chairman, Archie Norman, and Pearson’s boss, Marjorie Scardino, have been mooted for the role.

Other plans expected to be unveiled in the new charter include a clause to prevent the BBC striking financial settlements with the Treasury in secret, such as last year’s arrangement, which saddled the BBC with the cost of free licence fees for the over-75s. Instead any new licence fee settlement is likely to be put before parliament for debate.