THE BBC has used licence fee money to buy the silence of about 20 former staff who left after claiming to have been the victims of bullying or sexual harassment.

They have laid out their grievances in formal complaints to a BBC review set up in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal and overseen by Dinah Rose QC.

Former staff rounded on the BBC for its “hypocrisy” in gagging employees while promising to clean up the culture that enabled Savile to escape detection for his sexual crimes.

The 20 people forced to sign the gags, called compromise agreements, are barred even from revealing they have signed such a deal.

Miriam O’Reilly, the former Countryfile presenter who won a landmark case against the BBC for