BBC spends £22million on gagging orders: 500 staff silenced using licence fee money

• Payouts of up to £500,000 made over the last six years
  
• National Audit Office investigating scale of the agreements
• New BBC boss Lord Hall moves to cap future deals at £150,000

The BBC spent more than £22million on staff gagging orders, it emerged today.

More than 500 staff received payouts of up to £500,000 over the past six years using deals which can be used to silence whistle blowers.

BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten revealed this month that the scale of the spending was ‘difficult’ and the Corporation was braced for more bad headlines about the way it used licence fee money.

New BBC director general Lord Hall has also moved to cap spending on payouts in future.

Most of the deals included so-called gagging clauses - confidentiality agreements - which MPs, including the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, have been campaigning to get stopped within the NHS.

The huge figure does not include the BBC's legal costs nor the ‘independent legal advice’ that the BBC urges its employees to take prior to entering into one of these agreements, said LBC, which put in a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to the corporation.

Out of more than 500 pay-offs in the six year period, 36 were more than £150,000, 62 were more than £100,000 and two were more than £500,000, it added.

The station said it put in the FoI request on April 15 and on May 2 the BBC announced it was abolishing gagging clauses from future BBC contracts.

This was part of the measures introduced following the BBC's Savile inquiry, which found that some staff were still too scared to speak out about sexism and bullying at the corporation.

FULL STORY: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2344551/BBC-spends-22millio...