British Broadcasting CorporationRoom BC2 B6 Broadcast Centre White City Wood Lane London W12 7TP Telephone 020 8008 2882 Email foi@bbc.co.uk
Information Policy & Compliance bbc.co.uk/foi bbc.co.uk/privacy
Sandra Toon
Via e-mail: request-269414-98f563b2@whatdotheyknow.com
17
thJune 2015 Dear Ms Toon
Freedom of Information Request - RFI20150842
Thank you for your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act) received on 21 May, seeking the following information:
‘Please can you tell me the salaries paid to staff within your digital division in the following roles - Junior developer
Developer Senior developer Principle developer Junior software engineer Software engineer Senior software engineer Principle software engineer
Please tell me the highest and lowest salary within each role title, the average salary and amount of people
employed in total with each title. Where numbers allow, please also provide a gender breakdown demonstrating the same information separately for males and females.
As these job roles are employed in both London and Salford, please detail the salaries details separately at each base. Please also include any external benchmarking data indicating benchmarked salary rates for each role.’
We are providing information relating to staff employed on permanent or fixed-term contracts within BBC Digital (formerly Future Media) as at 31 May 2015.
For the purposes of this request, in order to provide information relating to the ‘Developer’ roles you have requested, we have looked at any jobs within BBC Digital with ‘Developer’ in the title: this includes Client Side Developers and Web Developers. In addition, while we do not have a ‘Junior’ Developer job title, we have counted our ‘Graduate Developer’ role in this category.
Table 1 below shows the number of staff employed in these roles, broken down by gender.
Table 1 – Gender Breakdown of Staff Employed by Role within BBC Digital as at 31 May 2015
Job Category Number of Females
Number of Males
Total Number of
Staff
Junior Developer 4 29 33
Developer 13 52 65
Senior Developer 2 38 40
Principal Developer 2 8 10
Junior Software Engineer 1 18 19
Software Engineer 9 98 107
Senior Software Engineer 10 81 91
Principal Software Engineer 3 20 23
Total 44 344 388
Table 2 shows the average salaries for staff in these roles as at 31 May 2015. These figures are taken from the HR system and are based on full time equivalent basic salary, which excludes London Weighting.
Table 2 – Average Full-Time Equivalent Salaries by Role as at 31 May 2015
Job Category Average Salary (£)
Junior Developer 24,051
Developer 34,761
Senior Developer 41,088
Principal Developer 49,141
Junior Software Engineer 30,206
Software Engineer 36,212
Senior Software Engineer 43,505 Principal Software Engineer 51,914
We are withholding information on the minimum and maximum salaries, together with the further breakdown requested by gender and location under section 40(2) (personal information) of the Act. As breaking the information down in this way would result in small numbers for many categories, it could lead to individuals being identified. Under section 40(2) of the Act, personal information about identifiable living individuals is exempt if disclosure to a third party would breach one or more principles in the Data
Protection Act 1998. The individuals concerned would not expect their salary details to be disclosed to a third party. To do so would be unfair; therefore, disclosure would breach the First Data Protection Principle (fair and lawful processing).
Please note that, as set out in section 6(1)(b)(ii) of the FOI Act, our subsidiaries (including BBC Studios &
Post Production Ltd, UKTV, BBC Global News Ltd and BBC Worldwide Ltd), as well as the charities BBC Media Action and BBC Children in Need, are not subject to the Act, therefore information for their personnel is not included in any of the figures quoted in this response.
Regarding benchmarking information, as our Pay Policy states:
“All requests for external benchmarking must be made via the HR Director (HRD). The HRD must seek advice from their appropriate Reward Manager as to the appropriate salary. The role of the Reward Manager is to provide internal relativities as well as accurate and comprehensive information on market rates. Relative rates of pay must be fair and equitable.
In the current climate it may not be possible to achieve alignment with the external market.”
When matching externally, the role is carefully assessed and matched against the appropriate survey role description and most suitable comparison group.
We are withholding the external benchmarking data requested. In accordance with section 1(1) of the Act, the BBC confirms that this information is held. However, the BBC will not be providing you with this information as we consider it to be exempt under section 43(2) of the Act. This is because disclosure would be likely to prejudice the commercial interests of the BBC and our actual or potential third party providers.
Disclosure of the above details would be likely to prejudice the commercial interests of the BBC and third parties by weakening their competitive negotiating positions, specifically in respect of any future tendering process covering the supply of benchmarking services to the BBC.
As section 43 is a qualified exemption, in accordance with section 2(2) of the Act, we have considered the public interest factors in this case. Specifically, whether in all the circumstances of the case, the public interest in maintaining the exemption outweighs the public interest in disclosing the information.
In favour of disclosure, we recognised that there is a public interest in the following:
that there is transparency in the accountability of the BBC for public funds;
that the BBC is using public money effectively, and that the BBC is getting value for money when purchasing goods and services.
On the other hand, in considering factors that might weigh in favour of the public interest in withholding, we took into account:
That companies, or individuals provide the BBC with commercially sensitive information, so that the BBC is able to make robust decisions regarding its suppliers of goods and services, including ensuring that the BBC obtains the best value for money from each transaction;
That the BBC maintains a strong bargaining position vis-à-vis suppliers during contractual negotiations in order to ensure that the licence fee is spent effectively;
