A senior editor at the BBC has made accusations that the company pays ethnic minority staff almost £20,000 a year less than their white colleagues. In breaking news, Saleem Patka stated he is suing the Corporation for race discrimination. He claimed that a certain group of employees earned less only because of the colour of their skin. Senior Manager at the World Services language unit in London, he has claimed Freedom of Information figures showed World Services languages staff were paid an average of £7400 less than staff on the same grade in network news.
Patka said the main reason for the gap was that 74.4 per cent of staff in London had black and minority ethnic backgrounds, while 80.2 of network news staff had white backgrounds. The Indian-origin senior editor has been involved in a two-year legal battle over his claims which the Corporation is contesting. The latest claim comes after a row over salary gaps between genders. It was sparked when China editor Carrie Gracie quit after learning that international male editors earned at least 50 per cent more than her.
An employment judge outlined Patka's case at a preliminary hearing in 2016, saying, “The claimant's case... is that on the grounds of race the salary he was offered at the three managerial roles that he held since 2010 was at a lower level than that which was offered or would have been offered to white managers in network news at the same level doing the same work as him. He says that it was on racial grounds because the decisions as to the level of salary were made in accordance with the policy or practice to pay those in World Service (non-white people) at a lower level than those in network news (White people).” The judge added, “His case is that that police or practice was racially discriminatory because the difference in pay between the two groups was due to the difference in the racial composition of the two groups.”
In response, the BBC said pay at Mr Patka’s level was “determined on an individual basis taking into account a number of factors”. It also said the statistics were not drawn from “truly comparable groups”.
Mr Patka had also pursued an internal grievance. It was initially refused, but in October 2016 Graham Ellis, the BBC’s deputy director for radio, partly upheld his complaint, court documents show. Mr Ellis concluded the difference in pay was “neither directly nor indirectly discriminatory”, but considered his pay should be set “at around £100,000”.
In 2017, the Corporation aligned median pay for World Service and BBC Monitoring journalists with that of their counterparts in network news. A BBC spokeswoman said: “We are defending this claim.”
Mr Patka declined to comment.
