The public has a right to know about BBC salaries, but we mustn't forget the environment in which the BBC exists

The BBC’s governing body has a fiduciary duty to ensure that it doesn’t pay over the odds for its presenters, or for its accountants and its studio directors for that matter, and they should be accountable for that, via audit and managerial control, to licence payers – but not by an arbitrary release of private financial information

Graham Norton, Chris Evans and Gary Lineker - the top paid 'talent' at the BBC (Getty)

Even for those trying to make a living outside the firmament of the media star system, it is usually a mistake to disclose salary details. It is, as they say, a “no-win”: either you will be thought of as “overpaid”, and thus resented, or be regarded as “underpaid”, and something of a mug.

Much the same may be said of the BBC’s disclosure, unwilling as it has been, of its best-paid “talent”. In a carefully orchestrated pre-announcement exercise in spin, the corporation conceded some of the more embarrassing features, not least the gender gap at the very top of this talent tree. Now the discrepancy has acquired a human face: Chris Evans, with earnings somewhere round the £2m mark, and the best paid of all; against the best paid woman, Claudia Winkleman, who gets by on about half a million.

Is Claudia a mug and Chris overpaid? There's no doubt that sexism is still a problem across society, and that the gender pay gap is a problem in far more places than just the BBC. The corporation is right to commit to closing the gap in its own organisation, and not a minute too soon.

What is clear, however, is that the exposure of the salaries of the likes of Gary Lineker and Graham Norton to public scrutiny will do little to deliver better value for the licence fee payers, if all that happens is that wages are inflated, as seems likely. Lord Hall has committed to ending the gender gap by 2020 – the adjustments to female pay inevitably being upwards rather than the men’s rewards being pulled downwards. Agents and stars of all genders will try to bid up their fees, and some will succeed. Transparency is usually a good thing and to be welcomed; but not always and everywhere, even for a prominent national institution such as the BBC. These disclosures are damaging.

In some cases, such as politicians and those in the public services who are on national pay scales, transparency is both necessary and unavoidable. It is right that MPs and ministers for example, also disclose their earnings outside their official duties, so the voters can judge their exposure to conflicts of interest. The BBC is also a public body, effectively funded by taxpayers via the compulsory licence fee, and so it is said that viewers and listeners have an equivalent “right” to know how it spends “their money”. This is, though, not quite right if the BBC has to exist in a fiercely competitive environment, as it does. There is no reason to suppose that it has set its levels of remuneration corruptly or with anything other than an eye to winning the best talent and delivering the quality entertainment and journalism the public demands. If the BBC’s critics can show that the corporation has failed to do so, then they have a case. The BBC’s governing body has a fiduciary duty to ensure that it doesn’t pay over the odds for its presenters, or for its accountants and its studio directors for that matter, and they should be accountable for that, via audit and managerial control, to licence payers – but not by an arbitrary release of private financial information.

We cannot, as Lord Grade said, end up in a situation where BBC salaries and fees are determined by the readers of newspapers that want the BBC denuded and even eliminated, sometimes for commercial reasons of their own. We should accept that the free market and forces of supply and demand will determine what constitutes a reasonable pay packet for such talent, whether or not we have more general problems with the way in which certain occupations are valued against others. If society doesn’t like people having vast incomes or accumulating fortunes then it can tax and regulate those matters on a fair basis, and not according to whether they are famous or have a likeable personality. Otherwise, we should leave this rarefied end of the labour market to its own devices.