{"id":45239,"date":"2025-07-29T14:14:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T14:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/45239\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T14:14:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T14:14:08","slug":"bbc-resolved-nearly-300-employment-disputes-with-settlement-deals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/45239\/","title":{"rendered":"BBC Resolved Nearly 300 Employment Disputes With Settlement Deals"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEXCLUSIVE: The BBC<\/a> has revealed that it signed nearly 300 settlement deals with staffers over the past decade to stop disputes escalating to an employment tribunal.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the British national broadcaster disclosed that 291 \u201csettlement agreements\u201d were signed between 2014 and 2024.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe BBC said that, since 2013, the agreements have not contained so-called \u201cgagging clauses,\u201d which prevent former employees from making disparaging or derogatory statements about the corporation.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2018, the BBC also removed clauses from settlement deals that stopped individuals from discussing the agreement or the circumstances of their departure.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe BBC did not disclose how many of the 291 agreements were signed before 2018 with individuals who are prohibited from discussing the reasons for their dispute. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe corporation\u2019s position is that these clauses never stopped people from making a \u201cprotected disclosure,\u201d meaning they could blow the whistle on criminal wrongdoing. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe FOIA disclosure comes after Deadline revealed that Channel 4 has restricted<\/a> what aggrieved former staffers can say about the company as part of settlement deals signed between 2017 and 2021.<\/p>\n

\n\tAll but two of 61 Channel 4<\/a> deals analysed by Deadline contained confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses that transparency campaigners consider to be non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe UK government is now moving to amend the Employment Rights Bill to outlaw the use of NDAs<\/a> to silence victims or witnesses of harassment and discrimination.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe BBC\u2019s annual report showed that the broadcaster spent nearly \u00a369.6M ($93M) on severance payments in the year to March 31 as employees were made redundant.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis was the highest level since 2021, when the BBC\u2019s outlay on severance deals totalled \u00a374.5M. The BBC does not require employees receiving a redundancy payment to sign a settlement agreement.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe BBC still enforces confidentiality clauses in settlements to protect commercially sensitive information that a staff member may have been privy to during their employment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EXCLUSIVE: The BBC has revealed that it signed nearly 300 settlement deals with staffers over the past decade…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45240,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[8827,28,27978,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-45239","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jobs","8":"tag-bbc","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-channel-4","11":"tag-jobs"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}