BBC Pay Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport
Kevin Foster
Main Page: Kevin Foster (Conservative - Torbay)Department Debates - View all Kevin Foster's debates with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport
(6 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Matt Hancock
Getting to the bottom of this problem in the BBC is not just important for the BBC itself and for all the brilliant women who work in the BBC and who are not paid as much as their male counterparts doing the same job. It is symbolic across the whole country and shows that we believe in the equality of opportunity and in people being paid fairly. Gender should not define how much an individual is paid.
Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)
Certainly, this debate shows why it was absolutely right to insist that the threshold for disclosure was £150,000. The whole point was to engender a debate about what it is right to pay people at the BBC—an organisation to which we are forced to contribute. Does the Secretary of State agree that the priority will be to ensure that pay is not only equal on a gender basis, but proportionate, given that some of the salaries that we have seen are almost impossible to defend?