No wonder most BBC employees regard the Daily Mail as being staffed and run by malevolent cretins. Let's take that opening sentence: "Licence fee payers face a shocking £2 billion bill to meet the spiralling cost of the BBC pension scheme, which includes six-figure payouts to top executives." Actually, the estimated deficit of the scheme is £1.7bn, according to the latest BBC annual report. And this, despite what the Mail suggests, cannot include the cost of recent redundancy payouts which, obviously, come from an entirely different pot of money. Even the pensions for the highest paid staff do not all come from the main pension scheme. Why? Because for staff who joined after the middle of 1989, the scheme has a limit of (currently) just under £140,000 for annual pay that can be pensionable. So if you earn more than that, the BBC has, in the past, made top-up pension arrangements that are run and funded quite separately from the BBC's main pension scheme and which therefore do not contribute to any deficit. Yes, these are a cost to the licence-fee income and the BBC's very large commercial income. But they are absolutely not a cost to the main pension scheme.

PLEASE-A formal -well publicised response from Pensions Department would squash this press nonsense