A VETERAN Asian presenter said she was being “vastly” underpaid compared to her colleagues at the BBC, and it was a key reason for her departure from the broadcaster.
Ritula Shah quit the BBC earlier this year, ending her 35-year association with the corporation where she presented popular shows such as The World Tonight, Woman’s Hour, World Today and Any Questions.
She now works for Classic FM where she presents Calm Classics on weekdays.
Shah, 56, said she quit the BBC as she felt she had been at the “other end of the range” compared to the young people the national broadcaster was trying to attract.
She told Roger Bolton’s Beeb Watch podcast last week: “It’s a really painful episode in my life and I still can’t quite get over it, even though it’s now behind me.”
In 2020, her colleague Samira Ahmed won an employment tribunal after claiming she had been underpaid by £700,000 for hosting the audience feedback show Newswatch, compared with Jere - my Vine’s salary for Points of View.
Shah said she discovered during the row she had been paid “vastly lower” than her colleagues. “I discovered during the course of the equal pay row that I was paid in the tens of thousands when all my colleagues were paid in the hundreds of thousands.
“I was paid vastly lower than my colleagues. We’re talking about colleagues who were presenters on the radio. We’re not talking about correspondents, we’re not talking about celebrities that appear on light entertainment programmes.
“If you bring television into it, it gets even worse,” Shah, who joined the BBC in 1988, said.
“I was really shocked. I went around asking everyone that I possibly could what they were paid, people who I thought would answer me. I couldn’t find a single person who was doing a comparable job to me, regularly presenting a news programme, who was paid less than I was.”
She said news journalists should not get into the profession to become rich.
“I really firmly believe if you work in news as a journalist, you don’t go into it for the money. You should be going into it because you want to make the world a better place.”
“I think that many of my colleagues are rather overpaid. It’s a privilege to do the job I used to do. I’m not quite sure why lots of us were paid as much as we were.
“There must have been more than 10 managers who saw what I earned and the fact no one chose to raise it as a concern among themselves... I really can’t explain it.”
However, Shah felt her bosses at the BBC were not being actively malicious.
“It’s a kind of benign neglect, it’s people not thinking things through. It’s such a big organisation, people don’t look at the bigger picture.
“I’m not sure that explains it or excuses it, I think it’s awful. It came home to roost in a horrific way.” Eastern Eye has contacted the BBC for a response to the story.
Bob Blackman MP speaks during the event