It is completely specious for the BBC to argue that it does not reveal what it pays to staff presenters for personal privacy or to freelancers because they are operating in a commercial market
One of the fundamental economic assumptions about how competition makes markets work is “perfect information”. So it is odd that it is only in the years since “the market” has supposed to be the answer to everything that we have lost all this information about what people (even as a group, such as teachers) are paid
Income tax returns may have always been confidential but that is because of what they reveal about your total income from all sources, & your personal allowances (though that is less the case these days). What public bodies, or public companies, paid out in wages was no secret, even in Victorian times
And how are performance bonuses supposed to work effectively if there is always room for suspicion that his is (unfairly) bigger than mine?
