BBC accused over 2,000 'managers'

The BBC has been accused of "sustaining a massive bureaucracy" after it emerged it has almost 4,500 separate job titles and nearly 2,000 staff classified as managers.

The corporation employs 191 staff whose job titles include the word adviser and 44 with the word strategy included.

The figures, obtained by the Daily Mail under the Freedom of Information Act, do not include casual staff or people working for the corporation's commercial arm.

They show that as of October 7 this year there were 4,420 different job titles with 1,894 staff having the word manager in their job title.

Among jobs currently advertised by the corporation are a choral manager for its choir, a client solutions executive, a commercial manager, a customer complaints manager and a research manager.

A BBC spokesman said: "The title manager is generally used to reflect a particular level of experience and seniority within the BBC rather than someone who necessarily manages a team of people."

Matthew Sinclair, from the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: "This is fresh evidence to support long-standing concerns that the BBC is wasting huge amounts of money sustaining a massive bureaucracy.

"Families struggling to pay their licence fee on top of so many other bills, and expecting it to be spent on things like making programmes, will be worried that too much of their money is going on a bloated management structure."

The BBC has faced criticism in recent years over the number of senior managers it employs and their pay.

Its most recent set of accounts, published earlier this year, showed a cut in pay for senior managers, with the number earning between £70,000 and £249,999 falling and £14.4 million being knocked off the senior management pay bill since August 2009.

Among the high earners to have left in recent years are marketing supremo Sharon Baylay, deputy director general Mark Byford and technology guru Erik Huggers.

All three earned large six-figure salaries.