Leader: BBC has no idea of public service needs

Away from the world of banking, there is a pay scandal which may have escaped your notice.

Alan Hansen, the retired Liverpool footballer who now carves out a handsome living as a football pundit on the BBC, is reportedly taking a £500,000 cut on his £1.5 million a year salary.

A grand gesture in these straitened times, you might think. But it means that he will still be getting only slightly less for repeatedly complaining about diabolical defending and making replay-aided judgments on refereeing decisions than RBS chief Stephen Hester is being paid.

He has inevitably been dubbed Hester the jester in some sections of the tabloid press, whereas what he has actually done is turn round a major financial institution, and the real jesters of society are the people like Alan Hansen who command enormous salaries working in the entertainment industry, doing not that much more than pulling faces and making us laugh.

The top BBC jesters take their money from the public – the licence payers – and have pay levels that the commercial sector, which has to live within the bounds of commercial reality, could not, and would not, match.

When it comes to spending and priorities, the Beeb is continuing to live in cloud cuckoo land.

Against this backdrop, new figures show that listening figures for BBC local radio stations are on the up.

And yet this sector is in line for a hammering, with local programming content slashed and jobs lost.

It is a case of warped priorities when a lucky few stars are rolling in money when local radio, which connects the BBC with the grass roots public and is demonstrably a service which the public wants and appreciates, is being dismantled and watered down as a truly local service.