PA MediaFour female news presenters have agreed a settlement in a dispute with the BBC over claims including sex and age discrimination.
Martine Croxall, Annita McVeigh, Karin Giannone and Kasia Madera claimed they lost their roles on the BBC News Channel following a “rigged” recruitment exercise.
The BBC has insisted its application process was “rigorous and fair”.
BBC News understands a settlement has been reached with no admission of liability, and a three-week tribunal to hear the presenters’ claims, which had been due to start on Monday, will now not go ahead.
In a joint statement, they said: “We can confirm that we have reached a resolution with BBC management that avoids the need for a tribunal hearing in respect of our employment-related claims.
“A protracted process lasting almost three years is now over. We’ve been deeply moved by the support we’ve received.
“We look forward to contributing further to the success of BBC News, especially to live programming and the growing streaming services that are so important to our audiences.”
A BBC statement said: “After careful consideration we have a reached a resolution which brings to an end protracted legal proceedings with four members of staff and avoids further costs for the BBC.
“In doing so we have not accepted any liability or any of the arguments made against the BBC. We are simply bringing to a close all of the actions brought against us so that all involved can move forward.”
It added that it welcomed the opportunity to “now look to the future, and to work together on delivering for our audiences – which is our first priority”.
The women were all off work on full pay from March 2023 as a result of the dispute, and started to go back to work the following March.
The terms of the settlement haven’t been released.
The dispute stems from July 2022, when the BBC announced plans to merge its domestic and international news channels, resulting in a recruitment process for five chief presenters.
The women claimed that ahead of the announcement, the BBC’s channels senior editor privately assured four other presenters – two men and two younger women – their jobs were safe.
“We were put through a pre-determined job application process in February 2023,” the presenters said in court documents during a preliminary hearing last year.
As a result, they said they were not recruited as chief presenters and were instead offered roles as correspondents, which in effect meant a demotion and a pay cut.
The presenters called the recruitment process “a sham” exercise, “where our jobs were closed even though the redundancies were not genuine as the work still exists”.
They argued they were discriminated against because of their sex and age, were victimised because of union membership and for bringing previous equal pay claims, and suffered harassment.
The corporation said all candidates for the chief presenter roles were subject to the same fair application process, which involved an application interview then practical assessments.
It said at least five other applicants scored more highly than the four women and were therefore appointed, based on an “objective assessment”.
The women’s case originally also included an equal pay claim, which a judge dismissed last May.
The women later appealed against that ruling, and the equal pay claim has now also ended as part of the settlement.
Analysis
By Katie Razzall, BBC News culture and media editor
So who’s won?
The BBC has not admitted liability. In other words, it has not accepted it did anything wrong.
The presenters remain in their current roles. Apart from McVeigh, who was appointed a chief presenter on the BBC News channel in February 2024, the others will not return to the full presenter roles they had and then lost in the restructuring recruitment process, which sparked two years of attrition.
Through that lens, it looks like a stalemate.
The losers, though, are licence fee payers who have seen hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on BBC presenters who were off work on full pay for at least a year, on top of whatever the costs of this settlement add up to. That may never be made public.
The pressure is on to justify the financial waste.
Why did it take so long to reach an agreement?
Both sides were entrenched. For two years, they were in conflict, with the presenters off screen for half of that time.
Contracts are binding. Employees remain on full pay while internal disputes are resolved. But this one took a long time, and they continued to fight when they returned to work. Only, on the brink of the tribunal, was there a resolution.
The BBC will have had licence fee payers in mind when weighing up whether to proceed to a full tribunal or settle. It apparently decided it wasn’t worth going through three damaging weeks, with all the headlines and media attention that would have generated.
A settlement is always likely to bring down costs. The impact of a tribunal can be substantial, and there is also the potential for appeals and further hearings that increase the financial impact.
But the optics of the last two years, ending in a settlement, aren’t good. And there is frustration inside the BBC about the impact of it all, at a time when budgets are shrinking.
