BBC spends £2m shuttling staff between London & Manchester
License fee payers have been left to foot a £2m bill for shuttling BBC staff back and forth between London and Manchester, including 61 bookings for lucky cabbies charged at £420 a pop.
The figures, from last year, were obtained by the Telegraph under a Freedom of Information Request and document the broadcaster’s expenditure on rail, air and taxi travel between the two cities.
A total of 61 Taxis were booked for the 200 mile trip for guests appearing on BBC Breakfast, BBC Radio 5 Live and BBC Sport, each costing an eye-watering £420.
BBC staff opted to forego the M40 and take to the skies, racking up a further £26k bill.
It was rail travel which made the biggest dent in the corporations coffers however with 26,265 individual trips made at a total cost of £1.9m – a near doubling from the pre-Salford flit days of 2011.
A further £3.3m has been spent reimbursing 174 BBC staff in a ‘halfway house’ deal whereby they receive some of their rent and expenses in return for commuting to Salford.
A BBC spokesperson told the paper: “We remain mindful of how we spend public money. Therefore we always encourage the cheapest method of travel, and rail is the preferred method."