About 11,000 BBC employees received back pay they did not expect in their September pay packets, after the corporation discovered it may have been breaching employment laws on holiday pay.
Some staff have gained as much as £3,000 to £4,000 on top of their normal pay, according to the Guardian.
The BBC decided to pay up after a staff member stumbled across the fact that for the past seven years it has not been calculating holiday pay properly.
Thousands of journalists, technical staff and others who receive extra money for working unsocial hours should have been getting slightly more holiday pay to reflect these payments. The BBC may have unwittingly been in breach of EU working time regulations.
It is making a retrospective payment to all affected staff, taking into account all night shift, Christmas and “extra responsibility reward” payments going back to October 1998, when the laws were introduced.
The BBC said: “Although this is a technical matter relating to the application of the working time regulations, the BBC is, of course, required to meet its legal obligations.”
