Lord Patten says he will ban bonuses and perks for senior BBC managers In his inaugural public speech as Trust chair, Patten said that "no executive board member will get a bonus in future", warning that the broadcaster needed to "distance itself in this way from the market".
He also said that the director general's pay would be capped in relation to the average BBC wage, and private health insurance will be "phased out" for senior managers:
"Senior staff shouldn't have those sorts of benefits if they are not available to everyone," he said.
Patten also pledged to continue to cut the number of senior managers. The 640 senior managers at the BBC in 2009 have already been cut back by more than 15 per cent, to around 3 per cent of the workforce.
The Trust chair said he aims to bring that down to "more like 1 per cent by 2015 at the latest, to create a smaller group of people more clearly accountable for spending the licence fee".
Figures published by the BBC in March showed that senior managers within its News Group earned more than £16 million.
The group, made up of BBC News, BBC Nations & Regions, BBC Global News and the BBC Sport division, employed 179 senior managers at the time, around a third of total across the broadcaster.
Facing increasing anger from BBC staff, director general Mark Thompson and the BBC executives have waived their bonuses since January 2009, as well as accepting a pay freeze and giving up a month's pay earlier this year.
Outlining the changes to be announced in his speech in an interview with Andrew Marr earlier this week, Patten said the issue of executive pay had become "toxic" and was "behind the public's lack of sympathy with the BBC as an institution".
According to Patten, the broadcaster will also adopt parts of a public sector pay review published by economist Will Hutton, in which Hutton suggested that companies should publish annual "pay multiples" showing how many times more senior executives are earning that the rest of the staff.
Patten added that the director general's pay packet would be capped at its current multiple of the average staff wage, and that he would seek to lower it when the next director general was appointed to replace incumbent Mark Thompson.
Elsewhere in his speech, Patten emphasised the need for the BBC to "keep pace with new technology without leaving its core audience behind".
"The BBC needs to provide a service to digitally literate 20 year-olds just as much as to old-fashioned newspaper-reading 70 year-olds. This goes beyond the sort of editorial challenge that has always existed for a broadcaster trying to reach a universal audience. It's now also a challenge with a technological dimension."
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