Page 21HOW THEY COMPARE
(2017/18 packages, latest VisitBritain figures, * left in Oct 2018)VisitBritain
Sally Balcombe
CEO Package:£225-£230,000 Staff:285
Metropolitan
Police
Cressida Dick
CommissionerPackage: £229,592
Staff: 42,232
(includes officers and
support staff)Crown Prosecution
Service
Alison Saunders*
Director of Public
Prosecutions Package:£205-210,000
Staff: 5,688
Daily Mail, Tuesday, August 27, 2019To order a print of this Paul Thomas cartoon or one by Pugh, visit Mailpictures.newsprints.co.uk or call 020 7566 0360.‘He thinks Ben’s kit will help him batter the EU into submission’
By Tom Kelly
and Rosie Taylor
BRITAIN’S tourism board
faces calls for an inquiry into
executives’ inflation-busting
pay rises and lavish bonuses.
Taxpayer-funded VisitBritain
gave boss Sally Balcombe a 6 per
cent raise and £17,500 bonus. Her
total pay package was worth up
to £230,000.
She received the same bonus and a
10 per cent salary increase the previ-
ous year, despite the agency falling
£61million short of its target to increase
visitor spending in Britain in 2016/17
Her pay for running the quango,
which has just 285 full-time staff, is
the same as that of the head of the
Metropolitan Police, who manages
more than 42,000 employees.
Her pay also outstrips that of the
boss of the Crown Prosecution Serv-
ice (CPS), which has more than 5,600
full-time staff.
VisitBritain receives over £60million
in public money a year. At least seven
WISH YOU
WERE HER?
OVERLOOKED in the
furore over Harry and
Meghan’s private jet use is
the formidable carbon
footprint created by the RAF planes
flying the official red boxes to the Queen
at Balmoral. Only ‘essential’ documents
and formal items for signature are now
sent to HM and the flights are no longer
daily. But wouldn’t it ease climate change
if the planes and the red boxes were
scrapped and replaced with email?PRINCE Harry’s private jet indulgence is of
recent vintage, with virtually all of his
pre-Archie official overseas trips – includ-
ing to the US, Brazil, Chile, Lesotho, South
Africa and Nepal – taken via scheduled
flights. All eyes are now on his forthcom-
ing African odyssey with his family. Will
they fly British Airways or Air Meghan?WITH Boris tickling the chins of Merkel
and Macron, a timely reminder of
Margaret Thatcher’s stance from Jacob,
Lord Rothschild, who recalls her
inspecting the silver at his Spencer House
state banquet for French president
Mitterrand in the 1980s. ‘It’s Augsburg
17th century,’ he told her. ‘Then take it
away,’ she said. ‘I don’t want any German
silver here.’SETTLED in Downing
Street with Carrie
Symonds, pictured,
Boris has elected not
to bring his four chil-
dren by Marina
Wheeler with him.
Shades of 1920s Tory
predecessor Stanley
Baldwin, whose eld-
est son Oliver not only
didn’t move in but stood against his dad
as a Labour candidate. Don’t get any ideas
junior Johnsons!DEBORAH Orr, estranged from left-wing
curmudgeon husband Will Self, calls him
Lurch and complains of his insistence on
visiting her home to collect his books.
She tweets, sweetly: ‘Psycho Billy coming
to wee on the lampposts.’ON the occasion of polymath Prince
Albert’s 200th birthday yesterday,
Prince Andrew’s boastful comparison
seems laughably inappropriate. Talking
about his Apprentice-like Pitch@Palace
scheme, he brags: ‘Prince Albert was
the entrepreneur-in-residence at Buck-
ingham Palace. He was doing it in the
Industrial Revolution. I am doing it in the
digital revolution.’ADORING cricket fans hoping for a
knighthood for Ben Stokes may need
patience. Ian Botham’s 1981 heroics
didn’t trouble the honours committee. He
had to wait until 1992 to get an OBE and
it wasn’t until 2007 that he got a K for
services to both cricket and charity.PIERS Morgan boasts in Woman&Home
magazine that he tops a secret crush list,
adding: ‘Katie Piper and Susan Boyle say
that I’m actually, very publicly, their
crush. It’s a bandwagon.’ His Good Morn-
ing Britain co-host Susanna Reid begs
to differ, saying: ‘It’s a bandwagon with
two wheels.’Ephraim
Hardcastle
Email: [email protected]with raising Britain’s profile
worldwide, increasing the vol-
ume and value of tourism
exports and developing our so-
called ‘visitor economy’.
According to the British Tour-
ist Authority’s 2017/18 report
published this summer, ten sen-
ior executives at the quango are
on basic salaries and allowances
of over £100,000.
Ms Balcombe’s total remuner-
ation was between £225,000 and
£230,000, up from £215,000–
£220,000 the previous year. The
report does not give the exact
figure for executives.
A freedom of information
request by the Mail also found
ningham, director of business
services, spent £7,269 on air
fares – an average of £1,817 per
transaction – and £2,928 on
hotels and subsistence.
John O’Connell, head of the
TaxPayers’ Alliance, said the
public would be ‘outraged’ by
the high salaries, describing the
figures as ‘yet another disgrace-
ful example’ of ‘extremely gen-
erous’ public sector pay.
Mr Mann added: ‘These fig-
ures are shocking. If there is any
increase in tourism it’s because
sterling is falling making it
cheaper for [tourists] to visit.
The Public Accounts Commit-tee will want to look at this.’ A
spokesman for VisitBritain, the
trading name for the British
Tourist Authority, said: ‘Last
year, for every pound of public
investment, the BTA delivered –
equating to nearly £1billion of
additional spending.
‘Salaries and travel costs
support the delivery of
national economic growth at a
time of uncertainty.
‘All costs are independently
reviewed, benchmarked and
audited and judged against
organisational performance.’
[email protected]that VisitBritain’s directors
ran up £164,307 in expenses
from 2018/19 even as visitor
numbers to the UK and the
amount they spent fell.
Ms Balcombe and nine direc-
tors ran up bills of £73,231.75 on
air fares, £62,367.15 on hotels
and subsistence, £10,771.28 for
taxis and £4,728.57 for enter-
taining in a year.
During the same period, visits
to the UK dropped by 2 per cent
and spending by visitors
plunged by 7 per cent.
‘Americas director’ Gavin Lan-
dry spent £12,435 and £10,967
on air fares, while Hazel Cun-Outrage as head of UK’s tourism
quango gets £230,000 pay deal
... that’s more than boss of CPS!
‘Extremely
generous’of its senior executives enjoy pay
packages worth over £150,000, and
the same number received bonuses of
between £5,000 and £20,000.
Last night MP John Mann, of the
Commons’ Treasury select commit-
tee, called for an inquiry into execu-
tive pay at the agency.
VisitBritain, which celebrates its
50th anniversary this year, is tasked