The figures in today’s article about BBC staff and their religion have been wilfully misunderstood by the paper.
We hold information on the religion/belief of 11,690 BBC staff. Whilst the data provides a good indication of our employees’ comparative religious identity profile, the figures do not represent the entire staff of the BBC. Of those who were asked about their religion, Christianity was by far the largest category, with 4,619 people.
There are many BBC employees for whom we don’t hold any information about their religion as we have only been collecting this information since July 2010, in line with employment good practice. In March of this year we conducted an internal census asking all staff to voluntarily update their equal opportunities information, including religion/belief for the first time. The results were disclosed in a recent Freedom of Information request.
I think the most interesting point here, is that the BBC is clearly an inclusive and richly diverse place to work, with a range of religions, beliefs and cultures reflected in our staff, and it is unhelpful to see such inaccurate reporting in the press.
