BBC presenters settle sex and age discrimination dispute

Four female news presenters have agreed a settlement in a dispute with the BBC over claims including sex and age discrimination.

Martine Croxall, Annita McVeigh, Karin Giannone and Kasia Madera claimed they lost their roles on the BBC News Channel following a "rigged" recruitment exercise.

The BBC has insisted its application process was "rigorous and fair".

BBC News understands a settlement has been reached with no admission of liability, and a three-week tribunal to hear the presenters claims, which had been due to start on Monday, will now not go ahead.

The presenters declined to comment.

The dispute stems from July 2022, when the BBC announced plans to merge its domestic and international news channels, resulting in a recruitment process for five chief presenters.

The women claimed that ahead of the announcement, the BBCs channels senior editor privately assured four other presenters - two men and two younger women - their jobs were safe.

"We were put through a pre-determined job application process in February 2023," the presenters said in court documents during a preliminary hearing last year.

As a result, they said they were not recruited as chief presenters and were instead offered roles as correspondents, which in effect meant a demotion and a pay cut.

The presenters called the recruitment process "a sham" exercise, "where our jobs were closed even though the redundancies were not genuine as the work still exists".

They argued they were discriminated against because of their sex and age, were victimised because of union membership and for bringing previous equal pay claims, and suffered harassment.

The corporation said all candidates for the chief presenter roles were subject to the same fair application process, which involved an application interview then practical assessments.

It said at least five other applicants scored more highly than the four women and were therefore appointed, based on an "objective assessment".

All four women had also alleged they had not been paid equally compared with an equivalent male presenter since February 2020.

But at a two-day hearing last May, the BBC successfully argued the women had no grounds to bring an equal pay claim.

The judge ruled that the equal pay claim could not go ahead because Croxall, McVeigh, Giannone and Madera had previously agreed equal pay settlements with the corporation. The women later appealed against that ruling.

They were all off work on full pay from March 2023, and started to go back to work the following March.