BBC's pension bill rises to £2 billion Within three months of retiring from the BBC, he became chief operating officer at Burberry on a salary of £575,000, plus an additional £172,500 annual cash payment instead of pension contributions. If Mr Smith lives for another 25 years, he will receive a total of more than £4 million in payments from the BBC pension scheme alone, the Mail on Sunday reported. Other recent employees who are also enjoying generous deals, often as a supplement to other public sector pay packages, include Dame Jenny Abramsky, the corporation's former radio chief. She retired in 2008 with a pension pot worth £3.9 million, which pays her £190,000 a year. She is now chairman of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, for which she receives a public sector salary of £40,000. Patricia Hodgson, who took early retirement from her post of director of public policy in 2000, is able to draw her pension of £119,000 a year in addition to £80,000 a year for her work as deputy chair of broadcasting regulator Ofcom and chair of the School Teachers' Review Body. Former director general Mark Thompson, whose role in authorising millions of pounds of payoffs has come under scrutiny, has two BBC pensions. The first was accrued between 1979 and 2001, when he left to become head of Channel 4, and is worth £70,000 a year. His second pension, from when he was director general between 2004 and 2012, is worth £19,000 a year. The report lays the blame at "the continued fall in corporate bond yields, which are used to determine the present value of the pension scheme liabilities." Last night Tory MP Rob Wilson said: "Licence fee payers are becoming increasingly angry about senior BBC management rewarding each other with lavish pensions and payoffs, which amounts to a form of upper middle class benefit. There now needs to be a full investigation by the National Audit Office. A BBC spokesman said: "Like a great many other employees in the UK, BBC staff have a pension scheme that is made up of their own contributions and those of their employer. The amount they will be entitled to depends on a variety of factors. A spokeswoman for BBC Worldwide said that Mr Smith had transferred some of his own money into the BBC scheme. She added that his payoff and bonuses had been paid for out of commercial income rather than the licence fee.