Anybody taking a cursory look at the headlines disclosing the salaries and expenses of senior BBC executives could be forgiven for thinking the corporation has entered a new era of glasnost. Not a bit of it. As with MPs and their expenses, the information had to be dragged out of the corporation inch by painful inch.

Only the Freedom of Information Act forced the BBC begrudgingly to hand it over. Like MPs, the broadcaster used taxpayers’ money to fight disclosure all the way. And this from a corporation whose journalists like to investigate public sector secrecy and waste.

Licence payers, many of them on modest incomes, are paying for the huge salaries, generous pension benefits and padded expense accounts of BBC executives. Reports last week suggested that 27 BBC executives earn more than the prime minister’s annual £197,689 salary. Our calculations conclude that no fewer than 47 BBC bosses earn in excess of that amount. You would be hard pressed to get the members of the BBC’s £200,000plus club round a table.

From Mark Thompson, the director-general, with his £647,000 salary (actual income with extras £816,000), through bureaucratic layers and job titles that would put a medium-sized country to shame, the BBC sails on, oblivious to the harsh world around it. The people who pay for the corporation are suffering the pain of recession. Not those who run this public sector leviathan. This weekend it has sent 405 people to the Glastonbury festival, nearly as many as the number who covered the Beijing Olympics and more employees than almost any national newspaper. This is not the behaviour of other media companies which have cut back during hard times.

The BBC uses the old mantra that you have to pay well or your top executives will migrate into the private sector. It is a false argument. That private sector is up against the wall and savaging costs. Anyway “the market” has been misused as a justification for public sector greed for decades. In the 1980s, when the government started privatising state-owned firms, it was used as an excuse for trebling the salaries of the mediocre bosses of former nationalised industries.

As Greg Dyke, the BBC’s former director-general points out, top BBC salaries are based on the commercial world as it was, not as it is. David Elstein, former head of Five, says the BBC gets the best of both worlds – public sector pensions, perks and job security, while claiming it is operating in the market.

There is a simple way of checking whether BBC executive pay is too high. Advertise these jobs at half the salary. There would be plenty of very talented takers.