Two BBC bosses have racked up the biggest pensions in the public sector, together worth more than £14m.

Mark Byford, 51, the deputy director general, is to receive a pension of at least £229,500 a year from a pot valued at almost £8m. This could rise to more than £10m if he works at the BBC until the age of 60.

Alan Yentob, 62, the arts presenter and creative director of the BBC, has accumulated a pension worth £6.3m, giving an annual retirement income of £216,667 for the rest of his life, according to new research.

Until now it was thought that Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, had Britain’s largest public sector pension. His pension pot is valued at £5.7m, paying a retirement income of £198,613 a year.

Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrats’ Treasury spokesman, said: “As more and more massive public sector pots are revealed, it only strengthens the case for reform. Taxpayers simply cannot afford to be paying lavish pensions for executives who are already extremely well paid.

“For teachers and nurses these schemes can deliver an appropriate pension, but these figures show that they can deliver obscene retirement packages for senior executives.”

This weekend it also emerged that the BBC has for the past decade rewarded senior executives with lavish receptions and leaving parties, with one farewell costing more than £150,000. The extravagant send-offs were not disclosed last month when executives’ expenses were published.

The Sunday Times asked Hargreaves Lansdown, the financial services group, to analyse BBC executive pensions after the corporation rejected a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) to disclose the size of pensions held by executives below main board level. The BBC said the scheme was exempted from FOI because it is managed by a third party.

The analysis found that Mark Thompson, the corporation’s director general, has a second “hidden” BBC pension worth nearly £2.9m. No details of this pension, accrued between 1979 and 2001, appear in the BBC’s most recent accounts. They record only the pension rights he has earned since his appointment as director general in 2004, after a short spell at Channel 4.

Similarly, the corporation makes public only the pension earned by Jana Bennett, the director of BBC Vision, since she returned to the BBC in 2002. It fails to reveal the value of her pension accumulated from 1979 to 1999.

Hargreaves Lansdown calculated how big a pension pot an individual would need to buy a given value of annuity. The valuations took account of how long the executive had worked at the BBC, their age and current salary.

The BBC said: “It is irrelevant to talk about how much it would cost to buy these pensions on the open market because they are not on the open market.”

Members of the BBC’s final salary pension scheme contribute 6.75% of their annual salary to the pension. The full cost of meeting these pension benefits far exceeds the members’ contributions.

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