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The corporation had refused to comply with a request for the figure under the Freedom of Information Act, saying it was not covered by the legislation and that disclosure could affect its future dealings with other companies.
Assistant commissioner Anne Jones rejected the arguments, however, saying "the information was held by the BBC for operational purposes such as financial and administrative reasons and therefore it does fall within the scope of the Act". FOI does not apply where details are held "for the purpose of journalism, art or literature".
The ICO added that it was "not satisfied that disclosing the annual staff costs would prejudice the BBC’s commercial interests". This was in part because the organisation, which is an arbiter in FOI requests, believed it was unlikely that "all separate cost elements of an inhouse production will be disclosed under FOI".
The watchdog did agree with the BBC that it should not have to reveal details about how much actors get paid, however, saying this would be too expensive and "exceed the cost limit set out under the Act". The corporation had argued that it would have taken more than two and a half days to retrieve and process information on contract values.
"The BBC emphasised that there are 331 individuals whose information would need to be retrieved in order to find the full range of values from maximum to minimum as requested," the ICO said in its ruling. "In order to comply with the appropriate limit, it would need to locate and extract the relevant set of records for each individual as well as make the required calculations in less than three and a half minutes for each individual."
The BBC has said it is appealing the ruling that it must release the total staff costs.
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