Fern Britton Denies 'This Morning' Exit Was Over Phillip Schofield Pay Row

Fern Britton has put the rumours to bed about her departure from ‘This Morning’, dismissing claims she left the ITV show over a row about pay.

After 10 years, Fern announced in 2009 that she was bidding farewell to the ‘This Morning’ sofa, with much media speculation she left after discovering that her co-host Phillip Schofield was earning more than her for the same job.

However, opening up to Hello! magazine, she has insisted that this is not the case. 

Fern said: “That certainly wasn’t true, not least because I had no idea what Philip had been paid; I knew what I was being paid and it was more than fair.”

Discussing the gender pay gap in general, Fern added: “It is appalling that, if you are doing the same job as a man, you are paid less and I am absolutely all for equal pay but at the time, even if Phillip had been paid more than me, he was doing more programmes on television.

“It is wrong for someone else to be paid more than you are for the same job. But it’s terribly important to find out where your ‘enough’ is because everybody’s different and I was very happy with my ‘enough’.”

Instead, Fern said of her exit: “I did ten years of it and I loved that show – I can’t tell you how much I loved it. But after ten years I just felt it was right to stop.”

When Fern stepped down from ‘This Morning’, she was replaced by Holly Willoughby, who at the time had won praise for her presenting stint on ‘Dancing On Ice’, alongside Phillip Schofield. 

The two have presented the daytime show for almost a decade now, and earlier this year, returned to ‘Dancing On Ice’ to present a rebooted series.

In 2017, Fern was seen presenting the Gordon Ramsay cooking show ‘Culinary Genius’, and she’s set to tour the UK in a new musical production based on ‘Calendar Girls’ later this year.