Is pay a public matter? The government thinks not when it comes to local government. Local authorities will be required to list all the posts that attract a salary of over £50,000 and name and state the pay and perks of anyone earning over £150,000.
Since this will be chief executives, there is a suspicion that this is nothing to do with greater openness and accountability to the taxpayer but a view from Whitehall that senior local government managers are being awarded excessive pay rises.
Why would so many former chief executives be moving into the civil service?
I can only assume top civil servants get paid more than local government chief executives, otherwise why would so many former chief executives be moving into the civil service? Of course this is a great deal of money compared to average earnings, but perhaps a more appropriate comparison would be to look at the pay of those who run large voluntary organisations.
A vacancy has arisen at a large housing association where the former chief executive was drawing a salary package of more than twice as much as even the best-paid paid local government chief executives.
It may not be particularly helpful to know what top jobs pay, since most local authority staff do not aspire to these posts. We are all curious about what others earn because it isn't something people talk about. This is a big issue in the private sector where managers negotiate individually with their boss for a pay rise. A skilful boss makes everyone think they are getting more than their colleagues and no one knows the truth because pay is a private matter.
Not so in the public sector, where there is no discretion to individual deals and everyone doing the same job gets the same pay. Or so we used to think before job evaluation.
We now know that despite working for the same organisation, those in the education department are better paid than social services, who are in turn better paid than those in environment.
Our suspicions have been proved correct: those who work in the chief executive's department in policy or communication do get paid more than those doing the same job in other departments. What we hadn't appreciated was that there is such a difference across the organisation in holiday entitlement, sick pay and overtime rates.
Even the length of the working week is different.
As we attempt to evaluate all jobs against the principle of equal pay for work of equal value, we are only now appreciating what has been hidden.
It is clear that historically certain areas of work were rewarded more highly than others irrespective of the level of skill, the knowledge and the experience required.
Implementing a fairer system is the right thing to do but it is difficult to persuade people that they have been overpaid or have benefited from more generous terms and conditions of work. Naturally they would prefer every one just came up to their level - but that is not affordable.
What this does demonstrate is what happens when organisations are not transparent about what they pay.
From Bubb's Blog
From Whitehall Watch
