Letters to the Editor - Even Victorians were more open on civil servants’ pay

Published: 8 April, 2010

• FOLLOWING the letter about pay rates among Camden’s senior staff (Meet the secret bonus squad, April 1), let’s keep the pot boiling on the topic of senior public servants’ pay. 
In 1869, when William Gladstone was First Lord of the Treasury (at £5,000 a year), the Foreign Office passport department clerk, F Bernhardt, was paid £200 a year, the Examiner at the Inland Revenue’s Cancel and Spoiled Stamp Office, RP Walker, was paid £680 and the Postmaster of the Charing Cross Post Office, W Tull, was paid £500. This level of detail was produced as a matter of course for every government department at a time when Britannia ruled the waves.
Can anyone imagine Gladstone giving the slightest weight to the notion of the “privacy” of public servants when it was public money they were being paid?
In this year’s Whitaker’s Almanac the only comparable material relates to the five “bands” of the senior civil service, as at April 1 2009. The lowest, goes from £58,200 to £117,800 and the top whack for permanent secretary level is £279,300. 
Special advisers to government ministers are paid from public funds but are “negotiated individually” and are “usually” in the range £40,352 to £106,864 (does anyone think Hampstead’s favourite spin doctor was at the lower level of that scale? Or even in the middle?). Since responsibility for pay and grading was delegated to each government department and agency it is no longer possible, the almanac tells us, to show civil-service wide pay rates for staff outside the senior civil service.
So, today, when Britain is nowhere near the top of any international league table, in any area of endeavour, we seem to have designed a system which actually obscures important public financial data. Instead, we have bred a cadre of hugely expensive people paid from the public purse who, apparently affronted at the notion of doing the same amount of work as their predecessors, “delegate” the tough and difficult things and reward their decisiveness by doubling or tripling their own salaries.
How dare anyone at senior level in central or local government pretend that their salary scales, and bonuses, and allowances, are “private” or are protected by “human rights” legislation, or any of the other puny excuses we have been hearing from them for some time?  
Publish the Camden data!
GL CUMMING
Cressy Road,
NW3