David Cameron’s commitment to “lifting the shroud of secrecy” over government is certainly being delivered in terms of public-sector pay. Last week the details of over 300 directors of non-departmental public bodies who earn more than the prime minister were published, following the earlier listing of senior civil servants who are similarly blessed in the earnings stakes. There will be a series of further disclosures, covering public servants down to a level of approximately £60,000.
Disclosure is, in a sense, the easy bit of public-sector pay reform. At the most senior levels it should be expected by both the individuals concerned and taxpayers, and once the initial “look how much they get!” reaction wears off, it should help us to consider just what roles we value in society and what we should pay those doing them.
That the chief executive of the NHS – with responsibility for our healthcare and over one million employees – is paid £255-260,000 would be regarded by most as an excellent bargain for the public purse, given what an equivalent chief executive would be paid in the private sector, if there is one.
Quangos, too, deserve the spotlight of disclosure as, unlike the senior civil service or top of the NHS, there are no pay scales in place and the governance processes for determining senior pay are patchy and varied in form and quality.
But moving down the structure, does it really help the public to know that the chair of water regulator Ofwat is paid £110,000 or deputy chair of the Office for National Statistics £35-40,000? Even as someone who works in the pay field, without knowing more about the jobs and relevant comparators, I am not sure I could say much about them. And publishing the pay details of middle ranking civil servants is of questionable value – in executive remuneration reports in the private sector, disclosure has often served to confuse, and even inflate, rather than clarify matters.
As the Senior Salaries Review Body has pointed out in a recent report, appropriate disclosure is only one leg of a three-pronged approach needed to improve public-sector pay management. Proper governance arrangements and appropriate pay objectives and structures are the other two, and we should be hearing as much from the government on these latter two as all of this hot air on disclosure if real progress is to be made.