The fanfare around coalition claims for greater transparency in Whitehall has not yet been met in reality. Let’s be honest, most people knew the salaries of the very top civil servants. The interesting information is in the the detail, the granular figures for the middle orders.
I’ve recently asked a number of FoI questions to see how many civil servants are paid as much, or more than an MP. The answer, in the list below, is that there are 3000.46 (full time equivalent) civil servants earning more than £65,738 per annum.
Francis Maude set up the Transparency Board to allow the public to “hold politicians and public bodies to account”.
I don’t think it unreasonable for the public to know the title and job description of every civil servant matching an MPs salary. So come on Francis, pull your finger out and get this committee to make a little more progress.
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I don’t think it unreasonable for the public to know the title and job description of every civil servant matching an MPs salary. So come on Francis, pull your finger out and get this committee to make a little more progress.
Pity you didnt think of it whilst wasting your time in Government over the past 13 years
Labour really has betrayed its own supporters and the
Labour MPs bear a big responsibility, fiddling exspenses, crawling before Blair and Murdoch
Not say anything about the Privatisation of NHS and Public Services
Your a Party of Neo Liberals no different from the Con Dems
We’re all on a journey, Eric. Even you. x
Tom
The question I find myself asking around the individual examples of the transparency agenda tends to be ”so what”, although this one is a little more meaningful than some others. The trouble with job descriptions is that they themselves conceal far more than they reveal.
If we look at, for example, John Suffolk. From memory he’s an SCS2, so probably in the £80-90k range, unless he’s on an exception contract in an effort to pull him in from the real world. His department is quite small, his budget is very small and the span of his work is predominantly advisory and stakeholder management. Cabinet Office can’t ”tell” any other department what to do as they have few meaningful sanctions available to them. It’s a challenging job, particularly in a period like that of the last PMs incumbency when CO had very little informal influence either. The money is probably fair, but at face value almost certainly not particularly defensible.
So from a transparency perspective each of those roles will probably need some qualitative information around it to allow the layman to make sense of it, and make a judgement on whether they think it’s worthwhile or not.
It may also be interesting to bring into the equation the military side of the public sector. That’s about the salary of a fairly fresh Lieutenant Colonel, commander or Wing Commander, in other words the Commanding Officer of a Battalion, Destroyer/ Frigate or fighter Squadron. From experience Civil Service spans of responsibility don’t compare well.
Where I would suggest there is value in examining is the process of decision making in government. Just how much does a decision cost. How much internal consultation goes into any internal decision, and why does it take the time it does? Transparency around that would add value so that we could expose just how much public money goes into auditing and governing how public money is spent.
I’d like to know the numbers on minimum wage (and/or one of the living wage measures) by department.
There’s a difference between public life and public service, and the things that motivate and drive the people who follow those respective paths.
I suspect you’ll probably get your wish in the next few months, Tom… but so what?
http://blog.helpfultechnology.com/2010/06/good-and-bad-transparency/
I’ll give you a very good answer to that in the next few weeks.
How do you get 0.46 of a civil servant?!?
John Suffolk’s salary is actually in the range of £205,000 – £209,999. It was disclosed in the Cabinet Office release of senior civil servants earning over £150k, at the start of June.
http://download.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/transparency/high-earners-pay.csv
If we’re going to campaign for open data, we really ought to use it.
3000.46? I wasted a couple of mins trying to work that out. You really need a (sic.).
Please speculate on whom at the Home Office you think is recognised as only 0.46 of a civil servant.
But what are the additional benefits etc to make up the whole “package” compared with am MP?
Apples and oranges again.
Tom thanks for showing this. Like you i think we do need to more not less transparency and more sharing of public information. However I have a strong reservation and am concerned that IPSA are about to publish the salary details of MPs staff, who can be all easily identified or matched from existing public records. What good does it do to to tell all that ‘x” a constituency secretary, earns less than £30,000…. unless the motive is more than transparency? Another attack on MPS, a game called ‘who has the lowest office costs’? I’m not sure.
@Simon
Valid point, he’s on a private contract, not a standard CS contract. That was needed to bring him into the CS from the real world.
However the point remains, this data is meaningless without context. Despite being SCS on that salary he has fewer people and a smaller budget than I had as an Officer Commanding on £43k salary.
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