Liberal Conspiracy has again delved deeper into the depths of madness with this post. I’m sorry but you really have no idea what you are talking about.

To suggest we must pay public sector executives huge salaries to stop them defecting to the private sector is ludicrous. They are replaceable. Further it is worth noting that the only reason private firms headhunt these people is for their insider knowledge and contacts. If the government initiated a more competitive tendering process for contracts, the private firms would gain nothing from insidery staff and consequently stop hiring them.

This whole post of course is not about public sector pay but instead your obsession with regulating private sector pay. You have reached this conclusion in an ingenious way, but that still doesn’t make the argument right.

David
http://www.davidbreaker.com

Two things.

First, consider tax inspectors. HMRC spend a lot of time training them and givign them experience at finding the tax dodges so that they can make the tax avoiders responsible and pay their dues. Then, of course, the tax inspectors can double their salaries by moving to an accountancy form, switching from gamekeeper to poacher. It happens all too often. Just an idea, what about the tax inspectors getting a cut of the extra tax they get out of the tax dodgers? It might keep the talent in HMRC. (I’m not a tax inspector, BTW)

Second. The pay freeze in the NHS will drive doctors and senior nurses to the private sector. This is the intention of the pay freeze because – godknows – the private sector needs the extra staff in preparation for Lansley’s big bankruptcy sell-off of the NHS next year. Not heard about that? No, the ConDems didn’t make much of an issue about it at the last election, and Labour (damn them) did fuck all to inform the public that if they voted Tory or LibDem they would lose the NHS.

The first point is is – you cannot compare private sector salaries to public sector salaries because private sector bosses have to raise revenue, they don’t have a guaranteed income stream from the taxpayer, public sector bosses don’t “run an organisation” they just spend money (the easy bit).

Secondly it’s ridiculous that anyone in the public sector earnns more than the prime minister.

“As a result of this merry-go-round, the public sector finds it incredibly hard to hang on to people who know what they’re talking about without paying through the nose”

Nonsense. Many public sector employees have come from the private sector and you will often find that they don’t know what they are talking about because they have a completely different skill set. As a result the public sector is stuffed with talentless deadwood draining the public purse. Thirty years ago local authorities were run by far fewer people on a fraction of the salaries now paid, and they provided a better service. There’s no correclation between salary paid and ability (just look at merchant banking – a bunch of overpaid monkeys who almost bankrupted the country and who still say they must pay top dollar to attract and retain “banking talent”).

@ Richard Blogger.

One of my brothers worked as a tax inspector at the old Inland Revenue and was indeed poached by a large oil company to assist them with their tax dodging. He earned a fortune, but it wasn’t all roses; the long hours and stress were so bad he developed a serious alcohol problem. After a spell in rehab he jacked in the job and now lives of what he earned then and some freelance work. He earns a lot less, but is a lot happier.

The NHS is world’s biggest employer after Indian railways and the Chinese Army. It’s ridiculous to complain about their CEO earning 250K. Perhaps the ConDems might like to look at the internal market in the NHS instead, since it was introduced administration as a proportion of the NHS budget has gone up from 6% to 20%.

There are public sector bosses who earn too much. I support the BBC against Tory and Murdoch attacks, but the Director-General Mark Thompson earning £834,000 a year is ridiculous and doesn’t help the BBC case.

Anyway, the big public sector salaries are just a product of the neo-liberal boom. Its only now when the bubble has burst we are looking at them. We should remember the principal culprits responsible for the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s worked in the private sector. What needs more commentary on is how a crisis in the financial sector has been converted by neo-liberals and the right wing press into a crisis of spending in the public sector requiriing drastic cuts.

Wow, fancy being on a mere ten times the sallary of your junior staff. How can they possibly cope?

it is worth noting that the only reason private firms headhunt these people is for their insider knowledge and contacts. If the government initiated a more competitive tendering process for contracts, the private firms would gain nothing from insidery staff and consequently stop hiring them.

How exactly would you go about this, doubtless piss-easy feat? Please answer with references showing your understanding of the public procurement system as it is today (an explanation of the current role of OJEC/OJEU and how you’d push this further forward would be helpful).

Thirty years ago local authorities were run by far fewer people on a fraction of the salaries now paid, and they provided a better service.

…supports Jonn’s point. 30 years ago, a competent manager in a local authority stood very little chance of being poached by PwC or Capita on wages reflecting their potential as a salesman – instead, they could be paid based on the organisation’s budget, their seniority, and the pay grades of their staff.

I wish I could be surprised by the footsoldiers of the right’s utter failure to engage in the point I was making, but it’s alas pretty much what I expected.

I’m not saying fat cat salaries are good. I’m not saying they’re right. I’m not even dismissing the idea that it’s easier to justify such sums for those whose job is to grow commercial revenue, rather than simply spend our tax.

But I do think that the TPA brigade are, with all due respect, fucking morons about this issue. If business really needs to pay more for top commercial acumen, then so does the state. If the state doesn’t, then neither does business. There’s no logical reason why you should need to pay millions for a FTSE100 CEO but get away with offering the head of the NHS £50k or something. Anyone who says otherwise is either prejudiced, ignorant of commercial reality, or simply stupid.

Or, like the TPA I suspect, they don’t actually care for greater value. They just want to shaft the state whenever possible for their own ideological reasons, and to hell with whether it works or not.

“. As a result the public sector is stuffed with talentless deadwood draining the public purse.”

Nice non prejudiced comment there as usual Matt.

You are neatly sidestepping the point that salaries of MPs and senior civil servants have shot up in the last thirteen years while overall performance has gone down so TPA think “why the hell are we paying these people so much” and a lot of private sector workers think “I could do a better job than that for half the pay”. It is quite likely that most of them would not but I have seen examples of highly paid management jobs where I do not see how I (who decided over quarter of a century ago that I really didn’t want to manage anyone and turned down a couple of career opportunities to stick to being a geek) could have done worse.
However the main problem with public sector pay is that, for the vast majority, there is no reward for effort or performance. It isn’t fair that those who “carry” a sick or idle or just plain incompetent colleague get paid the same as their burden. Many, probably most, of those who defect to the private sector do so because they feel their dedication and effort is unrewarded in terms of recognition and respect from their department more than in terms of pay. When they see the BBC paying tens of millions of pounds to Jonathan Ross who failed to get a job in the private (broadcasting) sector …
Finally, how do you propose to control the pay of those who are self-employed? During a building-sector boom a self-employed brickie earns more than a bank manager, in a snowy February he gets nowt while the plumber rakes it in. Do you propose capping J K Rowling’s royalties? Or Paul McCartney’s?