Moving towards more efficient public sector pay

Chris lancashire

Mr Oakley clearly knows a lot about policy and very little about management. A blanket pay freeze is the only way to halt continued inflation of public sector wages and salaries. Once an exception is made (for no doubt excellent reasons) the dam bursts and every group of workers will claim their own special reasons for being exempted from the blanket - and weak management (which appears widespread) will endorse the claim.

Fine tuning to reduce disparities must wait for another day; this blanket ban needs to stay for two years - minimum.

Philip East

This report completely discredits Policy Exchange, they used to be quite respectable, not so much now.

Pettros

The public sector will get round this by hiring consultants and agency staff.
I work as agency staff at a local council and recently saw my hourly rate double whilst permanent staff pay is frozen/reducing. There is a moratorium on hiring permanent staff so any resourcing gap is not filled by improving efficiency but by hiring more agency staff.....this is good news for certain elements of the private sector (i.e. my agency), not so sure about limiting public spending though.

I admit to not knowing how much agency staff cost in comparison to permanent per annum. They may be considerabley cheaper.

Rhoda Klapp

I know little of how public sector pay works any more, but don't they typically get rises in April? Would the jan-mar rises not tend to be minimal every year? Let's get a better stat before we go too far down this road.

alexsandr

has the fact that private sector workers face losing their jobs through their company going bustbeen factored in. Public undertakings dont go bust.
So senior managers in public sector jobs have a lot more job security than private sector.

Rhoda Klapp

And another thing. Don't you believe in the market up at Policy Exchange? The only criterion there is, in real life, is 'will you do the job for the money?' All else is flannel. If you can do better elsewhere, go on. If you can't, take the money and be glad. You'll get nowhere by comparing what people do, or how much they do it for. The market will take care of all that. You'll be going on about 'fairness' next.

Lonesome Dave

Well I'm sure that if our public sector friends are feeling so low in terms of morale, perceived reward and job satisfaction they can always leave their awful jobs and take a job in the private sector.

I do not anticipate a sudden surge....

Peter Hedges

I work in education and have recently been demoted following a staffing restructure designed to protect jobs. I can entirely understand why it is right that the bloated and inefficient sector is taking a hit. I feel as if I have paid my share of the "we're all in this together" ethos. If only they'd move on getting rid of the chaff as well as punishing the wheat!

Public sector pay will never be fair so long as national pay scales continue to exist. Quite why the unions feel it to be fair that a teacher in Newcastle should live in a much nicer house than his equivalent in Surrey, I'll never know. Quite why the idiot teacher who fails his students on a regular basis should be paid the same as a teacher who exceeds all expectations is beyond me. Still, that's the unions for you...

Every smack in the teeth for teachers pay and pensions suits me down to the ground. I am currently retraining and intend to escape from this disgrace of a sector within two years. Every time teaching becomes less attractive an option, my escape plan becomes more realistic. Bring on the axes and set me free!

Before you ask, I am a good teacher and could have had a very good career within the profession, had I not been worn down by the relentless decline in standards, the constant degradation of the profession and the inefficacy of those who call themselves my superiors. I was rapidly promoted and did my job well, for as long as it seemed productive to follow the party line. No more! I've a "can do" attitude and will soon be "doing" elsewhere. The jobsworths and bureaucratic obfuscators can carry on without me.

I'm not alone in my views but the unions and their shrill supporters shout louder still. Maggie should have crushed them back in the 80s. Will Cameron have the balls?

Hexhamgeezer

Productivity is the key issue from the lowest grade to highest executive - not wages. In general civil service and local authority productivity is appalling.

Large numbers of staff are incapable of carrying out the functions described in their job descriptions. Wage rises whether nationally or locally determined are irrelevant to the fundamental issue of ability (or capacity as it is sometimes euphemistically described). Performance related pay will not be applied or monitored properly just as policies like 'flexi-time' are used and abused.

A management culture which also benefits from high wages for weak productivity and overpromotion of mediocre staff is hardly likely to have the desire, or capacity, to implement effective reform. This Government is also not one with the appetite for the long hard slog which will be neccessary to radically overhaul the public sector.

To be fair to the CS it has been used for decades to soak up the unemployed and unemployable or to demonstrate the 'effectiveness' of social policy in other fields.

echo34

Hands up who would like to step into the breach at their local job centre plus for £15000 a year?

Meet local people, tingle with excitement when they threaten you for witholding their benefits.

Come on its easy! No different to the private sector.

REPay

The other factor consider is absentism which is 600% higher in the public sector. I suspect this is the case because it may not matter whether you turn up or not.

Verity

1. Cut the public sector by 25%.

2. Cut the public sector by another 25%.

3. Dump the quangoes, without notice, including the 17 new ones the weak, needy Cameron has introduced. (But until you dump them, Cameron Chameleon, why not set up a quango for setting rules for behaviour for the PM when hosting foreign heads of government? Like your cring-making shirt and tie barbecue with the Obmama creepies; and your extemporary ping pong match with Ocreepy had the dogs in my town in Mexico crouching and covering their eyes with their paws.

Go away.

daniel maris

This article is a melange of the divisive, the tendentious and the untrue.

I'm not sure I can even be bothered to look at the methodology since clearly there is an agenda there.

I will make a few observations though:

1. If local government workers are overpaid, why are there shortages of available staff in vital areas such as social workers.

2. What comparisons are being used? What is the comparator for a public sector social worker? Non public sector social work is far less stressful because it can be selective.

3. What is counting as public sector in this survey? Does it include or exclude the huge numbers of jobs where private contractors are the employers?

4. There are regional pay differences and these are achieved through different grading practices in effect.

5. A 0% pay freeze is a 5% pay cut when there is 5 % inflation. Owing to other cuts, increased charges and tax changes, disposal income is likely going down already about 10%-15% for most middle income families this year. THere will be another year or two of this. Many middle income people will probably be something like 30-40% poorer off while bankers and other lowlife continue to pay themselves huge, unregulated bonuses.

5. All the bankers who drove us to this near catastrophe in our economy received performance related pay. Is that an endorsement of performance related pay? Presumably Matt Oakley thinks PRP was having the desired effect.

6. Matt Oakley should get a proper job doing something useful: like social work with children, collecting waste, lighting the streets, checking on food safety, educating our children, providing libraries and so on...

Verity - We don't want to reside in some Godforsaken hellhole like Mexico thank you very much. Why don't you clean up Mexican society? It's got plenty of problems starting with a murder rate about 1000 times greater than ours and appallingly corrupt local government.

Hugh Janus

Excellent (if somewhat depressing) post by Peter Hedges.

I think I can answer the question at the end, where he asks whether Cameron has balls. On present performance the answer to that is a clear and unequivocal "NO"!! We have watched him roll over on the ridiculous increases demanded by the EU, and he shows no sign - apart from a few, tough-sounding press releases - of doing anything like fighting our corner when the next crazy increase comes along.

I'm sorry to say that I supported him at the last GE, but he has turned out to be a wishy-washy and completely spineless PM who, like his awful predecessor, wants to be all things to all men (sorry, persons). A huge disappointment in my view. Unless he wakes up, stops spinning and gets his act together I won't be making the same mistake twice.

wasthatthatguy

Re "To tackle these things, the government should begin to move negotiation of wages to a more local level and properly reward more productive workers with performance related pay."

Local power = Too much cronyism. Too much local corruption! Too many magistrates and judges who are local friends of local public sector employees, eg Local Authority social workers, legal services, planning, finance, etc Depts. In my opinion the proper central government should set the rates of pay of all public sector employees and how much money each LA has to spend and should ban any local person from being a local magistrate or a local judge! All magistrates and judges spending Monday to Friday sitting in courts at least 100 miles away from their homes. Travel to a different court each week. Stay in hotels Monday to Thursday nights. Bye bye friends of friends of Local Authority public sector employees. Bye bye local everything else of a public sector (corrupt) nature.