Want a big bonus? Get yourself a public sector job

John

"The average chief executive of a small company (up to 50 employees) is paid £65,000 a year and the average chief of a medium-sized company (between 50 and 200 employees) is paid £122,000."

But the Councils you are talking about paying their chief execs £200k employ over 10,000 people each, so I'm not sure what this comparison with small companies is meant to prove?

McSweeney

It started well and ended not badly but the unfortunate lapse into the easy target of stupid job names lets it down.

"including an ‘executive director of neighbourhood delivery’ who pulls in £120,780 a year — a pretty good whack for what sounds like a postman’s job."

It might sound like it but frankly if you bothered to find out what it actually entails the chances are it is a lot more than that.

And there is more than a touch of the double edged sword here as many of these people will be exactly those who would get it in the neck from the media for all and every error a council ever makes - something the Chief Exec of an SME would never face. So I'd say we can either have them on large salaries and expect them to quit after a sizeable error or pay them peanuts and let them carry on regardless of performance.

John Richardson

You deserve the two , frankly , unintelligent comments above ; 10:04am % 10:47pm 19th Feb.
You seem to approach this subject ( Local Govn. theiving via wages) with a wry , nudge nudge , 'it's all a bit of a laugh' attitude.
It's not.
These people are parasites and they are fully aware of the fact.
You obviously do not know anyone who truly STRUGGLES to pay their Council Tax.
The anger felt is real , incoherent and undirected.
People know they are being treated like slaves and cattle.
They know the 'Establishment', represented here in your article ('it's a right old shame but ah well never mind')
is contemptuous of their needs;
Feeding off them.
The People are correct.
I'll bet 'Local Government' , indeed political 'journalism' ,
was a cushty job in old Weimar.
Think what a thrilling piece you can write one the forthcoming riots.
Wow, the drama !
Sorry to be so honest , but the Country I love is being destroyed.

Mr Green

I'm not so bothered by their pay - more their attitude to work.
Some council employees a friend of mine used to know actually knew how many days they were "entitled" to take off sick each year, before having to answer questions (and so they took them all)!
They got the same pay as their peers regardless of how much effort they put in. This ultimately resulted in them putting in the minimum they could get away with (which was practically zero).

From what I could gleen from the various conversations I had, it seemed the average employment period went as follows:
Join Union (first priority it seems)
Decide whether to go into work.
Turn up late
Do little
Have very long lunch
Decide whether to return to work
Chat
Go home
Once every two years this pattern was broken with a strike - for more pay!
Finally retire early because of "back pain" or "stress"!!

McSweeney

And your council tax would probably be higher if the council was being inefficiently and disastrously run by the kind of senior manager that a really low salary would bring.

I don't think there is any implication in either comment or the article that there is no undeserving officials in local government. There are obviously people hoovering down a big salary who are bad at their jobs. But I don't think it's the rule and I don't think it is unreasonable that salaries of these levels are earned.

HJ

John: The point is that, in many cases, the boss of the company will also be the owner. So he has capital invested and his livelihood is on the line if he fails.

McSweeney:

The point is that these people don't get it in the neck from the media for every error the council makes. Most local press is run on a shoestring and they hardly know these positions exist. Even if they did, how would some of these errors ever come to light - it's not in anybody's interest in a council to highlight their cock-ups

"And your council tax would probably be higher if the council was being inefficiently and disastrously run by the kind of senior manager that a really low salary would bring."

The point is that if a private company were run inefficiently and disastrously, they'd go out of business. We really don't know exactly how efficiently or inefficiently the local council or a quango is run, because there is no measure of effectiveness against cost - they're not dependent on doing a good job for the money to come in - they get it through taxes. Let's remember that these jobs almost never go to people who have to be attracted from the private sector - they nearly all go to career-long public sector employees, so we have no information on any correlation between salary and quality.

Mark Solomon

How can the leader of Birmingham city council be paid only £52k (let's be fair, it's quite a big/responsible job) but some non-job on the administrative side in Thurrock be paid twice as much? That's one of the scandals in the public sector this last decade - the invention of non-jobs that nobody understands what they do on top money and effectively unsackable (because they lose nothing after all the compensation). This aping of the private sector without having any of the private sector controls, constraints or productivity is one of the worst legacies of New Labour.

David Cameron needs to find a chainsaw to cut out all the rot in the public sector and the welfare system - but there are not yet enough signs he understands the problem.

It would be a blessed mercy were the IMF called in - but they won't be because Gordon thinks he's saving the world and he wants to leave a total disaster for his successor - Denis Healey and James Callaghan were at least decent, honourable patriotic men - none of this applies to Gordon.

James R

McSweeney, your quiescent attitude to silly jobs in the public sector, and to the bureaucratic nonsense that goes with them, IS the problem here. No wonder you don't get it.
Start by sacking every official with 'diversity', 'community' or 'sustainability' in their job titles, and Britain would be on the road to economic recovery.
Any services disrupted in the transition could be easily filled by re-invigorated volunteers and small private contractors.

James R

And by the way, the same criteria could be used to decimate the executive and middle management ranks of the croney capitalist sector. The fact that private companies have been corrupted in this way is an aberration of the boom conditions of the past twenty years. We can ill afford these overheads at this point.

Ben Philips

Shocking isn't it? And it's all behind closed doors so no-one can see.

And the BBC won't blow the gaff on this racket. After all they're travelling aboard the same boat.

Disraeli once spoke of two nations, rich and poor - which still exist.

There's another divide - public and private sectors and the separate worlds each inhabit. Next time you tune into the BBC listen out for the the subject the context and the language they use. It really is a parallel universe and one I think we're becoming increasingly impatient of. When the main state broadcaster utterly fails to reflect the reality of most people's lives, you have to question its usefulness.

Andy SouthLondon

The pay-off for failure is really insidious. I worked twenty years in the NHS and saw constant reorganisation, as a consequence of which good people were allowed to keep their jobs (or a similar one with a different title) and the useless people were rewarded with large pay-offs.There is an army of failed NHS Chief Executives pocketing £300k AND coming back as consultants, interim Chief Executives, turnaround directors, DH advisors, project managers whatever on contracts that don't compromise their pay-offs.

They get paid handsomely for holding the fort while another reorganisation is implemented - what Alan Maynard famously called the "re-disorganisation" of the Health Service.

It often took two years to settle in the new organisation, by which time the top team decide the structure was not quite right and set off another reorganisation. Six months of interviews and new job descriptions to write, its a nightmare. Its not the just the salaries - it cripples the organisation with constant change, and acheives little of benefit to patients.

CharlieRay15

The best course of action for the Tories is declare the age of retirement for the public sector will be 65. Anyone whose services are not missed in the ensuing public sector strike can be fired. Well, we can dream can't we?

mrice

At a guess, the director of neighbourhood services does the ridiculously politically correct job of organising bin collections and street sweeping. Bad choice of target, I'd say.

The question the TPA's approach always raises for me is: who do you want to run these services? If you want tough, private sector style leadership, you've got to pay for it - it would probably cost even more than we pay already.

And as John points out, if you compared the salaries of council chief execs to people in the private sector who run similar sized organisations, I'd wager you that the business people are the fatter cats by a long chalk.

The TPA, incidentally, catch flak from liberals because their research is frequently of very poor quality.

F.Wood

I would like to know which of the partys will put an end to these unfair bonuses and gold plated pensions? (I think not Labour)

Alex

"So I'd say we can either have them on large salaries and expect them to quit after a sizeable error or pay them peanuts and let them carry on regardless of performance."

McSweeney
February 19th, 2009 10:47am

Thing is though McSweeney, they don't quit when they make a cock up - they refuse to resign, ensuring they have to be sacked, giving them the opportunity of getting the lawyers involved, at which point their former employers bottle it and give them a large, often undisclosed, sum of money which is supposed to be compensation - compensation for what? Making an almighty cock up.

If these parasites had any sense of honour, they'd fall on their swords when they make a big enough mistake, but they never do.

Libby

The overarching problem is the out of alignment pay and benefits (generous training, tolerance of sickness absence vastly greater than public sector (PS), flexible working aka skivers charter) received by PS employees in relation to the private sector. Gold plated final salary pension as, you rightly note, massively increase the value of the ‘package’I did my MBA with some supposedly ‘high potential’public sector workers (incidentally they were totally funded by their employer 20k 10 years ago!!) They were the worst performers in the class and couldn't work at the same pace or pressure. The school accepted them with lower entry quals because of the guaranteed revenue stream. The public sector is due for a radical overhaul!!!The so - called open competition for public sector roles is only lip service – what are the statistics of external to internal hires? It is a ruse to allow the public sector to increase wages. Well if they want private sector higher salaries let them adopt the other practices of the private sector.

I have worked as a management consultant and in industry for big blue chip employers. Most public sector workers would not be able to hack it.

One you do not even get the opportunity unless you in the top quartile academically and in those indefinable X factor skill (most public sector workers CVs would be passed round the office for a laugh!!)
It is not uncommon to work all night to meet deadlines for periods of several weeks
Having to work overseas (volatile far east ) when I demurred due to security fears told it wasn’t an option
Attending compulsory training, work events on weekends in addition to those occasion where client work, geographical location meant absence from home at weekends
Being coerced into working on long term overseas projects where I was absent from UK for periods of at least 3 weeks
Job insecurity – two horrific periods of prolonged uncertainty where the company went through 5 redundancy programmes
Sexism and abuse from the alpha males who are part of the territory in consultancy
Up or out culture – the pipeline narrows and by 40 only the truly brilliant or skilled manipulators survive. Cf public sector where average age is higher (thereby protecting
Pensions during the vulnerable late 40s and 50s)
Having to constantly prove oneself as the best and brightest – performance reviews culling the bottom 10% of an already superior workforce

R E Bland

Ross Clark has forgotten to mention the many add-on benefits for councillors. Amongst many others, they get to join (e.g. be co-opted onto) the EU-sponsored Regional Development Agencies, successors to the old Nazi 'Gau's into which Europe will eventually be split. These 'little earners' are amongst the consolation prizes for councillors who are voted out of office, when of course, they still need their slice of the action.