So the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has been spending £1m on making staff redundant and then employing them again as consultants. Nice work if you can get it!
More than £11m was paid out in redundancy to staff who did not want to move from the old quangos to the new. But in the run up to October 2007, when the new commission was due to start operations, it was short of 140 staff and 15 out of 25 directors.
Seven staff from the old Commission for Racial Equality, which Trevor Phillips headed in 2003-06, were hired as consultants, despite having just accepted large redundancy cheques. Yesterday’s report said there was no evidence there was even a gap between when they left one job and moved into another, but they were not asked to pay back their severance money.
But this isn’t the only quango on the gravy train in comparison to average paid to the lowest paid worker.
Labour Peer Lord Gavron stated this year when introducing a debate on pay in public companies: When 12 years ago, I conceived the idea of publicising the ratio between the highest and lowest remuneration in our public companies, a typical ratio in many companies would have been around 30. This meant that for example, if the lowest paid averaged £10,000 per annum, the highest paid were getting around £30,000. Perhaps naively, I thought 12 years ago that the gap was rather large. Today we find instances where the ratio is 300.
In salary terms this means, lowest paid worker on £20,000 while highest paid around £6m! Gavron also argues that the ratio, if it continues to develop in a linear fashion, could be 1,000 or maybe more.
Furthermore the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) show that between 2007 and 2008 the weekly earnings for full-time employees of the bottom decile grew by 3.5% compared with growth of 4.4% for the top decile. Incidentally, the gender pay gap has increased to 12.8 per cent, up from 12.5% in 2007 (it’s not an equal opportunities credit crunch!).
And obviously the further you go up the greasy pole the ever widening of the gap between rich and poor, per annum. Adam Crozier (Chief Executive of Royal Mail) earns a cool £3m (an increase of 1,222.3% since 1999), Mark Thompson (BBC Director-General) £816,000 (increase of 366.5% since 1999), Mervyn King (Governor of the Bank of England) earns £289,551 (an increase of 22.5% since 1999)… Trevor Phillips, Chair of EHRC, earns a mere £110,000 in comparison.
None of this top drawer pay seems to come with any form of public accountability. What impact are these bosses actually having? Do they treat their workforce fairly? Do they develop their organisations properly? Perhaps they do but we just cannot tell.
The above are only a taster of top ranking bosses’ earnings in the quangos and public companies but they show that our “betters” continue to walk off with our money with pretty well nothing to stop them. You can think on all these figures next time you hear right wing pundits complaining of greedy public sector workers.
What are they really worth? At a guess £64.30 each week.
See Labour Research July 2009 (sub only unfortunately)
