No sooner has Communities Secretary Eric Pickles, as reported, ‘attempted to end ministers’ war of words with councils’, than he launches a fresh assault on the competence and worth of council officials. ‘I think there’s a cadre of top officers whose salaries are wholly disproportionate for what they do’, he tells an interviewer.
Good old Eric, forever playing to the Tory heartlands. For him and his special advisers, it often seems that a day without a headline in the Daily Telegraph or Daily Mail is like a day without sunshine. He must know how expendable he is making himself if David Cameron seeks to restore his political fortunes by means of a reshuffle towards the middle ground, perhaps as soon as the May council elections.
Yet the aggressive Communities Secretary has a point about salary levels in local government. No amount of bluster from Solace or chief officers’ associations can substitute for a rigorous answer to the question of how much chief executives and their kin should be paid. What is the nature of the market for such jobs? What principles allow the public to judge worth?
One of the last reports prepared by the Commons Public Administration Committee before the 2010 election demanded that salary setters in the public sector explain their reasoning. It called for transparency ‘so that taxpayers know who is being paid how much for doing what’. In his interim report on pay in the public sector, Will Hutton asked whether public bodies had allowed themselves to be suborned by the louche behaviour of corporate boards, and pay increases without any sustainable relationship to performance.
Pickles says ‘they’ve taken on the worst aspects of the private sector, without any of the benefits’. It would be good, some other day, to hear him expatiate on just what those ‘worst aspects’ of private companies might be, but suffice it to say he has a point. Successive studies suggest the ‘governance’ of public sector pay, notably in councils, has gone Awol. Sums are paid because headhunters say they are necessary; packages are constructed on the basis of precedent and aspiration, not performance or justification.
If that’s not right, then the representatives of council chief executives and their colleagues should not just say so, but produce the evidence. For the most part they haven’t. The real problem with John Ransford, chief executive at the Local Government Association, wasn’t the sum he was said to be paid but the coy secrecy surrounding it, and the abject failure of the councillors involved to justify, provide a narrative or explain their reasoning.
LGA chair Baroness Margaret Eaton now complains to Pickles that it’s ‘dishonest’ to ‘peddle the view that top officers in local government are causing the financial problem’. Pickles gets that message and graciously admits that cutting council chief executives’ money won’t do much for council budget setting this year or any time.
But we still have a yawning gap where arguments and principles should be, to contextualise and explain why councils (and other public bodies) pay £180,000 or £300,000 (once pension and emoluments are included) to x. We are still all too squeamish about individuals’ money, which is one reason the bankers have extricated themselves from the hook of public concern.
The public sector has no choice but to lead by example – as, to be fair, it does in many instances. Embarrassed defensiveness won’t do.
David Walker is the former managing director for communications at the Audit Commission
