Leo McKinstry

Leo McKinstry is a British author and journalist, noted for his extensive coverage of British and Irish history and best-selling sporting biographies. Since 2005 he has been a columnist for the Daily Express.

This BBC pay bonanza shows that the public sector is out of control

ONE of the more notorious features of the former Soviet Union was the chasm bet­ween the ruling elite and the public.

IN THE MONEY BBC Director General Mark Thompson IN THE MONEY: BBC Director-General Mark Thompson

Politburo chiefs mouthed socialist rhetoric about serving the people yet enjoyed lives of extreme privilege, travelling in

curtained limousines and using exclusive restaurants and holiday villas.

Meanwhile, ordinary people had to endure the grim consequences of their masters’ ideology, reflected in endless bread queues or soulless Moscow housing estates. That kind of divide between rulers and ruled is an increasing reality in modern Britain. Our top state officials might like to pose as the servants of the people but they face nothing like their struggle.

In effect, the public realm is inhabited by two groups. On one side are the subsidised rich, insulated from the harshness of recession by their ­bloated salaries, gold-plated pensions, inflation-busting pay rises and excessive bonuses.

The Corporation’s salary levels are all too typical

On the other are the hard-working Britons whose taxes fund the public sector and who try to cope with job insecurity, falling wages, rising household bills and negative house equity.

The fallout from the BBC obscenities scandal has brought this gap into sharp relief. Much of the public’s anger over Jonathan Ross has focused on his obscene £6million a year salary, £16,000 a day, met by the licence fee payers. Vulgar abuse, it seems, has never been so well rewarded.

But a large phalanx of senior BBC figures is just as indulged. The Corporation has admitted that its 50 top executives are all earning at least £190,000 a year, more than the Prime Minister, and many far above that.

Director-General Mark Thompson is on £816,000 while no fewer than 16 senior managers are on over £300,000. They include Jana Bennett, the grandly titled Director, BBC Vision, who is on £536,000.

The BBC claims that it has to pay these enormous sums to attract talent but the truth is that, in the current economic climate, no commercialbroad­caster would dream of forking out a fortune for either Jonathan Ross or the BBC’s overpaid pen-pushers.

Just as the behaviour of Ross and Russell Brand was indicative of the vulgarity in public life today, so the Corporation’s outrageous pay levels are typical of the culture of excess at the top of the public sector.

Civil servants, quango heads, municipal bureaucrats and agency chiefs have all been cashing in, regardless of performance. The Royal Mail remains in crisis as it embarks on a wholesale cull of post offices, yet this year it rewarded chief executive Adam Crozier with an extraordinary package worth £3.04million, more than 180 times the salary of a typical postal worker and enough to save almost 170 post offices. And Gary Hoffman, new chief executive of the nationalised Northern Rock, receives£2.6million.

Every kind of civic institution has been infected with the belief that its senior managers should be treated like high­­flyers from the commercial world. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which has presided over such a school testing shambles, gives its chief executive Ken Boston a £325,000 salary, the use of a flat in Chelsea and six annual business class flights to Australia.

Equally offensive was the £53,000 spent on taxis last year for James Braithwaite, chairman of the South East of England Development Agency, one of the network of useless regional development quangos set up by Labour, with 39 executives earning more than £100,000 a year.

In local government, there are now at least six municipal bosses on £200,000-plus and more than 800 earning above £100,000. Andrea Hill, the £220,000 head of Suffolk County Council, is typical of this smug new breed, boasting that she is worth her salary because “it’s a high-risk job”.

Not exactly fighting the Taliban, is it? More public money disappears on huge pensions for state bureaucrats as millions of private sector and self-employed workers face penury in retirement because of the closure of final salary schemes and the dramatic slide in pension fund values.

THE BBC is again at the forefront. Jenny Abram­sky, its former Director of Audio and Music, has just retired with a pension pot of £4million, giving her an annual income of £190,000.

Public sector fat cats are in the habit of trying to justify these vast perks and pay by comparing themselves to executives in the private sector. But this will not wash.

First, they face nothing like the pressures and competition that exist in the commercial world. Unlike private business, they do not have to worry about winning in the market place as their revenue is guaranteed by the Government however badly they perform.

Second, most of them are career bureaucrats, used to working in the suffocating, buck-passing environment of procedures and committees. They would struggle to transfer to the more dynamic private sector. But by far the most aggravating aspect of all this taxpayer-funded indulgence is that it has done nothing to improve the running of public services.

Money has poured into the state system but too much of it has been swallowed up by executive rewards and bureaucracy. The result is rampant disease in hospitals, falling standards in schools, dumbed- down television, soaring violent crime and paralysed bin collections.

As the snouts sink deeper in the trough, the British public is the loser.

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