Their "performance" should not relate to extra remuneration after the event.Īlexander should stop public sector bonuses forthwith. Those paid more than £70,000 from the public purse, however defined, should be expected to maintain services and turn round struggling organisations. At the very least those who, in many cases, squandered resources in the years of plenty should not profit from the years of pain. It is not easy to share the agony of today's cutbacks. The day of reckoning was bound to come and come it has. Parts of the sector resemble a miniature Greece. Often ludicrous fringe jobs in equality, liaison and sustainability have been funded. Staff have been hired and, in some cases, overpaid. New town halls, art centres, hospitals, schools and colleges have been built. London's public services have enjoyed a decade of expansion and fiscal largesse.
Here managers are expected to make swingeing cuts in payrolls, leading to thousands of staff being laid off across the capital. In the case of government and its agencies, the bonus culture mostly applies to people earning more than £70,000 a year. The "bonus to performance", if there is one, should be to the public that paid the original salary. There is no such measure in public service. But in that case at least there is a measurable profit to distribute.
That is why public-spirited organisations such as John Lewis pay the same percentage bonus to all staff, based on the annual results for the whole company. The only proper reference can be to delivery in which everyone's performance, from top to bottom, is involved. How can he explain this distinction? This is the public service sector. Will he do likewise at the Royal Mail, the Met Office, the Prison Service, defence procurement, the UK Borders Agency, or elsewhere in the benighted public sector? Only the most corrupt consultant could see some surge in public benefit from these bodies to justify such hand-outs.Īlexander says his admonition "is not about getting rid of performance pay" but about making sure that such pay "is for genuine excellence and not just run-of-the-mill performance". He is reportedly about to approve £500 million in bonuses to the next tier of senior RBS staff. Meanwhile, Alexander does not mean what he says. I doubt if punctuality will plummet as a consequence. It was hard to see what conceivable incentive had worked on executives to justify previous top-ups.
Why only then? Network Rail pre-empted what would have been a spectacular explosion of rage by cancelling all bonuses. The BBC, where bonuses are indefensible, is to cut its boss's pay by a third, though only when the present incumbent resigns. And it is curious how those with the biggest salaries get the biggest bonuses. Don't "reward excellence", which sounds as phoney as it is. But what is excellence? If certain jobs cannot be filled by able people without paying them huge salaries, then pay huge salaries. There should be no "rewards for failure". He wanted bonuses confined to cases of "genuine excellence". The chief secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, declared yesterday that, in parts of the sector, as many as a quarter of senior staff were on various forms of bonus. In any walk of life, the concept of high earners working hard only when goaded by greed makes little sense. The presumption that anyone doing such work will not be forthcoming unless induced by a postponed "incentive" bribe should be an insult to any profession. Here can be no good reason why anyone paid a public salary of more than £100,000 a year should be paid even more for doing the job well. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.
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