Members may have seen details in the media from non-elected organizations attacking Public Sector and Civil Service Pay. Most of these articles make false claims and assumptions about Civil Service Pay, incorrectly stating that Civil Servants are well paid in comparison to the private sector and the rest of the public sector.
Pay in the Civil Service (DWP) is lower than that of comparable jobs in the private sector with pay gaps of more than £5,000 between the civil service and private sector. However true like-for-like comparisons between public and private sector jobs are inherently difficult and the ‘average’ figures such stories use are skewed by the fact that many traditionally low-paid public sector jobs have been privatised in recent years.
Also missed is the fact that PCS members are suffering a double whammy. Civil service statistics published on 20th January 2010 show that our members are often paid less than their private sector and other public sector counterparts. This supports the work Income Data Services (IDS) has done for PCS in 2009.
IDS’s comparative study shows that pay awards in the civil service are so different from one Department to another, it colours the reality of low pay and lower pay compared to other employers.
Administrative officers across the civil service (48% of all staff in 2009) delivering a range of services such as getting people back into work, tax credits and passports are paid £4,608 (21%) less than their colleagues doing comparable jobs in the private sector.
Compared to the rest of the public sector the gap is £4,045 (19%) and for the financial sector the figure is £3,330 (16%).
Executive Officers who typically work in a supervisory role or a job which requires a vocational qualification are paid £4,783 (18%) less than the private sector and £3,945 (15%) less than the financial sector.
Compared to rest of the public sector the gap is £4,503 (17%). This is a key grade in the Civil Service and many of our hardworking members at EO are undervalued by comparison to similar roles elsewhere.
Higher executive officers who manage teams of people are paid £5,338 (16%) less than their counterparts in the financial sector and £4,305 (13%) less than those working in the private sector. Compared to rest of the public sector the gap is £1,873 (6%).
Administrative assistants who typically undertake clerical duties such as processing benefit claims, tax credits and self assessment forms earn £979 (6.5%) less than the private sector and £572 (3.6%) less than the rest of the public sector.
The IDS study received a lukewarm reception from the Cabinet Office and Treasury and no serious discussion of the findings has yet taken place.
However, the report does support PCS’s arguments in the 2010 National pay claim, that Civil Servants are not the protected elite of the public sector that the media suggests.
It also shows that the Treasury scrutiny of awards and insistence that pay progression, equal pay and other parts of pay are included in the overall costs, hide the poor increases on basic pay year on year.
This is a robust piece of work. The IDS job evaluation system has been used for comparison with the national statistics figures for roles in the wider economy.
The new civil service statistics for the first time reveal that the lower ‘average’ salary for a civil servant is £22,850 compared to £24,970 in the private sector and £27,686 in the public sector as a whole.
The higher public sector average is partly down to the effect of lower paid jobs, such as security and messaging services, being contracted out.
With 63% of civil servants earning less than £25,000, it is clear that by any comparison our members are poorly paid. And this supports our campaign for national pay bargaining.
Pay in the DWP
The former Chancellor announced a new pay cap of 1 percent pay increases for the next three years in the Public Sector. Pay cuts and pay freezes have been a common feature for civil servants as the Government has sought to drive down pay over the past few years, with all of the DWP staff receiving a 0% pay rise last year and 1% this year.
There has not been a golden decade of pay rises in the DWP with people getting on average a one percent pay rise over the past three years; however we are being asked to pay for the financial crisis none of which was our doing.
In reality, because of the fact that, uniquely in the Public Sector, pay progression in the Civil Service is costed out of Annual Pay rounds, this means negative pay rises, i.e. pay cuts of -1%, or alternatively no pay progression. Pay Progression is the time that it takes to move from scale Minima to scale Maxima. This used to be as little as 4 to 8 years in the 1980’s and is distinct from the Pay Rise element. This is how much the pay scale increases by; it is sometimes also called the "cost of living rise".
To explain this; without pay progression, two people doing the same identical jobs, but one is paid up to £5,000 per annum less than the other, in perpetuity.
A pay freeze as now announced by the new Government for any earning more than £21, 000 (and a measly £250 per annum for those below £21, 000) would therefore be a pay cut in real terms due inflation and also due to pay progression not being funded separately.
