Monday, Apr 12, 2010
Sharpen the Scythes
Times: I’m paid too much, says police chief, and so are lots of other public service bosses
The pay packages of public sector chief executives are unjustifiable, irresponsible and must be reined in, according to one of Britain’s top police officers.
Posted by happy mondays @ 08:15 AM (990 views) Add Comment
30 Comments
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1. timmy t said...
I'm all in favour of pay restraint for those paid by taxpayers, but footballers being paid 10 times this much add a whole lot less to society.
2. happy mondays said...
timmy t said...but footballers being paid 10 times this much add a whole lot less to society.
I agree, i say "give them all a ball" then everyone will be happy!
3. Robo1968 said...
There's a big difference, Footballers are paid by private business, not the tax payer. It is also performance related.
Hats off to this copper, am not expecting this straight talk from many though
4. icarus said...
Pay's not bad in local government either. The average pay rise for the top earners in local government last year was 5%. Kent County Council execs do particularly well, with two of its execs 'earning' over £300k last year - its Managing Director of Environment and Regeneration got £365k. Just how much responsibility to these people have, given that their budgets are pretty well fixed (75% of local authority income is from central government) and most of what they do is constrained by central government rules and targets?
5. icarus said...
2nd line "do" not "to".
6. mark said...
Tell us something we don't know, try solving some crime instead of collecting stealth taxes with speed cameras
7. 51ck-6-51x said...
timmy t said, "I'm all in favour of pay restraint for those paid by taxpayers, but footballers being paid 10 times this much add a whole lot less to society."
1) If one does not approve of footballers' remuneration then one may refuse to watch football or to buy any merchandise thereof. If one does not approve of public servants' remuneration one gets a handful of votes every four years in which one can elect representatives who may or may not do what you expected and/or were promised.
2) I, and you, have no hope of reaching a correct evaluation of footballers contribution to society and it has little relevance (does a shop floor manager add more to society than a shop cleaner?). Personally I don't watch football AND don't care how much these employees are paid, it's decided by a market, if they are not worth what they are being paid their management will not be able to keep the ball up.
8. icarus said...
The non-market aspect of footballers' pay is the indebtedness of football clubs. They go into debt to be able to afford to pay their players. So it's a bubble, and if/when it bursts the players will be home free with their earnings, just like bankers.
9. letthemfall said...
Unusual for a high earner to protest they are paid too much. Not something you're likely to hear from the private sector. The "market" in salaries is as more about what people can get away with than the value they create. Footballers now earn a lot of money because of the debt taken on by the clubs and the money flow from satellite TV. Are footballers more valuable than in the days when max wage was £20 a week? Of course not; it's a transfer of wealth from the punters to the players.
10. timmy t said...
6's, the bottom line is that the public sector has to compete for talent just like the private sector, and if it doesn't compete on pay, it will attract muppets. The problem we have with public sector remuneration in general is not that the salaries are too high (Many of them do the most valuable jobs in the country), but that people do the job "because they want to make a difference" regardless of their ability. Why do we pay MP's the cr@ppy salaries we do when they run the country? A decent double-glazing sales person could make more. Contribution to society is relevant in my opinion, you are of course entitles to disagree. I'd like to see contribution to society valued more (and therefore paid more), rather than the only criteria being "how much money you can make me".
11. orcusmaximus said...
@timmy t - football (the Premier league especially) is one of our exports, and hence is good for the economy!
@666 - agreed.
12. orcusmaximus said...
@timmy t at 10 - my MP does nothing to earn her money. She just turns up to vote the way her party tells her to, milks the system, and does nothing for her constituants. A decent double-glazing sales person contributes far more to society.
Now a cabinet (or shadow cabinet) minister earns their money I grant you, but a back bencher does not.
13. timmy t said...
orcusmaximus - so what is the problem there then - That your MP is paid too much or that you have a lousy MP?
MP's should be given a list of things that their constituents want done and paid on their achievement of these - i.e. their ABILITY to do the job. If this was the case, I'd have no problem with MP's earning 250K.
And as Icarus points out, the business model for football is flawed. We will have several bankrupcies in the premiership over the next few years, the big names will leave because they only care about money, and the fans will be left to bail out the clubs. Sound familiar?
My point is that this is what we get for creating a society where the only thing valued is the ability to generate wealth.
14. orcusmaximus said...
timmy t @13
Hmm. MPs paid on achievements achieved. I like this. Maybe we should link Gordon Browns pension to the level of the government surplus :-) More seriously, giving MPs a performance bonus linked to definitively achieving manifesto commitments would be an idea.
15. rumble said...
"If one does not approve of footballers' remuneration then one may refuse to watch football or to buy any merchandise thereof."
The problem with involving the public in markets - the participants don't realise that they are in control, collectively, without having to organise a thing, simply by playing their individual part.
16. 51ck-6-51x said...
Football clubs that borrow too much to secure players go bust; however the fact that the fans then foot the bill shows us that the clubs were not borrowing too much in the first place, but undercharging the fans (or failing to accrue from those who, in the end, were happy to foot the bill)
...so player's pay is not necessarily the broken part in the football club management model.
17. timmy t said...
orcus... If UK plc was offering a £10,000,000 bonus to a Chancellor that sorted out the public finances, perhaps we'd have a half decent shortlist of candidates to vote for next month, rather than a bunch on whining finger pointing children. The brief would probably need to be a bit tighter than "sort out public finances" but you get my point.
18. letthemfall said...
But do they, 51ck? Or are they bailed out by rich benefactors - often the case. Perhaps football clubs are like banks - captive customers (probably have to be a football fan to appreciate that), and too "big" to fail.
19. 51ck-6-51x said...
Regarding performance based rewards for public servants:
Government should only exist to provide public goods (examples include justice, security, public utilities, etc.)
Measuring the worth of a public good to a group of individuals is a hard task (hence the existence of government)
Measuring how well the government performed at providing the public good depends upon the former as well as quantifying the end use of said good, thus is a much harder task. Furthermore one can only estimate this before the end of the tenure of the resulting solution.
Attributing the benefit to those members of the organisation that carried out the task of implementing this solution (be it an MP or a civil servant) is harder still.
20. Rlovatt said...
The 24% on your basic reflects pension contributions is very informative.
my cousin is a paramedic and earns 35,000 a year so that means he's earning over 40,000 in the real world!
21. 51ck-6-51x said...
letthemfall said, "But do they, 51ck? Or are they bailed out by rich benefactors "
- If they are bailed out by rich benefactors that implies these rich benefactors value the existence of football clubs. The problem, therefore, is that the clubs are not extracting this percieved worth during normal operation, which is what I was saying. (the rich benefactors are fans or those who depend upon the industry but do not pay the worth of that dependency).
I don't think any club is too big to fail.
IMO banks are not really "too big" to fail either, it's more that the central banking model is flawed (in that there is no market in issuance).
22. timmy t said...
6's. We're talking about how you measure and reward the success of the team that run one of the biggest economies on the planet - I wouldn't expect it to be easy but not trying because it's too difficult is a bit lame.
And your comment @17 confirms the fact that you don't watch football!!
23. Striebs said...
@17 Timmy T ,
At £500m further in debt per day , here are the returns on investment of paying someone a bonus to sort the economy out by getting wrid of the deficit :-
£10 million bonus : 29 minutes
£10 billion bonus : 20 days
Makes a good case for buying in some high calibre help if it's heart is in the right place .
Even this is an underestimate because it does not consider the amount of interest we would already have paid on our debt .
This is all before starting to pay off the 1 - 3 trillion public debt , honour partially unfunded public pensions , unfunded state pension and PPP/PFI !
What is the atomic half life of that lot ?
24. orcusmaximus said...
The problem with the public finances is that democracy rewards short term 'success' and ignores long term health.
Listening to the radio this morning, I was disgusted that the SNP was saying that in a hung parliament, they would give their support in return for Scotland being immune from cuts. I wonder what the reaction would be if an English party were to pledge to slash Scottish/Welsh/Irish public spending and protect English public spending?
25. 51ck-6-51x said...
timmy - when I say difficult I actually mean that the problem is non-linear and even to find a good approximation would be NP-hard. It would, therefore, be a huge waste of resources doing so.
"@17" - Not sure which post you mean - but no, as I already stated I don't watch football - but that should have no bearing on the subject in question: I still understand that typical fans think they pay too much and that may well be true (I don't wish to comment on the value a typical fan puts on being able to follow their team and it will certainly vary between individuals), but the fact remains that the bailouts occur which implies worth that is not being extracted somewhere along the lines (whether it be astoundingly rich playboys or dependent businesses).
26. 51ck-6-51x said...
* ...which implies worth exists that is not being ...
27. 51ck-6-51x said...
orcusmaximus said, "The problem with the public finances is that democracy rewards short term 'success' and ignores long term health."
Good summarising statement, but how do we resolve this?
Some propose calculating reward based on a better measure of success, but I opine that this is not really achievable, as per my post @2:19PM - but I am not saying this should stop society attempting to solve the underlying problem - how should society provide itself with public goods in both a fair and efficient manner? Is fixing the current governmental system even the right way to go or have we advanced far enough to successfully implement a more distributed solution?
28. rumble said...
"a more distributed solution" -- nice... institutional diversity, more agility, greater test bed of subsystems competing... the united kingdom of counties.
29. icarus said...
The odd football club is financed by an oil billionare or a kleptocrat but the rest, for the most part, are sinking in debt. They go into debt to buy and pay big-money players and managers in the hope of winning major trophies. Only a very small number of clubs can win those trophies but they still splash out on players. Since it's sustained by debt and clubs' incomes generally don't cover costs you could call it a bubble and on that basis you could say that players are overpaid.
30. alan_540 said...
Nice one Sir Norman, we could do with a few more upstanding public servants like you!