Eric Pickles, the thinking man's John Prescott, apparently wants to introduce measures to control the pay of local council officials. No doubt similar measures to control the pay of other public sector employees, where they haven't already been introduced, will follow. This purely populist approach is imbecilic in the extreme.
What netherworld do Pickles and his idiot socialist-orientated pals inhabit ? The pay of even the most senior public sector officials is a tiny fraction of the pay of very many in similar positions in the private sector. The Government wants the public sector to be more like the private sector in terms of innovation and eficiency but, it seems, is unwilling to pay for the skills required to achieve this. In order to attract the most talented managers, you have to pay market rates; if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. It may seem to many that salaries of £100,000 and more are vast and can't possibly be justified; the truth is that, in the private sector, such salaries are far from uncommon as can be seen from the enormous salaries paid to many lawyers, accountants, bankers, corporate managers etc.
If you want Chief Executives and Finance Directors who can really do the job, you have to pay a going rate, and if you don't do this you will never get managers of the required ability. The silly pronouncements of this Government in this respect are a sop to the increasingly left-leaning attitudes put forward by all our main political parties. Mr Pickles is a fool.
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