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Senior IT officials among top paid civil servants

Seven senior IT officials are on the newly published list of top paid civil servants. In the list published by the government to provide greater transparency of high earners' salaries, Joe Harley, IT director general and chief information officer (CIO) at the Department for Work and Pensions, comes out top of the information …

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FAIL

Smoking gun...

Yes this is the salaried jobs NOT the contract positions...

I'd be interested

to see how this compares to private sector pay for similar posts.

Thats the key issue

Unless we have a benchmark how are we supposed to know if thats "a lot" or not?

We need to know, from an equivalent private sector org how much someone with a similar budget/responsibility/geography etc earns. Id rather we overpaid a genius than underpaid an idiot.

Silver badge

Question is ...

How many of the folks mentioned in the article actually know anything about IT?

My guess is none of 'em. They are management, and part of the problem ... People like this are why Microsoft's marketing folks draw even larger salaries than the fore mentioned.

Anonymous Coward

How many know much about IT

The know plenty because that's why they get the jobs... and if you don't like management then tough. Techies are plentiful, managers are plentiful. Get a techie manager, well that's much rarer. Joe Harley in particular knows plenty IT than you and he can manage multi-billion pound budgets.

If someone can reduce an IT budget by £150million with increasing service quality he's probably worth 0.2% of the savings don't you think?

the fact that just because someone earns a couple of hundred grand more than you doesn't mean you can do his job, anymore than you could replace Frank Lampard.

There are some people who are just good - accept it and move on .

Bronze badge

Entirely agree . . .

. . . except this is the civil service, which has never brought a project in on time or on budget or with the scope even close to what was originally promised.

They have also never made savings.

So, tell me again why they get paid close on double the major private sector IT directors (n.b. thats IT directors not in the IT industry, which would be comparing like for like).

Stop

Been to the Daily Mail school of retard comments?

The Civil Service is big, encompassing everything from policy wonks to engineers to scientists. There are plenty of IT projects brought in on time and budget and plenty that aren't. To tar everyone with the same brush is lazy.

Paris Hilton

Ah good. Now for the next stages...

Step 1 - to identify ring-fenced employees in the public sector (ring-fencing is one way to maintain a level of income that is not commensurate to the job. Example: someone on a salary of £30k doing a job valued at £20k).

It is more widespread than you or I might imagine.

and

Step 2 - trash NUPE

I think there are at least two ways in which NUPE can be trashed and both of these hinge upon evidential basis of public sector not upholding basic principles in NUPE thus making the 'special case' argument and NUPE itself null and void by public sector actions.

Silver badge
WTF?

Just one little question...

WTF is NUPE?

My Google-Fu tells me

National Union of Public Employees

Anonymous Coward

What?

So step 1 seems to be talking about the mix of people:

- Those whose jobs have been reorganized out of existence but get a few years grace at their old salary doing a new job rather than expensively making them redundant, which is pretty common in most large organizations and is basically a sign of basic decency and good sense any employer

- Those like IT staff who would be placed at low low salaries according to public sector pay norms, but actually have to be paid rather nearer the market rate in order to get anybody to do the job. Try getting rid of them and watch everything break.

Not sure whether step 2 is a rant about a union that ceased to exist 17 years ago or a racist sideswipe at some Nigerians to be honest

Anonymous Coward

@I'd be Interested to see

Depends on what you are comparing their salaries with, commercial banks etc. about the same, I think. The SI's they face off against, a good deal more.

But consider the size of the organisations, the NHS dwarfs any UK private sector organisation.

Thumb Up

And the MoD

Dwarfs the NHS.

Anonymous Coward

By what measure?

The NHS employ's at least 3 times more people and its budget is over twice as much.

Not sure which kills more people though?

D'oh

I got them the wrong way round. My bad.

Paris Hilton

NUPE?

Well, the UK public sector has had its pensions and entitlements protected as part of parliamentary business in House of Commons.

At the same time the UK public sector seeks to erode and undermine the principles that pensions and entitlements are worth protecting hence making the act of parliament null and void in practice?

It has history in sense that UK public sector employees want entitlements protecting as well as job transfers when those public sectors are put into the private sector. So, if a public service is transferred from public provisioning to private provisioning most (if not all) of those employees will be transferred with the business AND have entitlements protected.

(It may be TUPE from NUPE?)

(I don't think that makes it any clearer to understand?)

Paris Hilton

There you go...

http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1655

NOT earners ....

These people do not EARN this obscene sums; they may be PAID the figures concerned, but they certainly don't earn them.............

Big Brother

Grab his money

The head honcho for the NHS gets (not earns) £255,000 plus.

In the last 3 years there have been hundreds of NHS data breaches. Start taking £10,000 per breach from his salary and watch the numbers fall to zero!

Money ... they understand that!

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