back to article Name and shame fat cat bureaucrats, Number 10 told

The Information Commissioner's Office has told the Cabinet Office to release salary details on 24 people earning more than £150,000 a year who refused to have their details released. Salary details for high-earning civil servants were released in July 2010, but 24 public servants wanted their pay kept secret. Prime Minister …

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  1. 7mark7
    FAIL

    ICO boss Christopher Graham's salary was increased to £140,000 a year in late 2007.

    Fairly modest in fat-cat terms. If you pay peanuts you get monkeys ...

    1. Refugee from Windows
      Trollface

      Paid too much

      Maybe you're getting exactly what you're paying for, executives who're so far up the food chain there's no-one above them to actually give them the boot when they sit by as things go belly up. We need to have these people a little more motivated so that they actually do something, instead of playing the "Public Sector" joker.

    2. Fehu
      Mushroom

      If you pay peanuts you get monkeys

      When the obscene pay and bonuses that the bankers and wall street fat cats responsible for the latest financial meltdown in the US came to light many people called for their heads. Their bosses (golf partners) said the same thing, "We have to pay high to attract the best talent." But the best talent had pushed the US economy and perhaps the world economy to the brink of the abyss while lining their own pockets.

      Sorry, we see your lie and raise you many pink slips.

      1. Steven Roper

        I'd like to see

        the salaries for these high-ranking jobs slashed to about that of a toilet cleaner. That way, the only people who will go for the job are those who seriously want to make a difference and actually do the job, instead of just those who are solely motivated by money. If you pay peanuts you may get monkeys, but if you pay gold you get fat greedy pigs.

        If you want to get the fat shits out of government, pay them a maximum of 25,000 quid a year. Then we'd see some real change in how the country is run.

  2. Tchou
    Pint

    They should be

    obligated to publicly thanks taxpayers every year.

    1. Tchou
      Thumb Up

      Or maybe

      kiss a commoner's butt. Just as a reminder of their true status.

  3. Bluenose
    Holmes

    Just in time.....

    for me to start sending my begging letters to try and get the cash for the annual family holiday in Southwold.

    I assume the old 419ers will be watching the details with interest.

  4. Bilgepipe
    Thumb Up

    Remember...

    ...they work for you, folks.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Right the first time

    Overpaid.

    How about the leader on the Labour ( who else ) council in Luton, awarded herself an 87% pay rise.

    There is no justification for this except 'because I can and there's nothing you can do about it'

  6. richard 80

    and shame?

    I'm all for naming but why the shaming. Should everyone on a high salary feel ashamed or just those that work in the public sector?

    1. Citizen Kaned

      just the ones...

      that are funded by a taxpayer.

      if you run a profitable business then why shouldnt you get a decent pay? just like when you go into a recession you get a pay cut. public sector seem to think they are above the rest of us. just like with their big pensions and retiring 5 years before the rest of us!

      1. JimC
        Devil

        The whole executive class

        (spawn of Satan) is out of control... Pay cut in recession: don't make me laugh. What happens is they make a few hundred redundancies then award themselves an F off big bonus for making efficiency savings, then when the recession is over award themselves another big bonus for expanding the company again...

        Then don't get me on the whole circle jerk thing of offering top quartile pay in order to get top quartile executives... There are, unsuprisingly, not enough top quartile excs to go round, so thats yet more pay inflation for the executives... but funnily enough not for the people who do the actual work...

        Executives, public or otherwise, seem to have forgotten they are fundamentally an overhead, a neccesary one, but an overhead, whose only purpose is to help the people who do the real work deliver value to the shareholders...

        Bloody hell, its almost enough to turn you into a bloody socialist...

      2. Anonymous Coward
        FAIL

        Why?

        If you build up a profitable business, no problem.

        If you 'run' a profitable business by sitting in the committee room half a day a week, and got the job by stint of going to school with someone who's great-great......great-grandmother was shagged by a mate of William the Conqueror that's a different story.

        Meanwhile don't forget the public sector - 13 grand a year and plenty of shit, pewk and blood to clean up as a hospital porter. And no, you can't retire '5 years before the rest of us' on your 'big pension of 4,300 p.a.

    2. John Sturdy

      Just the useless ones?

      Just the useless ones -- who I suspect are more common in organizations which have no competition and effectively cannot go bankrupt.

  7. druck Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    Right the first time

    The burghers of Luton could always tick a different box on the ballot paper next time.

  8. Andrew Pearson
    Unhappy

    Bad name for the rest

    When I was a Civil grunt four years ago, I earned £14k.

    I'm now told I'm under threat of being fired due to my "Gold Plated" pension, which my last pension stated would be £8k at 65 years of age.

    I'm of the opinion you should be forced to show your worth if you want the big money; some bosses may be worth it but how about ones who advice on financial matters or other areas which have gone completely down the pan?

    "I advised the government on the world economy for the last 6 years..... I deserve the £100k plus....not my fault that we are now bankrupt and firing everyone. Tell you what, just fire the lower grades and keep me!"

    Nice!

    1. DavCrav

      "Gold-plated" pension changes

      (The firing people becaue of pensions is a strange one, but I listen to too many low-grade civil servants moaning about the pension changes as if it's seriously going to affect their pensions, so I'm going to mention this now.)

      I was reading the pension changes suggested in the Hutton report (which almost everyone comments on but almost nobody has actually read), and the CARE system appears (or at least can easily be made) to be *better* for the AA and AO type grades, but will always be much worse for the selfish bastards who award their mates £10,000/year salary increases one year before retirement to "top up" their pension.

      Of course, there will be some way round it for them, because we can't have top civil servants being forced to choose which of their houses to sell when they retire, can we?

      (As an aside, you have to love the BBC's objective reaction to the Hutton report: "Millions of workers in the public sector should work longer for lower pensions, a major report has said." That's not what it said at all, and if people actually read it, they'd see what it actually said.)

  9. Nigel 11
    Mushroom

    The right answer

    Tell these fat cats that there is one way and only one way to keep their pay secret. It's accepting a pay cut to £149,999.

    Sign here.

    Still too fecking much in my book, but at least it would be a start!

  10. RW
    Holmes

    "Our brightest and best businessmen"

    ITYM "our most sociopathic businessmen"

    It's my opinion that the socio- and psychopaths have commandeered executive suites everywhere, and now that they're in control, they make sure that others of their ilk are the only ones allowed the luxury of a paneled office.

    The only solution is to fire the lot, and hire their replacements from among the folks standing outside the building waiting for a bus. Like a blue light special at K-Mart, not quite as good quality, but much, much cheaper.

    I'm sure that 99.9% of executives would, if asked "but what about your fiduciary duties?" would piss themselves laughing at such naiveté.

  11. Rather Notsay
    Mushroom

    Shut up, hippy!

    "Waaaaah, I don't get paid that much. Why doesn't the government work for free to make sure nobody earns more than me? I want more pay for me, but less for others, more hospitals and less taxes. It's not fair! Waaaaaah!"

    Whenever the public service decides to be honest, every toothless chav/bogan/redneck who thinks they're CEO material gets all uppity about the salaries, how much tax they pay, and how the public service are leeches. Of course, they ignore all the pensions, dole, healthcare and assorted handouts they get themselves every day living in a welfare state.

    Do most of the complaining feckless bolsheviks here know how much the private sector gets paid to do the same job as the public sector? No. Do they care? No. If its more than them, they're not happy.

    If you're rad-awesome and underpaid, why don't you go and apply for those public and private jobs with the big salaries when they come up? After all, nobody is as hard-working as YOU right?

    Or are you just jelly?

    1. DavCrav

      Yes!

      You're right! Definitely! Where do I sign up to apply to be an MP? What do you mean, did I do an unpaid internship at <insert political party> central office? No, of course not, I'm not <insert leader of said party>'s neighbour. Oh, so I can't become an MP then? Damn.

      OK, can I be head of the ICO? Yes, Christopher Graham's job. Oh, so it helps if my father was a BBC journalist and I went to public school? But mine didn't, he was a builder, and I didn't.

  12. Sam Therapy
    Unhappy

    Does anyone honestly believe these spineless careerists?

    The whole lot of 'em are Public Servants in name only, some not even that. They are all there to keep the hierarchy in place and keep us poor bastards in ours.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    could be worse

    here in Santa Clara County, the local birdcage lining insists on releasing the pay details of ALL county workers, with the pre-tax amounts, job codes and first/last names lined up nicely.

    Doesn't matter if you're a high six-figure exec or a probationary office assistant making less than living wage-it's all up there for anyone to peruse who goes to their website.

  14. skeptical i
    Meh

    There are great public sector workers, just not enough of them relative to the number of duds.

    I think part of the problem might be with the fact that there may be no incentive to hire the best and brightest, per se: as long as candidates meet minimum qualifications, hirers will choose those with whom they'd most like to hang out and not necessarily the hardest- working or best qualified (this happens in the non- profit sector too: as long as candidates meet funders' minimum qualifications, they're good to go even if they're not the best). At least the private sector has an incentive to get the most for their payroll buck (and we see how well that part of the economy works).

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