Irishman tops earnings table in British civil service
The pay and perks of senior British civil servants earning more than £150,000 (€180,000) were published in the first step of a pledge to remove the “cloak of secrecy” from government information.
A list compiled by the Cabinet Office showed the top earner was Office of Fair Trading chief executive, John Fingleton.
The former head of Ireland’s Competition Authority, Fingleton’s annual £279,999 (€335,000) package was one of 23 worth more than £200,000.
Fingleton’s pay was almost double David Cameron’s annual pay as prime minister of £142,500 – although as an MP, Cameron also receives a parliamentary salary.
In Ireland, there has been heavy criticism that chief executives of the top state and semi-state bodies here earn more than €500,000.
British ministers said they hope the openness will help restore public trust in politics and insisted the pay details are “just the start” of a wide-ranging bid to give the public more access.
By September, they will also open up the remuneration of senior civil servants earning £58,200. Cameron has also pledged to force local councils to do the same.
He set out to Whitehall departments a detailed series of items they must make public – with hospitals to begin publishing data on hospital-acquired infection rates this week.
Government contracts over £10,000 will be published on a single website from September with items of central government spending over £25,000 and local government over £500 shortly afterwards.
Most of the 172 salaries had either already been published or unearthed by campaign groups such as the TaxPayers’ Alliance, on its annual Whitehall rich list.
The pressure group welcomed the official release as a “first step” but said further details such as taxpayer-funded pension deals should also be revealed.
Among other top earners on the list were NHS chief executive, David Nicholson, (up to £259,999) and Joe Harley, the IT director general and chief information officer at the Department for Work and Pensions (£249,999).
The Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, gets up to £244,999 – one of 28 people at the Ministry of Defence paid more than the prime minister.
Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude is overseeing the process – and the creation of a public “right to data” – as head of a Public Sector Transparency Board.
It will also include World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and mysociety website founder Tom Steinberg among outside experts.
Maude said: “By being open and accountable we can start to win back people’s trust. Openness will not be comfortable for us in government, but it will enable the public to hold our feet to the fire. This way lies better government.”
Academic studies also suggest allowing outside experts to build web applications and sites around government data could contribute up to £6 billion to the economy.
Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “Publishing this data is long overdue but is nevertheless extremely welcome.
“Taxpayers have a right to know how their money is being spent and anyone earning a large amount of money in government should have their pay packet open to public scrutiny, so people can judge whether they are providing good value for money.
“This should be the beginning of a process where the pay of people in quangos, local government and the European Commission is also published to help the Government root out excessive salaries and wasteful spending.”
The openness drive was launched as the government negotiated the continuing fallout from the shock resignation of Liberal Democrat David Laws as chief secretary to the Treasury after admitting he had channelled tens of thousands of pounds of public money in rent for his partner.
But his successor, Danny Alexander, immediately faced questions over his own finances. He denied any wrongdoing after it was revealed he did not pay capital gains when selling a property he had designated as his second home.
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