Tories and top town hall earners
Since I’ve been accused of being down on Tory plans simply because they are Tories and I am definitely not, I thought I might praise something Cameron has suggested. Representatives and executives earning more than £58,000 are to have their names, pay and perks published, if the Conservatives win the next election.
I’m all in favour of this sort of transparency, and I suspect most of the Labour Left is as well. The scandal of consultancy fees and executives earning stratospheric wages over £100,000 for jobs they’ve completely botched needs to be brought into the light. Private Eye’s ‘Rotten Boroughs’ column just isn’t enough.
What’s quite disturbing is the rhetoric that’s accompanying this sort of thing. Cameron singles out councils like Tower Hamlets (Labour), Islington (Lib-Dem) and Kingston-upon-Hull (Lib-Dem) as examples of oversized wage packets – but lest we forget, six of the top ten biggest wage packets come from Tory councils.*
The Tories, for all the triumphalism in Cameron’s speech, which can be read here, seem to regularly forget that the vast majority of councils and councillors are Tory – so when Caroline Spelman attacks the rise in council tax “under Labour”, in reality she means “under the Tories”, since council tax is set by, er, those pesky Tory councils.
Cameron also returns to dwell on the impulse to local power, in a rather disingenuous way.
“In exchange for all this, I’m going to give you something you’ve wanted for years… …that you’ve asked for for years… …that politicians have been promising for years… …but that has never really happened.
“I’m going to give you much more power and control.
“I’m a Conservative.
“I trust people.
“I believe in local power.”
I wonder what Mrs Thatcher and her lot, who are far from being a fringe in the Conservative Party, might say about that. Actually I wonder what David Cameron will say when councils up and down the country go from blue to red, in revolt at the Tory imposition of swingeing cuts in public services, once the barrier of an unpopular Labour government is removed.
Now, in theory, this could represent a change – but I’m not inclined to think so.
Circumstances are coming in to alignment which allow for this populist angle by Cameron; our economic conditions demand spending cuts. Councils can’t use new-found powers to return to the old ways of service provision, a capable, unionised workforce and enough council housing to meet demand.
Instead it’s more likely that, faced with cuts in the central grant, councils will be pushed towards the sort of outsourcing, local enterprise partnerships and simple cuts which both Tories and Labour advocate, when they aren’t in election mode. The only alternative, which Tories are betting that Left councils won’t adopt, is a hike in council tax – a regressive tax, which is unpopular.
Increased local powers are thus taking place inside a narrow straight-jacket, which suits the Tories down to the ground, both in town halls and in central government.
*In case you’re interested; Shrewsbury and Atcham, Kent, Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, Hertfordshire and Surrey.
This might be controversial in left circles, but I don’t support the proposals re: increased transparency of pay & perks for the public sector, if they are only for the public sector.
I don’t like inequality or hierarchical structures in private industry or the public sector, but don’t support putting the public sector at a disadvantage with the private sector by encouraging downward pressure on management’s pay in the public sector that doesn’t exist in the private sector. That will only serve to weaken the public sector. To my mind, it’s part of a long-term strategy by the Tories to demonstrate the inefficiency of the public sector and to harden public attitudes towards it.
If Cameron’s extension of power to local areas stretched to allowing them to change their tax system and not just their tax rates, it might be useful. For example, it would allow the introduction of land value taxes as a replacement for business rates and possibly for council tax itself (local income tax would also be possible).
I agree with Tim and Rob.
If the Tories are so set against excessive pay – good. But since we have to fork out as consumers for the sake of over-payed bankers and bosses, this is a problem across sectors of the economy.
On local power – I wonder how keen the Tories will be to allow councils to expand their revenue base through municipal trading…
Tim, I can see where you’re coming from. If we drive down management wages, we’ll get crap managers. I think there are numerous answers to that problem which are better than what seems tantamount to a defence of stupidly high salaries.
1. Elements of industrial democracy, taking the emphasis off individuals and creating a better dynamic where the job of managers is to ensure staff have what they need to serve the public most effectively.
2. Growing managers from within public services themselves, rather than hiring supermarket directors to run businesses utterly unrelated to what they’re used to.
Well I’m absolutely in favour of all that and would support more transparency in public sector management wages if accompanied by those kinds of measures, but obviously they’re not part of the Tory proposals!
Yeah but there’s no reason why they can’t be a first step. Sure, the Tories will never propose them – and probably never implement them. We can do that – but it’s important to get the information out there that something is wrong in town halls, and publishing such wages are part of that.
But if it’s only as a “first step”, why only town halls, why not all wages above a certain level that are taxed in the UK? There is nothing more wrong with obscene wages in town halls than there is with obscene wages in the private sector. Tories think there is, because they recognise tax dollars as being “our money” without recognising the money management creams off the top in the private sector as being workers’ money. But we don’t share their perspective, and applying these measures in the public sector but not in the private sector only serves to reinforce it.
It’s not more our money, but it is ours – so why pass up a chance to control its use? Extending this to the private sector is a fight that will come, but why pass up footholds along the way?
Because it could damage the public sector in the meantime and make it easier for the Tories to take public opinion along with them in cutting it back. I don’t think it is a foothold along the way; I think it reinforces the idea that the public sector is inefficient and the private sector efficient and that we no rights to know what’s going on in the private sector.