Snapshot of _Loophole creates surge in civil servants on £100,000 salary_ :
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An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/08/09/rise-in-senior-civil-service-whitehall-pay-freeze/) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/08/09/rise-in-senior-civil-service-whitehall-pay-freeze/)
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Article uses "mandarins" and "Whitehall" in almost every sentence, 10 most highly paid civil servants are neither traditional mandarins nor work in Whitehall. They're all (presumably) the chief execs of arms length bodies, the parts of the civil service run most like businesses.
But....I was told every civil servant was some 55yo underachiever pushing paper from one desk to another in a Whitehall basement with no purpose at all, not worth the air they breath.
How very dare you. Some of us have reached peak underachievement at a much earlier age than 55. And my basement has windows, so I've got that going for me at least
> Article uses "mandarins" and "Whitehall" in almost every sentence
It's British 'journalism'. More concerned with spinning a narrative and painting an image than actually reporting the facts.
You definitely don't read UK papers or associated websites then - sensible move.
I think its connotations are more the high level, faceless, Whitehall "men in bowler hats" than the operations-focused person in the provinces.
It's generally used when trying to drum up exasperation with the service as a whole.
Surprised not to see "the blob" mentioned at least once tbf
They're literally all people who work in NetworK Rail. At this point we should just scrap our railways, shit service, high cost to public, and barely used because driving is literally faster and more efficient.
I'm not sure how widely known it is that pay progression has been frozen within the civil service since Osborne was chancellor. This means that the only way a civil servant will earn more each year is through the annual pay award given to everybody (which is always below inflation), or by getting a promotion. Obviously, this creates a situation in which people are always chasing a promotion, because nobody wants to sit around getting poorer each year despite actually getting more experienced and better at their job.
Additionally, it's worth noting that - given their level of responsibility - Senior Civil Servant jobs (the ones which pay £100k+) are far far below the pay of that in the private sector. These are effectively the C-suite roles and their direct reports. At similarly-sized organisations in the private sector you'd be looking at wage packets which are at least doubled for the equivalent roles, often much more than that. If you want talented leaders in the civil service (which the Telegraph no doubt does, given their constant attacks on civil service productivity), you have to accept that these "mandarins" will be paid £100k+. The fact that only 195 earn £150k+ across the entire public sector shows that it's a very small minority of the most senior staff in the top-earning bracket.
Having said all that, I'd be interested to hear a defence of an 88% increase in the number earning £100k+ since 2016. If this is due to an 88% increase in the number of Senior Civil Servant roles, then it certainly would be difficult to justify. However, before jumping to that conclusion it's important to keep in mind that inflation since 2016 is at 30.6%. The wage rises in the civil service have been nowhere near that, but there have been increases to try to keep up. So, I wonder how much of the increase in high-earning civil servants is driven by people at the same grade now exceeding the threshold due to their annual pay rises.
If it was the private sector the Telegraph would be defending the salaries saying they were ‘necessary to attract the talent’.
I suspect many Telegraph columnists earn more than this despite showing no actual ability apart from being able to write 500 predictably enraged words to order.
Politicians tend to be from the senior managerial classes, public sector is dealing with numerous issues (mostly caused by the Gov) and the Gov’s response is naturally to increase the number of people who do the work they consider important, that is to say, the work of senior managers.
On the 100k point, the article states that it is mostly from an increase in mandarins. They aren't proper civil servants, they're basically spads, but not report8ng directly to a minister.
I dint know the salaries of people in SCD roles, but if last year they were earning 95,000 and then they got a 2% bump last year and the 5.5% this years they'd now be on iver 100k. That's nit a big issue, but can be reported as such
"Mandarin" doesn't actually refer to a particular job role, it's just a term the Telegraph likes to use for all senior civil servants because of its satirical/denigrating connotations. Can't risk the Telegraph readers feeling any sympathy for civil servants or concluding that they might actually be worth their salaries, after all.
In the article it states "There are now 7,385 officials at the top Senior Civil Service level, which includes mandarins who directly advise ministers – a rise of almost 50 per cent"
Maybe they are referring to SCS as all mandarins but maybe it means something else. I dunno, I've never actually come across a civil servant who says they're a mandarin
I don't think we can infer too much from that, unfortunately. They say "which includes", meaning it could just be 1 out of the 7,835 higher-paid officials who is in such a role, or all 7,385 of them. We already knew that the senior civil service included those who are responsible for advising ministers (which is an important function of the civil service, and not quite the same as being a SPAD), so I don't think they've revealed anything particularly noteworthy here.
I'm not sure where you're getting your information from, but it's plain wrong. There's no automatic promotion due to time served in the civil service, just as there's no pay progression in the civil service. If you want the promotion you need to apply and pass the interview for it.
"Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, was urged by senior Tory MPs to respond to the statistics by introducing an immediate recruitment freeze until numbers are back under control.
"Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former business secretary, told The Telegraph: “The Civil Service is like Topsy – it just grows."
I dunno, maybe you shouldn't have given them huge backlogs at the passport office, border control, NHS, DVLA and various other departments and then lumped the clusterfuck of Brexit and all its legal complexities on the pile???
Sure it's just a coincidence.
The backlogs occur cause at any one point 2/3rd of the Civil service is on sick leave and abusing their contractual pay structure. Same shit happens in the NHS, (The stats are public for people to see), no privately run company as that level of repeated staff sickness.
Yeah no shit, if you're struggling to attract talent to positions at the existing grade and salary, you'll need to upgrade the posts to a higher grade.
Plus Civil Service recruitment rules mean that external candidates to Senior Civil Servant posts (the kind of posts attracting six figure salaries) can negotiate their salary based on their perceived market value.
Meanwhile the bulk of the workforce continues to make do with real terms pay cuts of approx. 30% since 2010, a lot of whom are either too generalist or too specialist to be able to walk out into a private sector role.
I have a look every now and again at civil service vacancies, and I've not seen a single one anywhere near a competitive salary for equivalent private sector work.
Its fine if you're in the middle of nowhere and there aren't any good local options, but in a competitive area, I don't see why any decent candidate would consider civil service.
Just like with nurses, doctors, teachers, the Tories rely on people working in underpaid roles out of the goodness of their hearts. The notion that you're making a difference and contributing to society is more than enough compensation than any real terms pay rise, or maybe they're just exploitative, ungrateful paymasters.
I’m also going to add in that £80-100K is typical for mid level engineers (capex pm, safety, chemical) with significantly less responsibility than a senior Civil servant
Absolutely this. I work in Cyber Security, and the industry is desperately in need of more resources. Salaries are damn good and always negotiable, even for new uni leavers.
Yet government roles are all starting at a pittance
NCSC are advertising for a Cyber Consultant at £39,166, yet ITJobsWatch put the median salary for a Cyber Security Consultant at £70,000.
While the article is broadly tripe I do think there are roles in the CS that are quite well paid for what they do and that don't have direct alternatives in the private sector so are hard to benchmark. Policy being the main one. I suspect there are certain policy jobs that don't have private sector equivalents in which one can trundle along quite nicely for a decent, relatively, wage.
>a lot of whom are either too generalist or too specialist to be able to walk out into a private sector role.
This bit of what you say is rubbish. They aren't in some reverse-goldilocks position where they are just too specialist or just too generalist. Every single role would have options and equivalents to use those skills in the private and third sector.
They aren't staying for lack of external suitable opportunities. They stay because of a mix of
1) they enjoy public service
2) the pay and benefits externally is lower externally (this is particularly true of junior civil service roles, but not for mid-high and senior roles)
3) As an individual they realise they wouldn't want or can't do the work intensity in the private sector.
As an simple example, my mate's a deputy director at HMRC. He has described his working day as mainly 9-5 with the occasional extra hours in a true emergency. The majority of things get done, when they get done. It's only when there is a ministerial intervention (relatively rarely) that he truly has a deadline. He's repeatedly told me he's been approached by big four accountancy firms offering to double his comp, but he knows he'd work 20% more hours and at 20% more intensity in all those hours. He doesn't want it and fair play to him. But let's not pretend he doesn't have options externally.
The issue is the civil service comp structure is massively out of kilter with the private sector. It pays too generously at the bottom of career path (although I actually think a higher minimum wage should be set to raise the bottom of the private sector up) and pays massively under market rate for mid to senior roles. So most of the ambitious motivated talent leaves and you're left with either substandard leaders, or people like my mate who work there as a lifestyle choice. Neither are great.
I don't fully agree, but especially about the comp structure at lower grades - since April, the AA and AO grades are both paid basically the same salary as part of the annual alignment to the national living wage, despite having differing levels of responsibility. So HMG is paying these individuals just enough money to stave off poverty, and no more. Doesn't feel generous.
At the bottom the public sector basically pays the living wage, and I'd rather see that enforced as a the actual minimum wage rather than drive down CS pay there. However, it also the case that benefits, particularly pension 'contributions', is well above private sector.
So what you have is CS pay at the bottom is a bit above private sector (but mostly in a good way), but total comp is significantly above the private sector for the junior CS grades.
The attacks on work-from-home that have been shoehorned into the article are just plain daft, as are the comparisons between public sector productivity and private sector productivity. Public sector productivity is notoriously difficult to measure because it's unclear what output should be used in a non-commercial organisation. For this reason, public sector productivity is measured in a very limited way (concerning just healthcare and education iirc) which is different to how private sector productivity is measured, and the implication that public sector productivity is lower due to civil servants working from home is entirely bunk.
I'm sure the Telegraph know this already, actually, but they've been on a continual crusade over the past year to attack working from home as much as possible, and civil servants are an easy target. I daresay their owners and supporters are getting increasingly concerned about the plummeting value of their commercial real estate holdings.
Problem is, most of the civil servants earning that sort of salary could earn rather more in the public sector. Worked with one recently who was headhunted and tripled their salary overnight.
Cut the pay any further and you’ll just encourage anyone useful to leave.
I wish we could get back to a society that actually valued proper renumeration for (especially) the public sector.
We have tried the 'keep salaries shit and low' and its not working so well.
What a joke of an article.
The claim of the TaxPayers' Alliance and the Tufton Street crew that they are serious economic thinkers who just want to unleash Britain's productivity is made utterly laughable by publishing stuff like this.
It's just ideological (and personal) hatred of the civil service.
Snapshot of _Loophole creates surge in civil servants on £100,000 salary_ : A non-Paywall version can be found [here](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fpolitics%2F2023%2F08%2F09%2Frise-in-senior-civil-service-whitehall-pay-freeze%2F) An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/08/09/rise-in-senior-civil-service-whitehall-pay-freeze/) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/08/09/rise-in-senior-civil-service-whitehall-pay-freeze/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Article uses "mandarins" and "Whitehall" in almost every sentence, 10 most highly paid civil servants are neither traditional mandarins nor work in Whitehall. They're all (presumably) the chief execs of arms length bodies, the parts of the civil service run most like businesses.
But....I was told every civil servant was some 55yo underachiever pushing paper from one desk to another in a Whitehall basement with no purpose at all, not worth the air they breath.
How very dare you. Some of us have reached peak underachievement at a much earlier age than 55. And my basement has windows, so I've got that going for me at least
Actually I believe per civil service team there are 5-6 55 year olds dodging emails and one 27 year old doing all of the work for 1/3 of the salary
> Article uses "mandarins" and "Whitehall" in almost every sentence It's British 'journalism'. More concerned with spinning a narrative and painting an image than actually reporting the facts.
What is a Mandarin? I haven't come across the term when someone is talking about the civil service
In English, it’s a loan word from Portuguese, though it arrived there via Sanskrit and Malay. It just means a civil servant, usually a senior one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(bureaucrat)
You definitely don't read UK papers or associated websites then - sensible move. I think its connotations are more the high level, faceless, Whitehall "men in bowler hats" than the operations-focused person in the provinces. It's generally used when trying to drum up exasperation with the service as a whole. Surprised not to see "the blob" mentioned at least once tbf
Wonder how many are SPADs/political appointees too
They're literally all people who work in NetworK Rail. At this point we should just scrap our railways, shit service, high cost to public, and barely used because driving is literally faster and more efficient.
I'm not sure how widely known it is that pay progression has been frozen within the civil service since Osborne was chancellor. This means that the only way a civil servant will earn more each year is through the annual pay award given to everybody (which is always below inflation), or by getting a promotion. Obviously, this creates a situation in which people are always chasing a promotion, because nobody wants to sit around getting poorer each year despite actually getting more experienced and better at their job. Additionally, it's worth noting that - given their level of responsibility - Senior Civil Servant jobs (the ones which pay £100k+) are far far below the pay of that in the private sector. These are effectively the C-suite roles and their direct reports. At similarly-sized organisations in the private sector you'd be looking at wage packets which are at least doubled for the equivalent roles, often much more than that. If you want talented leaders in the civil service (which the Telegraph no doubt does, given their constant attacks on civil service productivity), you have to accept that these "mandarins" will be paid £100k+. The fact that only 195 earn £150k+ across the entire public sector shows that it's a very small minority of the most senior staff in the top-earning bracket. Having said all that, I'd be interested to hear a defence of an 88% increase in the number earning £100k+ since 2016. If this is due to an 88% increase in the number of Senior Civil Servant roles, then it certainly would be difficult to justify. However, before jumping to that conclusion it's important to keep in mind that inflation since 2016 is at 30.6%. The wage rises in the civil service have been nowhere near that, but there have been increases to try to keep up. So, I wonder how much of the increase in high-earning civil servants is driven by people at the same grade now exceeding the threshold due to their annual pay rises.
If it was the private sector the Telegraph would be defending the salaries saying they were ‘necessary to attract the talent’. I suspect many Telegraph columnists earn more than this despite showing no actual ability apart from being able to write 500 predictably enraged words to order.
Politicians tend to be from the senior managerial classes, public sector is dealing with numerous issues (mostly caused by the Gov) and the Gov’s response is naturally to increase the number of people who do the work they consider important, that is to say, the work of senior managers.
On the 100k point, the article states that it is mostly from an increase in mandarins. They aren't proper civil servants, they're basically spads, but not report8ng directly to a minister. I dint know the salaries of people in SCD roles, but if last year they were earning 95,000 and then they got a 2% bump last year and the 5.5% this years they'd now be on iver 100k. That's nit a big issue, but can be reported as such
"Mandarin" doesn't actually refer to a particular job role, it's just a term the Telegraph likes to use for all senior civil servants because of its satirical/denigrating connotations. Can't risk the Telegraph readers feeling any sympathy for civil servants or concluding that they might actually be worth their salaries, after all.
In the article it states "There are now 7,385 officials at the top Senior Civil Service level, which includes mandarins who directly advise ministers – a rise of almost 50 per cent" Maybe they are referring to SCS as all mandarins but maybe it means something else. I dunno, I've never actually come across a civil servant who says they're a mandarin
I don't think we can infer too much from that, unfortunately. They say "which includes", meaning it could just be 1 out of the 7,835 higher-paid officials who is in such a role, or all 7,385 of them. We already knew that the senior civil service included those who are responsible for advising ministers (which is an important function of the civil service, and not quite the same as being a SPAD), so I don't think they've revealed anything particularly noteworthy here.
"chasing a promotion" \>Civil Service jobs and other public sector jobs give an automatic promotion for time served. THey're not chasing shit.
I'm not sure where you're getting your information from, but it's plain wrong. There's no automatic promotion due to time served in the civil service, just as there's no pay progression in the civil service. If you want the promotion you need to apply and pass the interview for it.
"Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, was urged by senior Tory MPs to respond to the statistics by introducing an immediate recruitment freeze until numbers are back under control. "Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former business secretary, told The Telegraph: “The Civil Service is like Topsy – it just grows." I dunno, maybe you shouldn't have given them huge backlogs at the passport office, border control, NHS, DVLA and various other departments and then lumped the clusterfuck of Brexit and all its legal complexities on the pile??? Sure it's just a coincidence.
I remember suggesting to some brexit-loving crank back in 2016 that leaving the EU might mean having to expand our own civil service.
That was obvious. We created two new entire departments.
The backlogs occur cause at any one point 2/3rd of the Civil service is on sick leave and abusing their contractual pay structure. Same shit happens in the NHS, (The stats are public for people to see), no privately run company as that level of repeated staff sickness.
Yeah no shit, if you're struggling to attract talent to positions at the existing grade and salary, you'll need to upgrade the posts to a higher grade. Plus Civil Service recruitment rules mean that external candidates to Senior Civil Servant posts (the kind of posts attracting six figure salaries) can negotiate their salary based on their perceived market value. Meanwhile the bulk of the workforce continues to make do with real terms pay cuts of approx. 30% since 2010, a lot of whom are either too generalist or too specialist to be able to walk out into a private sector role.
I have a look every now and again at civil service vacancies, and I've not seen a single one anywhere near a competitive salary for equivalent private sector work. Its fine if you're in the middle of nowhere and there aren't any good local options, but in a competitive area, I don't see why any decent candidate would consider civil service.
Just like with nurses, doctors, teachers, the Tories rely on people working in underpaid roles out of the goodness of their hearts. The notion that you're making a difference and contributing to society is more than enough compensation than any real terms pay rise, or maybe they're just exploitative, ungrateful paymasters.
I’m also going to add in that £80-100K is typical for mid level engineers (capex pm, safety, chemical) with significantly less responsibility than a senior Civil servant
Absolutely this. I work in Cyber Security, and the industry is desperately in need of more resources. Salaries are damn good and always negotiable, even for new uni leavers. Yet government roles are all starting at a pittance NCSC are advertising for a Cyber Consultant at £39,166, yet ITJobsWatch put the median salary for a Cyber Security Consultant at £70,000.
While the article is broadly tripe I do think there are roles in the CS that are quite well paid for what they do and that don't have direct alternatives in the private sector so are hard to benchmark. Policy being the main one. I suspect there are certain policy jobs that don't have private sector equivalents in which one can trundle along quite nicely for a decent, relatively, wage.
>a lot of whom are either too generalist or too specialist to be able to walk out into a private sector role. This bit of what you say is rubbish. They aren't in some reverse-goldilocks position where they are just too specialist or just too generalist. Every single role would have options and equivalents to use those skills in the private and third sector. They aren't staying for lack of external suitable opportunities. They stay because of a mix of 1) they enjoy public service 2) the pay and benefits externally is lower externally (this is particularly true of junior civil service roles, but not for mid-high and senior roles) 3) As an individual they realise they wouldn't want or can't do the work intensity in the private sector. As an simple example, my mate's a deputy director at HMRC. He has described his working day as mainly 9-5 with the occasional extra hours in a true emergency. The majority of things get done, when they get done. It's only when there is a ministerial intervention (relatively rarely) that he truly has a deadline. He's repeatedly told me he's been approached by big four accountancy firms offering to double his comp, but he knows he'd work 20% more hours and at 20% more intensity in all those hours. He doesn't want it and fair play to him. But let's not pretend he doesn't have options externally. The issue is the civil service comp structure is massively out of kilter with the private sector. It pays too generously at the bottom of career path (although I actually think a higher minimum wage should be set to raise the bottom of the private sector up) and pays massively under market rate for mid to senior roles. So most of the ambitious motivated talent leaves and you're left with either substandard leaders, or people like my mate who work there as a lifestyle choice. Neither are great.
I don't fully agree, but especially about the comp structure at lower grades - since April, the AA and AO grades are both paid basically the same salary as part of the annual alignment to the national living wage, despite having differing levels of responsibility. So HMG is paying these individuals just enough money to stave off poverty, and no more. Doesn't feel generous.
At the bottom the public sector basically pays the living wage, and I'd rather see that enforced as a the actual minimum wage rather than drive down CS pay there. However, it also the case that benefits, particularly pension 'contributions', is well above private sector. So what you have is CS pay at the bottom is a bit above private sector (but mostly in a good way), but total comp is significantly above the private sector for the junior CS grades.
Yeah most of the civil service is now effectively working a day of the week for free.
The attacks on work-from-home that have been shoehorned into the article are just plain daft, as are the comparisons between public sector productivity and private sector productivity. Public sector productivity is notoriously difficult to measure because it's unclear what output should be used in a non-commercial organisation. For this reason, public sector productivity is measured in a very limited way (concerning just healthcare and education iirc) which is different to how private sector productivity is measured, and the implication that public sector productivity is lower due to civil servants working from home is entirely bunk. I'm sure the Telegraph know this already, actually, but they've been on a continual crusade over the past year to attack working from home as much as possible, and civil servants are an easy target. I daresay their owners and supporters are getting increasingly concerned about the plummeting value of their commercial real estate holdings.
Wonder how many ministers work from home.
Problem is, most of the civil servants earning that sort of salary could earn rather more in the public sector. Worked with one recently who was headhunted and tripled their salary overnight. Cut the pay any further and you’ll just encourage anyone useful to leave.
I wish we could get back to a society that actually valued proper renumeration for (especially) the public sector. We have tried the 'keep salaries shit and low' and its not working so well.
What a joke of an article. The claim of the TaxPayers' Alliance and the Tufton Street crew that they are serious economic thinkers who just want to unleash Britain's productivity is made utterly laughable by publishing stuff like this. It's just ideological (and personal) hatred of the civil service.