Corin Taylor: Public Sector Rich List 2007

Corin Taylor, Research Director of the TaxPayers' Alliance, reveals this year's public sector rich list and explains the reason for it. The full list can be downloaded here.

In November 2006 the TaxPayers’ Alliance produced the first ever list of the most highly paid people in the public sector.  Now the time has come to repeat the exercise and so in the second edition of our annual Public Sector Rich List, we reveal 300 public sector executives receiving remuneration packages of at least £150,000 a year in 126 government departments, quangos, other public bodies and public corporations.

Trawling through the annual reports and accounts of these public bodies to dig up salary, bonus, benefit and pension details of public sector executives is an interesting, if often depressing, exercise.  We do it for two main reasons.

Firstly, people and organisations that receive large amounts of taxpayers’ money should be accountable to the public they serve. Taxpayers should be able to judge for themselves whether the remuneration of senior officials represents good value for money.  In an ideal world the remuneration packages of public sector staff (at the very least senior staff) would all be made publicly available in the same place on an official website.  People are unlikely to begrudge reasonable salaries being paid, but would be right to disapprove of average pay rises of almost 13 per cent, and right to question whether the 10 most highly paid public sector executives are really worth 400 nurses, police officers or soldiers.