How to be a Civil Servant
There are approaching 6 million public servants in the UK, but only around 0.4m of these are civil servants. (Click here for further detail.) Civil service pay therefore represents only a small fraction of total public sector pay.
The vast majority of civil servants earn pretty much the same as their private sector counterparts. The median full time salary of all civil servants is around £23,000. Senior civil servants, however, earn significantly less than their opposite numbers in the private sector.
Civil Service pay has been frozen since 2010, bonuses have been sharply reduced, and pension contributions have increased. As a result, the real pay of UK civil servants has, like that of most of their private sector counterparts, fallen very significantly in real terms. The Senior Salaries Review Body (SSRB) has calculated, for instance, that the pay of a fairly typical member of the Senior Civil Service (the SCS) will have seen the real value of their pay fall by 20% over the four years to 2013 as a result of the pay freeze, inflation, tax and National Insurance changes, reductions in bonuses and increases in pension contributions.
Apart from the Senior Civil Service ('SCS' - see further below), there are no government wide pay systems. Subject to Treasury approval, each department is encouraged to establish reward structures and pay scales which meet their own particular needs. A few departments still offer automatic annual progression up a pay scale, but this is discouraged both as a matter of principle and also because it erodes the post-2010 pay freeze. More generally, annual increases in pay scales are negotiated with the Treasury in the form of an annual 'pay remit'. But there is a fair degree of consistency across the main departments (or else too many staff would try to migrate). The results may be summarised as follows.
First (with a small number of well-publicised exceptions, generally recruited from outside the civil service*) the most senior civil servants are paid less than half of their private sector equivalents. But pay rates improve, relative to the private sector, the further one descends through the ranks, to the extent that the very lowest grades are paid about the same as their private sector counterparts. But it cannot be stressed too strongly that such pay nevertheless does remain low in absolute terms, as do the pensions that result from such low paid employment. According to the main civil service union, a quarter of civil servants earned less than £15,430 a year in 2006. And Cabinet Secretary Gus O'Donnell told the Guardian in November 2010 that "The median salary of a civil servant is is £22,850 - lower than the wider public sector, and lower than the private sector". The following chart, taken from the 2013 Senior Salaries Review Body Report, summarises the position rather well, though please note that the top bar in this chart summarises all public sector pay, not just civil service pay.
The Office for National Statistics published a report in July 2011 which estimated that public sector employees were on average paid around 7.8% more than their equivalents in the private sector, but this difference was reversed in the case of more qualified employees. The ONS did not however separate out the 10% of public servants who were in the civil service, and it seems likely that civil service pay has been more tightly constrained than wider public sector pay, if only because it is controlled by Ministers.
*It became clear, in early 2012, that a number of departments had arranged to pay certain senior individuals via the individuals' own limited companies. These individuals were not, strictly speaking, senior civil servants as they had not gone through the normal recruitment process, but they worked alongside and were pretty much treated as though they were civil servants. The main motivations behind these devices were (a) to enable the departments to pay the market rate for the job - not the constrained pay of the senior civil service, (b) to enable the individual to avoid income tax and national insurance contributions, and (c) to enable the departments to enter into fixed term contracts with their staff, thus avoiding the danger of unfair dismissal claims if/when the appointments came to an end. Needless to say, there was considerable criticism of departments' willingness to enter into such artificial arrangements so as to avoid the government's own pay restraint, tax and employment law legislation.
Second, the civil service offers a pretty good pension scheme and all salaries are quoted net of quite large (c.20%) employers' contributions, which have to be taken into account when comparing civil service and other salaries. Click here for more information about civil service pensions.. Note, however, that the pensions that are eventually paid are calculated by reference to salaries before adding employers' contributions, and this, in effect, reduces civil service pensions quite noticeably.
Third, there was for some years a move towards paying non-pensionable bonuses, rather than increasing salaries. However this trend has recently gone sharply into reverse. The original motivation was to save money by reducing salaries and pension payments in the long term, and hence employers' pension contributions in the short term. But bonuses were also intended to reward different behaviours to those rewarded by permanent salary increases:
The highest bonuses, in cash terms, were paid to the SCS but bonuses were in practice paid to a high proportion of the SCS, so the average bonus was only around 12% of salary which was in practice far too low to change behaviour. (Private sector bonuses, for senior staff, were typically much higher, and so drove behaviours much harder.) This did not, however, stop media criticism of bonuses being paid to civil servants - especially those in the Ministry of Defence - in the wake of similar criticism of the much higher bankers' bonuses and bearing in mind the low pay of soldiers risking their lives out in Afghanistan. The bonus pot available to the SCS, which was originally supposed to reach 10% of salary, therefore peaked at actual payments of 7.4% in 2008-9. This fell to £2.8% in 2010-11. The percent of the SCS receiving bonuses peaked at 73% in 2008-9, but was only 24% two years later. This represented a sharp reduction in real pay for most of the SCS - a significant contribution to the decline in relative remuneration summarised below.
Fourth, there is these days no more job security in the civil service than outside it:- see separate notes on civil service numbers and Can Civil Servants be Dismissed?.
Fifth, all civil service departments offer national pay rates - as does much of the rest of the public sector. There are strong arguments that this is very damaging both in the South-east and in the regions. Professor Alison Wolf of Kings College London wrote a thought provoking report on this issue for Centre Forum in February 2009. She argued that private sector employers who want a good quality workforce have to match or exceed what people can get in the public sector. Poor regions and poor cities typically have bad road or rail connections as well as old industries that have died; one of their few, but genuine, competitive advantages should be lower wage costs to match their lower property costs. By importing national pay scales for large parts of the workforce, we force local employers to match these. In other words, the way we set public sector pay directly increases private employers' costs in our poorer regions and reduces their ability to create jobs for local people. They also incidentally reduce the incentive on civil service managers to move staff out of London to save money. (But see Matthew Parris' column in The Times (6 February 2010) for an entertaining summary of the political and presentational reasons why this pay system will survive for some time yet.)
Note:- Over the longer term, civil service pay seems to track changes in the wider economy reasonably well. The most junior officials are currently paid around 50% to 60% of average UK salary, compared with around 40% to 70% in 1986. The equivalent figures for Executive Officers and their equivalents are 80-90% compared with 60-110% in 1986. And Permanent Secretaries, like their private sector Board-level counterparts, have significantly improved their position, from around 6 times average salary in 1986 to 8.5-12 times average salary in 2007. (I am grateful to Neil Macaskill for providing these figures.)
Although there are only around 3,600 of them (around 0.8% of the total), a good deal of attention is paid each year to the salaries of the SCS. This is because
Let's look at each of these factors in turn.
No member of the SCS is on the bread line. The vast majority earn between £60,000 and £100,000 and Permanent Secretaries (heads of department) earn £140,000 and more.
But equivalent private sector salaries are much higher. Most obviously, more than 2,800 people in the City of London were paid more than £1m in 2009, according to the Financial Services Authority. But the detail is also very telling. Including bonuses, benefits and the value of annual pension benefit accrual, median total remuneration of Pay Band 1 SCS officials was only £94k in 2011, compared with £103k and £142k respectively for their counterparts in the wider public sector and the private sector. The equivalent figures for Pay Bands 2 and 3 were £128/191/290k and £167/not known/659k. In other words, Directors General (PB3) earned only 25% of their private sector equivalents. These percentages were typically around three quarters of the equivalent figures 4 years earlier, which strongly suggest that higher paid private sector employees had managed to insulate themselves from the pressures that caused reductions in the real remuneration of most of their staff as well as the whole of the public sector. Further detail is in annual SSRB reports.
A more detailed comparison of civil service and private sector pay is in Hay's 2005 Pay Market Comparability Study which contains the following telling chart. (The bottom two lines are SCS remuneration inc. pension; I&S = industrial & service sector, excluding financial services and main board members; TR = total remuneration.)
Turning to job security, the same Hay report notes that, although SCS staff turnover remained low at around 10%, it was on a rising trend. Also, recent SSRB reports confirm that only 20-30% of SCS leavers do so on retirement. The others resign or come to the end of fixed term contracts or are encouraged to leave with the help of early retirement packages. Just as in the higher levels of the private sector, there is a high attrition rate at age 50 and above. Click here for more detail.
Finally, successive SSRB reports have expressed increasing concern about the dual market in SCS recruitment, as around half of all SCS appointments have in recent years been made from outside the SCS itself, and very often at significantly higher salaries. Oner SSRB report a few years ago noted that internal recruits to Pay Band 2 were appointed at salaries which averaged £92,000, whilst the equivalent figure for external candidates was £102,500. See the latest SSRB reports for further detail, comment and analysis.
This is a complex subject and I would be glad to be corrected if I have misunderstood or over-simplified anything. Please therefore email me if you have any comments on this web page.
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