The footballer, the banker and the civil servant (From Times Series)

The footballer, the banker and the civil servant

7:00am Thursday 5th February 2009 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
• Comments(0)

What have Heurelho Gomes, Sharon Shoesmith and Sir Fred Goodwin got in common? Well, they have all been paid a lot of money for doing their jobs, and they were all particularly bad at them.

Gomes, the Tottenham keeper, probably gets somewhere in the region of £25,000-a-week for flapping at crosses, Sharon Shoesmith was sacked from her estimated £110,000-a-year job as director of children’s services at Haringey Council, while Sir Goodwin presided over losses expected to reach £28 billion as the highly paid chief executive of RBS.

The conclusion we could draw from this ragtag bunch is that paying someone a lot of money doesn’t mean they won’t be spectacularly incompetent.

Yet a fortnight ago a Barnet Council committee agreed to raise the pay grades it can offer to executives because, it says, it can’t attract good enough quality candidates for vacant posts.

So the solution, according to the council, is to offer enough to be able to poach directors from other authorities and to ensure that existing directors don’t defect.

This, surely, creates the inflationary job market that sees civil servants in a local authority paid thousands of pounds a week while many of the residents who pay their wages face the real threat of redundancy.

Gomes the Premiership footballer and Goodwin the banker work (or worked) in very different fields to Sharon Shoesmith who, as a civil servant, occupied the same world as the individuals Barnet Council might look to employ.

But footballers, bankers and senior civil servants have all been the subject of calls for pay restraint, or at least condemnation of their inflated fees.

The vital difference is that while the wages of footballers and bankers - unfortunately still - are inherently subject to market forces that can inflate them beyond control, those of civil servants needn’t be.

All civil servants are employed by the same people - us, the taxpayers. And it is bizarre that the Government which distributes our money to them can’t impose restraint that prevents a mercenary, inflationary job market.

I’m sure that civil servants have a sense of pride in their job, after all it’s a tough, competitve world that sometimes attracts unwarranted criticisim. So if the Government was to impose a much lower salary cap, the only reason executives would defect would be for greater challenges and responsibility.

And if the directors get fed up with it, they can always get jobs as footballers or bankers.