No good in golden goodbyes

IT is difficult to say quite when senior public sector pay got out of control. It is much easier, however, to recognise that the tipping point has long since been reached and, when council managers are getting six-figure pay-offs, then something has gone very wrong with the way we reward the people who run our towns and cities.

The payments made to three assistant chief executives at Sheffield City Council are eye-wateringly high. To any hard-working road sweeper or cleaner who works for the authority and is facing a pay freeze, they will seem unfair. To hard-pressed taxpayers, who are constantly being told by Ministers there is a public spending crisis, these golden goodbyes may appear beyond justification.

The anger of Bob Neill, the local government Minister, at six-figure payoffs is likely to lead to legislation to limit both executive pay and severance packages and to stop such staff "boomeranging" back into another lucrative public sector job. Until that point, however, both councils and their departing officers have a moral duty to show some restraint.

Of course, the managers in question may well have helped Sheffield to make savings, while the officials who approved these payments might argue that staff contracts cannot be changed retrospectively.

That does not preclude departing managers from waiving part of what they are allowed to claim, however. Just because something is a legal entitlement does not necessarily mean it is justifiable, and a precedent has been set in the private sector, where chief executives have occasionally turned down pay rises or pay-offs when the rest of the organisation is suffering.

It is this sense of equality that is at the heart of the debate surrounding remuneration. If senior staff benefit from success in the good days, then they must take their share of the pain when times are tough.

Labour's years of largesse mean Britain has entered one of its toughest post-war periods. The onus is on everyone in the public sector to show some responsibility. The work these people do is important, but the best managers are those who don't lose sight of the fact that they are servants of the people, and not their masters.