Quote of the day
“When you consider the risk they are running of being killed is one in 40 on the front line and you have got more than that being injured … how many civil servants would volunteer for that?”
- Hazel Hunt, whose son recently died fighting in Afghanistan, condemning the Ministry of Defence last night for awarding its civil servants bonuses totalling £47 million in the first seven months of this financial year. Also reacting to this news, Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox said “this will only increase the view that the armed forces and the MoD administration are hugely out of balance” and that many in the armed forces would be “aghast” at the payments (there are 85,000 civil servants at the MoD, one for every two active troops). Colonel Bob Stewart, the former commander of UN forces in Bosnia, added that he was ”absolutely staggered” and stated that “no civil servant should be getting any kind of a bonus when our country is broke and our troops are fighting for their lives.”
Witanagemot Blogs
This whole episode is shameful, I’ve heard all the excuses, separate budgets, last years bonus etc. But really what a kick in the teeth for our fighting men and women. The MOD is not fit for purpose and seems only to exist to spend excessive amounts of taxpayers money on unachievable targets, whilst trying to claw back money offered in compensation to the injured forces.
Truly an awful day.
Shameful indeed. What I still cannot fathom is why any civil servant gets paid a bonus – surely they should jsut do their job and do it properly without the need to incentivise their role as a public servant?
I couldn’t agree more. This system (not just the MOD) is coming apart at the seams, if Cameron can’t reduce the public service wagebill by nearly 20% then there is something wrong. Duplicity and validity in these jobs show how much the NuLibour project has been built upon their diabolic ideals, dread to think the pension bill alone for this Barmy surplus score…
There are no heroes in this story – not the government, and not Liam Fox. The biggest villains, though, are journalists who are either too lazy or too incompetent to report this story properly.
The government has been hoist on its own petard here. Some years back, seduced by private sector rhetoric, it started championing performance related pay across the civil service. Something the Tories have also been strongly in favour of across the public sector. The whole point of performance related pay is that some will get less, and some will get more. Ie, some will get bonuses. Performance related pay of necessity depresses the overall pay award in order to give more to some. It does not ‘increase’ pay. It just distributes it unevenly. The Tories have been fervent supporters of this method of payment.
Of course, the word ‘bonus’ conjures up images of special presents, of fat cats, of undeserving riches. In fact, bonuses, as used by this government, are a convenient way of keeping pay costs low. A bonus is unconsolidated, therefore it does not count as actual ‘pay’, so does not form part of the basis for the calculation of future pay. It also handily reduces the need for the government to pay pension contributions. So one way to reduce the MoD’s current and future pay costs would be to increase bonuses. Bonuses reduce costs. It’s that simple. This whole story shows how Alice-in-Wonderland our political debates can often become – a device cynically used by the government to reduce pay costs (while, in true Orwellian fashion, describing it as a ‘bonus’) becomes a story about pen-pushers feather-lining their nests.
Liam Fox must know this (or, if he doesn’t, it is extremely worrying), so his outrage is little more than cant. If he is sincere, then I look forward to the Tory announcement ending performance related pay in the public sector. And to seeing the NUT and the PCS dancing in the streets.
What Highveld Brit said:
As I understand it, most civil servants didn’t actually want this bonus system put in place. As a former soldier, I am not going to get irate about someone getting a £500 bonus when they are only earning 16k a year.