From The Evening Standard:
A SENIOR Scotland Yard officer is to quit for a Home Office post which will see him collect a combined £200,000-a-year pay and pension package. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Alf Hitchcock, 49, is to retire from the Metropolitan Police, gaining an £80,000 pension, then immediately start work as deputy chief constable of a quango at an estimated £120,000 a year.
His new role will see him take charge of part of the National Policing Improvement Agency where he will "mentor" potential chief constables. The senior officer's package, which will entitle him to another pension when he retires, will far exceed the pay of the officers he is mentoring.
Mr Hitchcock said it was a "one-off" job and told how he had been put off applying for promoted posts because of the pay. "Chief executives of councils usually earn far more than chief constables in charge of policing entire counties," he said... [Oh, so that's all right then]
... Peter Smyth, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation which represents more than 30,000 officers, said the public would be "shocked" by the news. He said: "I'm not sure this is the best use of public money. Common sense says this isn't right." It comes after thousands of officers have been forced to take second jobs to supplement their wages. Other officers who have retired and immediately gone into other policing roles include the chief constable of the British Transport Police, Ian Johnston, and his deputy Andy Trotter. They left Scotland Yard and joined the BTP, which is not under Home Office control, entitling them to the "double hat" windfall.
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
Quangista of the week
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12 comments:
It's funny the way people who think large pay differentials between staff and top managers are perfectly OK in the private sector, because top managers are required to ensure top staff performance, are so often the ones who think we should employ muppets on sod-all to manage the public sector, because economic incentives have mysteriously vanished for some reason or other...
PRIVATISE THE POLICE!
I've heard the chief executives of some companies make more than their heads of office security, too.
" . we should employ muppets on sod-all to manage the public sector"
The problem is we employ muppets in the public sector on ludicrously over-generous salaries to do useless jobs like Mr Hitchcock's new one or this one
And we can't seem to sack them when they screw up either....
John B.
If the private sector shareholders don't like it, they can sell the stock. No such choice for taxpayers.
JB, what NVM says, with the additional point that shareholders can (in theory at least) vote on the appointment and salary package of their directors.
In practice they can't, because of our lunatic tax system that ensures most shares are owned by pension funds or 'institutional investors' who are in cahoots with the directors, but hey.
NvM, MW: aye, but that doesn't help us much, does it? If we *did* have two competing states, one of which paid government officials private sector rates and one which paid them pittances, I'd certainly rather live in the former (perhaps we could call the first one 'the UK' or 'the US' or 'Germany', and the second one 'Somalia' or 'Albania'...)
JuliaM: Sharon Shoesmith was sacked, despite an excellent record, after an underling in a department she'd only recently taken over after a merger messed up. That seldom, if ever, happens in the private sector, on the grounds that blood-baying idiots tend not to care quite as much about seeing someone torn apart for the hell of it (whilst bosses recognise that keeping someone good who's messed up is better than making daft Pyrrhic points).
Umbongo: hiring a lawyer to see whether the CPS are being even-handed on making decisions to prosecute between people of different ethnic/gender/social groups seems like a very good idea, given that we know for a fact that people-in-general usually allow those factors to influence their judgement when they're supposed to be assessing evidence.
John B
You mean to say it requires some lawyer (who probably can't make it in the real world but likes the sound of £80K/year plus gold-plated pension plus 26+ days off a year + sickies + plenty of management meetings) to opine on whether the CPS is being even-handed in its decisions to prosecute. Is it too much to expect that those who are paid generously to run the CPS and are appointed (by the recruitment "experts" in Whitehall) precisely because they have the appropriate expertise, skills (and, I suspect, a suitable "diversity" mind-set) actually to manage the CPS such that this doesn't occur?
Out here in the real world, the answer to a perceived problem is not always recruiting someone to tick another few boxes. If there's a problem then it might be because the management or the existing management structure or the internal reporting system is crap. Since this is the CPS I would guess that, in fact, it's all three. Nevertheless, it seems you are suggesting that in the public sector every perceived problem not only requires another recruit but that every part of the state bureaucracy actually requires an internal shadow diversity organisation. Oh wait a minute - that's exactly what happens in the UK diversity industry: there exists everywhere in the public sector a simulacrum of an internal audit set-up but better paid, with more clout and much less accountability since any measurement of outcome is, at best, debateable.
In the spirit of creating useless jobs, let me suggest that another diversity network be created in each state organisation to see that the present diversity network is operating . . er . . diversely. And how will we know that that shadow set-up is diversely correct without setting up another shadow network and so on ad infinitum? This would solve the unemployment problem but, unfortunately, do less than nothing for wealth creation.
Isn't mentoring juniors the job of their bosses? That's the message I keep getting from my employers. If this is so then it is clear these juniors with potential are not being properly mentored, otherwise why create this post. Therefore it stands to reason that the current crop of Chief Constables is failing in its duties and should be brought to book. That would be a lot cheaper than creating a whole Quango.
So your excellent, profitable, successful employers don't do any central, company-wide training or participate in any industry-wide training initiatives? Well, good luck to 'em.
John,
Rest assured Conglomerated Unobtainium does use external and centralised sources for training. But training isn't mentoring.
As a designated mentor for identified young high flyers in my company I happen to know the difference between the two and you'll notice that the quote Mark uses only talks about one of them.
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