Will Hutton speaks with forked tongue: shock.

Will Hutton in The Guardian on the subject of Stephen Hester's £1 million salary + £1 million bonus for meeting targets at the Royal Bank of Scotland:

There is no inbuilt sense of proportionality in pay: no determined effort to link exceptional reward with exceptional contribution; no rigorous effort to separate out the luck of being in the right place at the right time from genuine effort and innovation; no mechanism to require executives to have some stake at risk, or some "skin in the game" to use Warren Buffett's phrase; and a process in which the guiding principle is to give in to empty threats from executive teams.

It is a one-way street in which executives in any circumstances always get more bucks or mega-bucks – never fewer bucks.

And the by-line reads: Will Hutton chaired a government inquiry into top pay in the public sector, published in 2011

Now, Hester turned down the bonus, but a base salary of £1 million is still an outrageous sum of money for just running what is effectively a government department, there is no particular skill involved. To be fair to Hester, RBS is a huge organisation (150,000 employees) and while he was in charge, it appears to have made modest profits and hasn't gone bankrupt or anything.

So let's look at Will Hutton's record shall we?

He was paid (or paid himself) around £180,000 a year for running a quango called The Work Foundation (formerly The Industrial Society), which had 43 employees and went horribly bankrupt in 2010.

Emma Harrison, 'Family Champion'

It appears that the Lib-Cons are following Nulab tradition and appointing all sorts of meddlers and quangista to try and create The Master Race. This story was on Radio 4 this morning (brief write up here) but apart from that I can't find anything online.

Basically, Emma Harrison founder of fakeprivatecompany Action4Employment, now possibly known as A4E, yes, the ones who bought David Blunkett's seal of approval, has been given the job of being 'Family Champion' who is going to turn 'troubled families' into 'working families'. She claims to be doing it unpaid, but the plan is that she will have tens of thousands of people working for her.

Yup, that's right, people like Emma Harrison or Will Hutton just glide smoothly from being Labour luvvies to being Lib-Con luvvies. The whole thing makes me feel sick.

UPDATE: I refer my readers to the single issue 'blog Watching A4E for more A4E-related tomfoolery.

Fun With Numbers

Today's maths lesson is a from a lecture by Will Hutton:

"As you're no doubt all aware, I managed to wangle myself a job on the Lib-Cons' High Pay Commission, despite having been a Labour luvvie for the previous few years. My first idea was to set an absolute upper limit for civil service pay in £-s-d, so I chatted to a few people in Whitehall and some of my old mates running local councils or Primary Care Trusts and Trevor Phillips, who's on about £160,000*, and they explained to me that a) they weren't going to take a pay cut, b) if I did set a limit at slightly above what they were currently getting it would give the game away, and c) they reminded me how much I was getting paid and that a) and b) apply to me as well.

So back to the drawing board!

Now, of course, I see myself as a public servant first and foremost, I don't do it for the money. In fact, I'm not even sure how much I paid myself for my services to The Work Foundation last year. I tried checking on the Charities Commission website, but that just reminded me that we hadn't actually submitted any accounts for the year to 30 June 2009 yet. Ah well, there were some financial irregularities and so on, nothing the accountants can't sort out, although I'm surprised that those accounts are already 215 days overdue.

So I checked the accounts for the year before that, which have a handy little table on page 27 which shows that the highest paid employee paid him- or herself between £170,000 and £180,000. I'm not sure if that was me, but I'd assume it was. It can't have been Jean in the payroll department or Tony who fixes the computers. It's not Fumi, the nice Nigerian lady who comes in to empty the paper baskets and collect the coffee cups either, she's on something called 'The National Minimum Wage' (note to self - is it worth trying to wangle a job on Low Pay Commission? Doesn't sound very lucrative if that's all they get!) and she earns around £9,000 a year, or at least that's what Jean told me before she popped out for a cigarette (filthy habit).

Or maybe she's called Joan? I just can't remember...

Then little ol' Will had a brainwave! It came to me in a flash - thanks to decades of dumbing down, most people don't understand multiplication, but it happens that I am a dab hand with the old calculator. I idly tapped in £180,000 and £9,000 and a couple of other buttons - more or less at random - and it came up with the number twenty. Two-zero. 20. I got Tony to run it through the computer, just to check, and he confirmed that if somebody who is paid £180,000 is being paid twenty times a much as Fumi. Apparently £180,000 would make me a 'fat cat' or something, so I did a dry run and told a few people that I get twenty times as much as Fumi, and they just stared blankly.

Result! Twenty. What a beautiful, lovely round figure....

I tell you, he's a clever chap that Tony from the computer room. He told me that he's only paid £25,000 (I suppose he has a private income and does this for a hobby or something), so in theory, if I sacked Fumi and Jean (or Joan), he'd be the lowest paid person in the office, and then I'd be allowed to pay myself half a million squid without breaking the "twenty" limit. For that sort of money, I'll tidy up the coffee cups and run the payroll myself! I might give him a bonus for that insight... oh, great!

... so that's the story behind the number!

I hope you all enjoyed today's lecture, I'll be back next week with a quick run down of the practical application of differentiation and calculus, if anybody's interested."

* He's a cunning cove, my mate Trev. He's persuaded people that he only pays himself £112,000, but that's for a three-and-a-half day week. I checked with Tony in IT again, who confirmed that that's the equivalent of £160,000 for a five day week. My calculator must be broken or something, because it kept coming up with £6,400, maybe a key is sticking or something.

This is so much fun on so many levels.....

An extract from the FT article (which should be read as it does for Will Hutton's credibility)

"The Work Foundation’s pension woes mirror the difficulties currently being experienced by many businesses. Uniq, the food maker formerly known as Unigate, this week proposed a radical “deficit for equity” swap to resolve a towering pension deficit."

(clicking on the headline will take you to the FT site - but you might need to register - this is the link
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/396bf3aa-ddcb-11df-8354-00144feabdc0.html )

Update: Or you can try Googling - Work Foundation bought out of insolvency
(Thanks to a dearieme)

Lola

Will Hutton: Update

I have pointed out before that talking head Will Hutton is 'Chief Executive' of super-quango The Work Foundation, whose income is derived primarily from other government departments, quangos, fakecharities and corporatists. Some of us may have hoped that the Lib-Cons would be true to their word and do a bit of slash and burn on the quangocracy in general and people like Will Hutton in particular...

... think again: "Will Hutton, the Observer columnist, has been appointed by the government to head a review into public sector pay... Hutton will be asked to look at the gap between the highest- and lowest- paid public servants."

A quick glance at page 27 of The Work Foundation's 2008 accounts tells us that the organisation has two employees paid between £100,000 and £110,000; one employee paid between £120,000 and £130,000; and one employee paid between £170,000 and £180,000.

I can't say for sure which of those salary bands he's in, but I guess it's safe to say he won't be doing his bit to narrow the "gap between the highest- and lowest- paid public servants."

PS, more Will Hutton Fun over at Witterings.

[Missing the killer blow] Miles Templeman vs Will Hutton

You can watch a dreary debate between Miles Templeman and Will Hutton from the Channel 4 News, starting at 10 minutes 14 seconds into this clip - if you can be bothered. It's the usual blah from Miles about "cutting the bloated public sector without hurting frontline services" and the usual blah from Will that "cutting spending now will plunge us back into recession".



Right. Why does Miles Templeman stoop to this? Why didn't he just point out that Will Hutton is the personification of the "bloated public sector"? Will was announced as 'Head of the Work Foundation think tank", for example.

How cool would it have been if Miles had waved a set of The Work Foundation's 2008 accounts at the camera and pointed out that out of total income of £4,808,000 (see P&L, page 19), ninety per cent of it comes from other government departments? And then asked Will who the highest paid employee was, the one falling into the salary band£170,000 - £180,000?

Aha, so that's why John Hutton resigned ...

From The Times:

John Hutton, the former Business Secretary who was the architect of Britain’s plans to build a series of nuclear power stations, is in talks with EDF about joining the group as a senior adviser, The Times has learnt.

I had developed a sort of residual respect for John Hutton as the least-bad of a terrible bunch, but it now turns out he's a trougher like the rest of them. Reading on ...

EDF Energy set up a Stakeholder Advisory Panel in 2006. A spokesman said that its role was to allow the company’s senior management “to draw on the experience of eminent and diverse senior advisers outside of EDF Energy to discuss key strategic issues and their impact on our business”. Other members of the panel are Will Hutton, Diane Coyle, John Roberts and Simon Robertson.

So they're getting their propaganda team in place.

Will Hutton is currently 'Chief Executive of the Work Foundation', which is a Quango From Hell, see footnote here.

Diane Coyle's Wiki Page says she's "a freelance economist, and a former advisor to the UK Treasury. She is a member of the UK Competition Commission, and a member of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

I can't track down anything on John Roberts, but Simon Robertson's background is even murkier:

THE Eden Project has been criticised by environmentalists over its links with French nuclear energy giant EDF and its UK subsidiary EDF Energy.

The Cornish environmental attraction supported EDF Energy's Green Britain Day, launched yesterday by athletes including Olympian Victoria Pendleton and Paralympian Eleanor Simmonds, which urges people to reduce their carbon footprint...

Two of Eden's trustees, Sir John Rose and Simon Robertson, are senior figures within Rolls-Royce, a firm known to be keen on nuclear development in the UK.

Lord Lamont ... er ... rocks

An earlier Badger was on Channel 4 News this evening (feel free to hunt for a clip here) in a head-to-head with Will "Nobody Know What My Qualifications Are. Because I Don't have Any" Hutton* and some banking PR guy from HSBC on the topic of whether we should join the Euro.

Having spent the last sixteen years ruing the fact that he happened to be Chancellor of The Exchequer on White Wednesday, Lord Lamont politely let Will "Nobody Knows [etc]" Hutton ramble on for a bit, and then hit back with the following simple points, IIRC:

1. What makes you think they'd have us? For example, UK public borrowing is far in excess of the three per cent of GDP upper limit seen as a precondition for Euro-membership (altho' they waive this for France on regular occasions, of course).

2. What makes you think they'd have us at this particular rate?

3. The fact that the GBP/EUR exchange rate is fast approaching parity is a numerical quirk and irrelevant in the grander scheme of things.

4. Even if they let us join at today's rate, the example of Italy (which joined at an artificially low rate) shows that any perceived competitive advantage for exporters is soon competed away, as joining at a too-low rate merely stokes inflation in that country.

Like most of my political heroes**, Lord Lamont is perceived as a bit of a failure, and I never thought I'd say this, but frankly, tonight ... he rocked.

* According to Will's Wiki biog, he is "weekly columnist and former editor-in-chief for The Observer in London (which ought to set alarm bells ringing) and currently Chief Executive of The Work Foundation".

Like all self-respecting quango's, The Work Foundation is registered as a charity and it burns its way through £5 million of taxpayers' finest every year. It describes its income as 'consultancy' in its accounts, but of course it's only government departments like DBERR, The British Library, the BBC, the DCMS, and Channel 4 who "... are among those who have benefited from the lens provided by Public Value. Indeed it has been so successful that financial support was secured for a second phase of research which commenced in January 2007. This phase will examine how public institutions understand what the public values as well as how they shape expectations and demand."

** Neville Chamberlain, Jimmy Carter, Sir John Major etc.