Biting Sarcasm Of The Week

Prof. Alison Smith gives a potted summary of her own report in The Times:

... public sector pay scales are almost entirely uniform across England. Conditions of service are also negotiated and set at national level. This creates a fine lifestyle for professionals in areas where house prices are a fraction of those in London or the southeast. It makes it easy for schools in the affluent Wirral to hire teachers; more generally, hospitals in the north can find good permanent nursing staff, while trusts in the southeast scramble from agency cover to agency cover. But the positive side stops there...

However, the main thrust of her argument - and this is a good explanation for why certain parts of the UK are far more dependent on public sector jobs than others - is as follows:

Private employers who want a good quality workforce have to match or exceed what people can get in the public sector. (It is not just wages: it is also pensions and job security.) Poor regions and poor cities typically have bad road or rail connections as well as old industries that have died; one of their few, but genuine, competitive advantages should be lower wage costs.

By importing national pay scales for large parts of the workforce, we force local employers to match these. In other words, the way we set public sector pay directly increases private employers’ costs in our poorer regions and reduces their ability to create jobs for local people.

Anyways, the first thing I consciously heard on Radio 4 this morning was Prof Wolf calmly and patiently explaining all this. To give a 'balanced view', they had also invited Sarah Veale (who appears to be the TUC's head of equality and human rights) who had a shrieky whiney voice and constantly interrupted, repeating over and over again some mantra that "National pay scales protect jobs and ensure fair pay" or words to that effect, without stopping to consider that this policy contributes to high unemployment in large areas of the country. And there was me thinking that trade unions were supposed to be against unemployment! D'oh!