So how does highest paid vice chancellor defend her £451,000 salary? ‘I’m worth it’
THE timing couldn’t have been worse. Just as Lord Adonis was castigating the ‘greed’ of Britain’s highest paid university boss Dame Glynis Breakwell, the remuneration panel that sets her salary was meeting to discuss whether she should have another rise.
Judging by the lavish perks the vice chancellor of Bath University already receives, it is hard to see quite what she spends her vast pay packet on any way. She lives rent free in Grade 1-listed property in the city’s most prestigious Georgian conservation area, and many of her everyday expenses are taken care of.
Her generous annual allowances include £8,738 simply to pay for a housekeeper – that’s not far short of the £9,000 students at Bath have to fork out each year for their studies.
Not that Dame Glynis, 64, who studied psychology at university, has ever displayed the slightest sign of discomfort at her fabulous earnings which dwarfs the amount paid to every other vice chancellor in the country, including those who have more than twice the number of students of Bath.
‘I’m worth it,’ she has said whenever asked to justify the deal which means she is paid more than three times the Prime Minister. As if to emphasise this lack of humility she airily insisted: ‘I’ve been in the job a long time and you do tend to get increases over time in most jobs.’
It has all meant that the engineer’s daughter from the West Midlands has lived an extremely comfortable life since rising through the ranks of academia to her current post 16 years ago. FOR
example, take that five-bedroom grace and favour house in the heart of the historic centre of Bath and near to the famous Royal Crescent. It was bought by the university in 2002 for £1.6 million, a year after her arrival when her salary even then was in excess of £176,000. According to Lord Adonis it is a benefit in kind worth £20,000 a year.
At the time, the university said the purchase had been made as part of a ‘drive to become more involved in the life of the city.’ More recently, amid growing criticism over the property, Bath said it was also used for ‘ university business’ adding: ‘ This includes hosting events with visitors to our university such as honorary graduates, academics from other institutions and industry partners.
‘The university is the second largest employer in the city of Bath, providing jobs for more than 3,000 people. We use all our buildings… to build new partnerships and promote our teaching and research.’ But it has hardly come cheap. A Freedom of Information (FoI) request last year revealed that Dame Glynis claimed £713 for electricity, £4,767 for gas and £290 for water and sewage costs. There were also claims of £550 towards maintaining the railings in the elegant crescent, £1,933 for council tax, £406 for cleaning products and £132 for a vacuum cleaner and a steam mop. The FoI also disclosed that she had claimed £2 on biscuits.
Little wonder that Lord Adonis, a former Labour minister, used a debate on public sector pay to tear into Dame Glynis, and Bath, which he described as a ‘midranking university’ with ‘barely a fifth of the income of Cambridge.’
Yet this year, Dame Glynis got an 11 per cent pay rise – despite the Government’s one per cent cap on non-managerial staff across higher education – to take her salary and benefits to £451,000. on top of this, she also got £27,000 from non- executive directorships, which she apparently has time to undertake alongside being a full-time vice chancellor. Certainly her accumulation of wealth has been steady. By the time she was made a dame in 2011 for her services to higher education, her salary was £284,000. The following year it shot up to £356,000. By 2015, she was the eighth highest paid vice chancellor in the country, earning £395,000. But this year, she is head and shoulders above her academic rivals in the pay stakes. Apart from an Apple watch and a taste for gold jewellery, Dame Glynis is far from ostentatious with her riches. She and her long-term partner Colin Rowett – she has never married and has no children – own a home in a village near Guildford, Surrey. It was bought for £629,000 in 2000 in her name only and appears to be mortgage-free. BROUGHT
up in West Bromwich an only child, Dame Glynis was educated at a comprehensive school in Sandwell and was the first member of her family to go to university. After several years of post-graduate work, she spent two years as a social psychology lecturer at Bradford university before joining Surrey University where by 1994 she had been appointed pro- vice chancellor.
Had she not been an academic, Dame Glynis says she would like to have been an artist. A number of her own paintings are on the walls of her office at Bath.
If Bath’s remuneration panel increase her pay again – and yesterday they were stubbornly standing by their right to pay her what ever they like – Dame Glynis might wish to replace her amateur efforts with some more expensive works of art.