The Daily Telegraph

Public pay equality is not the same as fairness

- JULIET SAMUEL NOTEBOOK FOLLOW Juliet Samuel on Twitter @Citysamuel; READ MORE at telegraph. co.uk/opinion

What constitute­s “fair” pay? According to Britain’s biggest unions, it is pay that is equal: all workers get paid the same for doing the same job. This sounds intuitivel­y fair. But in a country where regional wages and the cost of living differ by vast margins, it is decidedly unfair for the government to award equal pay to a teacher in Kent and a teacher in Wales.

This is basic. But it’s a level of sophistica­tion not yet achieved by the debate on public sector pay. Politician­s are fixated on whether to scrap the 1 per cent cap on public pay rises. It is said that London hospitals are struggling to recruit because the cost of living locally is so high.

The obvious answer is that London hospitals should get a bigger budget supplement to address recruitmen­t problems. The difficulty, of course, is that because wages are set nationally – at the insistence of the unions – London cannot do anything without causing unaffordab­le and irrational knock-on effects for all public salaries across the country.

Take Wales. The median, full-time salary for a Welsh worker was £25,400 last year. But this single figure disguises a startling fact. Whereas the median wage in the private sector was £23,390, it was £28,489 for public sector workers. So Welsh government employees are worth nearly a fifth more than their counterpar­ts at private companies. In London, by contrast, annual public and private pay are almost the same.

It’s no wonder that businesses complain they cannot get local workers to take jobs available in Britain’s regions. Why be a private sector chump when you can live much more comfortabl­y off the state?

The pattern is repeated everywhere outside the south-east. Public sector workers in London are paid just 43p more per hour than their peers in the north-west, but they face average house prices more than three times as high. In both regions, government staff get much more than private sector workers for each hour worked.

There is nothing “fair” about this. It stops businesses hiring and investing in the regions, where wage costs are artificial­ly high, and it creates problem hotspots for services in the south-east.

In a world of constraine­d public finances, by far the fairest solution to localised recruitmen­t problems would be to release public services from the strangleho­ld of national pay bargains and let them negotiate pay individual­ly as they see fit.

Some reasonable­ness on the part of Wales’ relatively well-off teachers would go a long way towards helping hard-pressed nurses in London. Over time, as companies invested to take advantage of cheaper wages outside the south, it would also help unlucky private sector workers too. This would be fairer, but not equal. Unfortunat­ely, that makes it blasphemy.

Feeling rather delicate, I wandered out of my house on Saturday with modest ambitions for the day. But just yards from my doorstep, I found myself in the middle of London’s Gay Pride celebratio­ns. I had known the parade would pass somewhere nearby and assumed it wouldn’t really be my scene. Instead, I found the air filled with an infectious, joyful energy. The crowd was young and cheerful and, for once, they weren’t screaming anti-tory slogans or accusing politician­s of murder. They were just happy to be out, and on the streets.

Most striking was the parade itself. It was a clean sweep of Britain’s most establishm­ent institutio­ns. Civil servants marched together waving flags. London Fire Brigade received a lusty cheer. A dazed pair of East Asian tourists took shelter in a nearby sandwich shop as the logos of banks rolled by, surrounded by colourful balloons. And, most incongruou­sly, the young crowd clapped and cheered as platoons of police officers and soldiers went past, tiny rainbows painted on their faces. Mobs of youths cheering British soldiers and police: I had never seen that before.

When people argue that Britain needs leadership from other countries to make us open, progressiv­e or freedom-loving, I will remember the sight. Among the crowd were thousands of young Europeans, who came here to experience British openness for themselves. If they were in doubt, that impressive parade of institutio­ns rammed the message home: personal freedom is well and truly entrenched in Britain.

Using the taxi app, Uber, is “not morally acceptable”, according to Rebecca Long-bailey, Labour’s shadow business secretary. People who pay their cleaners in cash are “not good citizens,” says Matthew Taylor, the author of a government report into modern work practices. Can these finger-wagging busybodies please stop telling us how to conduct the intimate details of our economic lives and concentrat­e on coming up with sensible policies? That is, after all, their job.

The band Radiohead has come under intense fire from fellow Lefties for daring to include Israel on its worldwide concert tour. In response, lead singer Thom Yorke made a fairly straightfo­rward denunciati­on of the boycott mentality: “Music, art and academia is [sic] about crossing borders, not building them, about open minds, not closed ones, about shared humanity, dialogue and freedom of expression.” Yes, I think that covers it. Bravo, Mr Yorke.

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