The GOS and Mrs.GOS were having a conversation about money the other day, and mentioned those consumer magazine competitions that drop through the letterbox two or three times a year - the ones where they say you can win £100,000 or something, though no one you know ever does. This made us think - a hundred grand would be the most incredible riches. If we won that, we'd really feel we'd won the jackpot. We'd be set up for life.
We imagine most readers will feel the same. After all, the national average wage is only about £25,000, so that competition win represents four years' wages. The minimum wage is £5.73 an hour, so that even if a minimum-wage worker worked 8 hours a day, 5 days a week every week of the year, he would only earn just under £12,000!
Yet in the grand scheme of things, £100,000 isn't very much, is it? Untold wealth to us ordinary folk, but just pocket-money to others. It wouldn't seem very much to the man or woman who got this job with Kirklees Council, for instance …
Reference: NP-060209-8683177
Contact: Kelly Shaw or Graham Goodwin
Position: Director of Finance
Salary: Up to £116,000
In fact council officials' wages are swallowing a larger and larger portion of what little national earnings we have left. The average local authority now spends £4 million a year employing nine times as many people on £50,000-plus packages as ten years ago, which is an increase three times larger than the commercial sector. Nationally 12,600 local council officials earn as much as, or more than, an MP does - of which more anon.
Scrabbling to the top of the local government ant-heap, people like Andrea Hill, the new Chief Executive of Suffolk County Council, earn £220,000, while her colleague in Kent, Peter Gilroy, gets £250,000. Remember, the average wage is £25,000, and the minimum wage is £5.73 an hour.
Even in teaching, traditionally a poorly-paid profession, a few people are getting the big bucks these days. A Head Teacher can earn as much as £100,000 - though it would have to be a very big school - and the Head of a large primary school might earn £60,000. It is in the universities, though, that academics can really earn some dosh. The Vice-Chancellor of Southampton university gets £240,000 (up from £196,000 in 2006, quite a nice little pay-rise). Simon Lee, Vice-Chancellor of Leeds Metropolitan University, is currently being paid his £276,000 salary despite being suspended because of complaints of "mistreatment" from staff. We don't know what the "mistreatment" was. Perhaps he unfairly expected them to do some actual teaching once in a while.
While the public sector may be leading the way, commercial firms aren't far behind. AVJobs Ltd. were recently trying to fill a vacancy for a "Software Sales Manager" at a salary of £100,000 a year plus "benefits", whatever they are. The lucky man (or woman, of course - the gravy train is an equal-opportunities outfit - will be based in Lincolnshire, so won't have to spend too many of those bucks buying a house. Apparently they're looking for someone with ten years' experience of selling mainly to local government. Well, that makes sense. They're the ones with all the money these days!
At the top of the commercial tree, well … the sky's the limit. We read about one chief executive of a FTSE100 company who was paid £2½million in 2008. Presumably he (a) worked full time for the company, and (b) had relevant and successful experience. Remember, the average wage is £25,000, and the minimum wage is £5.73 an hour.
The beleaguered bank HBOS aren't quite so fussy, to judge by some of their board members. Up to 2007 they paid one Charles Dunstone £400,000 despite the facts that he spends most of his time running Carphone Warehouse and that he has no banking experience at all. Sir Ronald Garrick received £1m in return for his … erm, no banking experience. Sir Brian Ivory and Coline McConville, similarly well qualified, received £700,000 and £500,000 respectively.
On the other hand, Tony Hobson does have some banking experience, so he must have richly deserved his £1.23m. He's also on the boards of 3 other companies. The average wage is £25,000, and the minimum wage is £5.73 an hour.
But the really big bucks go to people like Michael Geoghegan, chief executive at HSBC, who is believed to be in line for a bonus of more than £1m in spite of plans by the bank to raise as much as £10 billion from its investors. His chairman, Stephen Green, received £3m last year, including a £1.75m bonus paid entirely in shares. He is expected to get another bonus this year, but has generously agreed to be paid in shares again instead of cash. What a philanthropist.
Of course we all know that footballers are paid ridiculous amounts of money. Premiership footballers earn an average of £676,000 per year, according to a survey by The Independent and the Professional Footballers' Association. That's £13,000 a week. When performance-related bonuses are taken into account, they may get between 60% and 100% more. And the average wage is £25,000, and the minimum wage is £5.73 an hour.
But even they can't hold a candle to your favourite and ours, that cheeky chappy Jonathan Woss. In 2006 it was revealed by a then-unidentified BBC mole that Ross earned £530,000 a year for hosting his Radio 2 show - that's £10,000 a show. Then a new contract secured his future until 2010 for a reported £18 million.
£6 million a year for being an arsehole. Worse than that, even: £6 million a year for being an unpleasant arsehole.
And speaking of unpleasant arseholes, what about politicians?
MPs earn £63,000 plus allowances to cover the costs of running an office and employing staff, having somewhere to live in London and in their constituency, and travelling between Parliament and their constituency. Gordon Brown's salary is £194,000. Cabinet ministers get £142,000, as does David Cameron in his role as Leader of the Opposition. So when Gordon Brown loses the next election (please, god!) he'll drop not one but two average workers' wages.
In the House of Lords they don't get paid a salary at all, but a Lord who is also a Cabinet Minister gets £107,000, and a Lord who is a common-or-garden sort of minister gets a mere £83,000. Practically on the breadline, if you ask us.
But it's in the matter of their expenses that MPs and Ministers really raid the piggy-bank. This has had so much publicity lately that there's no need for us to go into details, except just to remind you that Jacqui Smith, who as Home Secretary ought surely to have understood the need to keep a clean nose, claimed £116,000 in expenses and is facing an enquiry into allegations she misused the expenses system by classifying a bedroom in her sister's London house as her "main residence" so that she could pocket more than £20,000 a year to run her family home, the detached house in the West Midlands where she lives with her husband and two young children.
The investigation by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner follows an official complaint by neighbours in her sister's street, who say that her claim that she spends most nights of the week at the London home is 'a fabrication'.
There's an even bigger scandal in Brussels (surprise, surprise!) where a leaked internal report has revealed systematic abuses by Euro MPs of parliamentary allowances that enable them to pocket more than £1m in profits from a single five-year term. The auditor's confidential report, suppressed by the Brussels parliament, discloses the extraordinary frauds used by MEPs to siphon off staff allowances funded by taxpayers.
It shows that some claimed for paying assistants of whom no record exists, awarded them bonuses of up to 1½ times annual salary and diverted public money into front companies. End-of-year bonuses worth up to 19½ times monthly salary were paid to assistants to allow members to use up their full annual allowance, payments for secretarial work were made to a crèche whose manager happened to be a local politician from the MEP's political party, payments were made straight into the coffers of national political parties, some assistants doubled their money by banking pay-offs from outgoing MEPs at the same time as receiving salaries from incoming ones, and one MEP claimed to have paid the whole £182,000 staff allowance to just one person - who was a relative.
The report was based on figures obtained in October 2004. The analysis of the figures then took years to surface within the secretive Brussels bureaucracy, and have only just come to light.
Figures from the Tax Payers' Alliance suggest that the graft may be even more profound. They say that over a full term, MEPs could easily bank almost £450,000 in staff allowances, even if they employed several genuine full-time assistants. MEPs claiming the maximum subsistence of £257 a day while staying in cheap accommodation could also pocket about £105,000 from this source over five years, and could make £217,800 in office expenses by claiming their home was also their constituency office. No receipts are required to receive this money.
The lack of any need to provide receipts to justify travel expenses means that MEPs could receive a £54,000 tax-free profit while still making regular journeys between Brussels and their home country. MEPs also have a final salary pension scheme which is even more generous than the one provided to members of the Westminster parliament. The TaxPayers' Alliance calculates that the cash value of this benefit would be about £350,000 over a full parliamentary term.
At current exchange rates the grand total profit over five years comes to £1,176,800. If that weren't enough, currently British MEPs are looking forward to an inflation-busting pay rise that could see their take-home pay rising by almost 50%.
And finally, the cherry on the cake, so to speak: at least one politician recently got the ultimate sweetener. We paid Peter Mandelson a £234,000 "transitional payment" on top of his rather generous salary, to persuade him to make the move from Brussels to Westminster.
Hmm … now there's a thought. Perhaps if we gave him another £234,000 he'd bugger off back again, and leave the rest of us alone? It might be worth it.
NOW ... we've given you the facts, we've detailed the figures, we've told you how the other half lives while you're wondering where next week's big shop in Asda is coming from.
Now it's your turn: can anyone tell us what the hell it is that these people do that's so bloody special? We're often told that it's necessary to offer large salaries to "attract the best" - so what is it that's best about these parasites? What does Jonathan Woss do that fifty other comedians or DJs couldn't do just as well?
If you took all the Chief Executives of all the banks and other companies and county councils, chucked them in a pit in the Isle of Wight and covered them in quicklime, promoted someone three steps below them in the hierarchy and paid them one third the money, don't you think they would do the job just as well?
Of course they would - and be pleased of the chance. It's not rocket science, work, is it? Quite a lot of people do it perfectly well.
The GOS used to work in a county council. He says he could do it.
He'd just have to work out how to stay awake. It may not be rocket science, but it's hell-and-all boring.
Finally, look at this excellent clip from German television. Just look at the figures they quote! And then remind yourself that in the UK the average annual wage is £25,000, and the minimum wage is £5.73 an hour.
The GOS says: Come to think of it, the one bunch of people who probably do justify the claim that you have to pay big money to "attract the best" are the footballers.
Of course if you took the three highest-paid footballers from each Premiership club, dragged them round the back of the stadium and put a bullet behind their ear, the standard of the football probably wouldn't suffer that much. England can lose just as well when Wayne Rooney isn't playing as it can when he is. No one's indispensable.
But at least when Wayne Rooney's on song, he demonstrates a standard of skill and strength and determination that all can see. Has anyone noticed how good Michael Geoghegan is lately? Can anyone even remember who Michael Geoghegan is?
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