Reports of £150m police pay-outs spark row over bonuses

Requests under the Freedom of Information Act uncovered the £150m figure, according to the Daily Telegraph which said some individual officers were receiving tens of thousands of pounds per year in "incentive" payments.

The bonus system, devised by former Home Secretary David Blunkett, was designed to reward officers undertaking the most demanding jobs such as recovering bodies or those who show consistent high standards ...

BBC NEWS  14 Aug 2010    

Police receive bonuses just for doing their daily job

Sir Paul Stephenson calls for end to police bonuses

Police bonus programme slammed

NHS boss earned £68,000 in bonuses - on top of six-figure salary

"Dr Patrick Geoghegan ... who earns £170,000-180,000 received
 £20,573 in the same year for helping it do well against NHS targets."

Notice Dr Geoghegan received bonuses for hitting targets, not for patient care.

Anna Walker, who was chief executive of the Healthcare Commission until it was disbanded last year, earned the largest combined amount in the past three years – £68,150 on top of her six-figure salary.

She received £22,375 in 2006-07, £23,000 in 2007-08 and £22,775 in 2008-09 for running the then NHS watchdog in England ...

This is the first time both the number of bonuses and their size has been disclosed. The Lib Dems sought information from every hospital trust, primary care trust (PCT), mental health trust and ambulance service in England, as well as other NHS bodies such as strategic health authorities. While some pay no bonuses, many do.

However, the figures do not reveal the full picture because some refused to disclose theirs and a few simply gave their chief executive's salary band.

The £32,000 one-off bonus and the £68,150 over three years are large but not atypical.

Laura Roberts, chief executive of the Manchester PCT, received £25,732 extra in 2008-09, while Dr Patrick Geoghegan, her counterpart at South Essex Partnership mental health trust – who earns £170,000-180,000 – received £20,573 in the same year for helping it do well against NHS targets ...

Observer  25 Apr 2010    

How 'high quality' service helped four Royal Mail bosses earn £310,000 in bonuses

Those bonuses are now likely to be called into question after it emerged that the company’s market research is being manipulated by staff ...

The latest directors’ remuneration report by Royal Mail Holdings plc states that 30 per cent of the bonus paid to the company’s top executives is based on “service quality” which includes the delivery times of letters and parcels. The remainder of the bonuses are based on the company’s profits.

In 2008-09 Adam Crozier, the chief executive of Royal Mail Group, was entitled to a performance-related bonus of £453,000 on top of his basic salary of £633,000. A total of £135,900 of the bonus was based on “service quality”. He opted to put £314,000 of his bonus into a Long Term Incentive Plan, meaning he will only get the money if Royal Mail hits future targets, leaving him with a total pay package of £995,000, the second-highest of any public sector boss.

During his seven years at Royal Mail Mr Crozier, 46, controversially ended twice-daily deliveries and moved delivery times to later in the day, meaning many households do not get their mail until lunchtime at the earliest. He has also axed 45,000 jobs.

Telegraph  13 Mar 2010    Wealth Log

Royal Mail delivery tests 'rigged'

Public sector faces pay cuts

“In some quangos, local authorities and other organisations, the level of pay, especially at the top end, and bonuses have reached the stage where they don’t pass what I call the next-door neighbour test. If you can’t justify them to your neighbour, you’ve probably got it wrong,” Darling said ...

Darling is also concerned by “special performance” awards in Whitehall. He admitted the payments were not always a reward for exceptional work.

Embarrassingly, the practice is rife in the Treasury. Figures in a parliamentary answer show 73% of Treasury staff had “special performance” awards, averaging £8,030, last year ...

Times  24 Jan 2010

Analysis of parliamentary questions and departmental accounts found the Whitehall bonus pot for 2008/09 added up to £129,393,139 - around £2 for every man, woman and child in the UK.

The figure was made up of end-of-year payments and rewards for performance on projects throughout the year.

The performance-related pay in Whitehall has spiralled despite assurances that senior civil servants were willing to show restraint during the recession when many in the private sector are having to take pay cuts or accept a wage freeze ...

Telegraph  23 Dec 2009

Nearly £5m has been paid in bonuses to staff at a funding body criticised for the "catastrophic mismanagement" of a college re-building scheme in England.

Figures released to the Conservatives show the money was shared by 3,106 staff at the Learning and Skills Council for the year to March.

The LSC was also criticised last year over delays in learning grants ...

In 2009, £4,868,463 was paid in bonuses to LSC staff - £200,000 more than in the previous year.

The funding body's chief executive Mark Haysom resigned in March, shortly before publication of the damning independent report on the building programme.

Mr Haysom did not receive a bonus payment for the year to March but took six months salary in lieu of notice.

The LSC's annual report shows he did receive a bonus for the previous year (up to March 2008) amounting to £36,000 ...

The LSC was criticised in the independent inquiry into the handling of a £2.3bn budget for 2008-11 for the rebuilding of colleges in England.

In short, the body had promised colleges funds for rebuilding projects after it had used up its budget.

Colleges had invested money in preparing their bids for the cash.

Report author Sir Andrew Foster said "the crisis was predictable and probably avoidable" and blamed poor management.

He said the crisis could have been mitigated if action had been taken earlier and that as early as February 2008, the LSC had been warned of a likely overspend, but this was not acted upon.

MPs on the Commons Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee later complained of the "catastrophic mis-management" of the scheme ...

BBC NEWS  19 Dec 2009

College building scheme 'flawed'

Colleges face £170m projects loss

Colleges in building funds limbo

Inquiry into college renovations

Staff at the Student Loans Company received almost £2m in bonuses last year, figures revealed.

The payouts, some of them five figure sums, were made while a system that has left thousands of students waiting for grants and loans was being developed.

The Liberal Democrats, who uncovered the bonuses under Freedom of Information laws, said rewarding failure was unacceptable.

The SLC said it operated a bonus scheme structure to reward hard-working staff.

SLC admitted that some £1,893,500 was paid in bonuses during 2008-09. Three bosses received £21,000 bonuses, while two got payouts of £15,000 and five were given £10,000.

Some 1,603 of the SLC's 1,876 staff picked up rewards.

The figures also showed senior executives racked up an expenses bill of £110,596.31 - £28,000 more than the previous year.

In total staff claimed more than £1.2m in expenses, up from £793,000 in 2007-08.

Ministers ordered an inquiry after tens of thousands of students who had applications approved were left without funding at the start of the new academic term.

This year was the first time first year students applied directly to the SLC for grants and loans.

The new arrangement has been beset by problems as the Glasgow-based firm struggled to cope with a higher number of undergraduates and deal with technical problems ...

BBC NEWS  16 November 2009

Thousands wait for student money

New students still without funds

Student finance 'shambles' anger

Civil servants at the Ministry of Defence have been paid £47 million in performance bonuses this year ...

The figure, which covers just the first seven months of the current financial year, has been revealed as the Government faces charges of failing to provide British troops with adequate support and equipment on the front line in Afghanistan.

Additional bonus payments for the rest of year could take the total above the £53 million paid out to MoD officials in 2008/09.

There are 85,000 civil servants at the MoD, one for every two active troops. Around 50,000 of them will get a performance bonus this year.

The MoD has claimed that the bonuses would average less than £1,000, but some officials will get much bigger payments.

Last year, the department had senior 95 employees who were paid salaries of more than £100,000; and the average bonus for a senior civil servant in the department was £8,000.

An Army private can be paid as little as £16,681, with a £2,380 bonus for serving in Afghanistan ...

Telegraph  11 November 2009

The Royal Bank of Scotland, which was bailed out with government money 12 months ago, has set aside almost £2bn for bonuses and salaries to investment banking staff – a figure that could double by the end of the year.

After a week in which Goldman Sachs admitted it is on track to pay out its biggest ever bonuses, the Edinburgh-based RBS conceded that it too would be likely to offer bonuses to its 20,000 investment bankers this year.

The remuneration bill for the investment bank division at RBS in the first half of 2009 reached £1.8bn – equal to £90,000 a head.

The final total is expected to rise substantially, by the time a decision on bonus payouts is made by the bank at the end of the year ...

Stephen Hester, the chief executive of RBS who has a £9m pay deal, has already defended the need to pay bonuses because of a "damaging but not yet destructive" exodus of its big City players who were poached during the political row over bonuses at the bailed-out bank last year ...

Lord Oakeshott, the Liberal Democrat treasury spokesman, said: "This government has granted a goldmine to a few investment banks. They've bailed them out and effectively pulled the plug on the competition, so we must come up with our share of the loot when it comes up the mine shaft."

An RBS spokesman said: "We have led the way in reforming how we structure our rewards to staff, aligning incentives more effectively to long-term performance."

But Unite's MacGregor said: "The greedy investment bankers have learnt no lessons from the financial meltdown. The actions of these top bankers brought catastrophe to our economic system, yet they continue to be rewarded generously."

Guardian  18 October 2009

How have bankers managed to make such significant sums again, barely a year after the entire financial system came to within an inch of collapse?

One reason is competition – or lack of it. Despite the fact that the recession has taken hold, life goes on and companies still need to invest, to grow, to borrow and occasionally to take each other over.

Each of these tasks necessitates a visit to their investment bank which, in the same way that a high street bank will provide money services for an individual, will do everything from lending money and helping sell bonds, to issuing shares and insuring against future collapse.

The difference between now and a year ago is that Wall Street and the City are significantly smaller places.

With the disappearance of so many of the old names, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns most notably, plus the fact that there are a significant number of walking wounded such as UBS and Merrill Lynch, the remaining banks can get away with charging significantly more for simple "vanilla" services.

Quite simply, whether you're a business or one of those finance ministers in Istanbul needing to raise money, there are fewer places to go for help.

Another explanation for the bankers' success is that the markets have been flooded with cheap money by central banks, the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve chief among them. The by-product has been that, with interest rates so close to zero, there is next to no incentive to save.

So money has flown around the system in search of any kind of investment that can offer a decent yield.

Given that investment banks are usually the middlemen in the process, they have benefited immensely from this central bank-created search for yield.

Quantitative easing – by which the Bank of England has been creating money and using it to buy government debt in order to boost the economy without bringing down interest rates any further – has also created a nifty carousel for investment banks to buy gilts on the cheap and sell them back to the Bank at a profit.

And so the merry-go-round has sped up again ...

Telegraph  16 October 2009

An unwelcome bonus culture is creeping into head teachers' pay, diverting funds from the classroom, a teachers' leader is warning ...

Speaking at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers fringe at the TUC Congress in Liverpool, Dr Bousted said her union did not object to heads being paid a fair wage for a demanding and increasingly insecure job.

But, she warned, schools could now pay their heads more than the statutory national pay scale for school leaders (£102,734 outside London), and that there was evidence of some heads receiving bonuses as well.

She said: "The vast majority of school leaders in England and Wales still see education as a public service, but a few have been seduced into seeing it as a chance to make money.

"We strongly support schools working together to share good practice, and we strongly support school leaders working together.

"But we do not support the growth in executive heads, consultant heads, super heads, and super duper heads."

She added: "If there is an executive head plus a head in a school working under him/her, who is being paid for what?"

"Let's not forget that every pound of bonus paid above the school leadership pay scale if a pound less for books and equipment for pupils, and less for classroom based staff." ...

BBC NEWS  16 September 2009

Bonus secondary teacher suspended

'Golden hellos' for head teachers

The entire governing body of a comprehensive school was sacked yesterday by Children's Secretary Ed Balls following a row over bonus payments to its head and senior staff.

An interim board will now be set up to run Copland Community School in Brent, north-west London, after it emerged that its head, Sir Alan Davies, was paid a bonus on top of his salary of £80,00 last year and £50,000 two years ago.

Mr Balls said he was "very concerned" about allegations of serious financial mismanagement at the school. These are now being investigated by the National Audit Office while Sir Alan and the school's bursar have been suspended.

In all, it has been alleged that bonus payments worth £1.6m have been paid to senior staff at the school over a number of years.

The payments came to light when a teacher at the school, Hank Roberts, highlighted them at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers conference at Easter and claimed it was bringing the world of banking bonuses into education. He was subsequently suspended over another matter, but later reinstated.

They were defended by Dr IP Patel, chairman of the school's governing body, who said Sir Alan – one of the first "superheads" to be knighted under the Blair government – was "worth every penny".

The interim board to run the school will be appointed by Brent Council.

Mr Balls said: "Robust governance and management must be established as soon as possible at Copland."

He said there was "no alternative in putting Copland back on track" to replacing the governing body.

The Independent 24 June 2009

Ed Balls was of different opinion two months ago:

Bonus culture 'banking sickness' spreading to state schools

Hank Roberts, a senior member of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said taxpayers' money should be spent on books and employing more staff instead of "going to the top".

The comments came as it emerged the head teacher of one comprehensive in North-West London received £130,000 in bonuses over a two-year period.

Copland School, where Mr Roberts was formerly head of geography, admitted sanctioning the payments but insisted Sir Alan Davies, the head, was "worth every penny".

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, insisted there was "no reason" why heads should not receive bonuses, saying school governors should be free to make decisions on pay.

"I'm supporting great pay for head teachers who take on greater responsibility," he said. "I don't think there's any reason why there shouldn't be a pay package of benefits for head teachers.

"Linking pay to performance is something we in general sympathise with, obviously it needs to be done properly and responsibly and within sensible constraints, and genuinely linked to performance, I would have no objection to it." ...

Telegraph 06 April 2009

Bonus school 'removed' governors

London school governors sacked

School staff suspended

It's time to face up to the unpalatable truth - Labour's public-service reforms have failed. Determined to liberate public services from producer interests, the government itself has turned into the oppressor. It is now locked into a nightmare cycle in which each round of reforms makes things worse, justifying further reforms which founder in their turn because (you've heard this before) in attempting to do the wrong things righter, they actually become wronger.

Some of us have long suspected this is the case. But now we have Systems Thinking in the Public Sector (Triarchy Press), a new book by John Seddon (full disclosure: I helped to edit it) which pinpoints in detail why the reforms have gone wrong - and how to put them right.

Seddon pins the blame squarely on the coercive 'deliverology' regime dreamt up (the correct expression) by the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit (PMDU) in Tony Blair's first term. As he shows, New Labour embraced the 'public choice' theory that had so excited right-wing intellectuals under Margaret Thatcher: basically, applying economic principles to politics. The problem was that civil servants, like any 'producers', tended to put their own interests above those of the public they were supposed to serve.

Since they could not use the 'perfect democracy' of the market to tell public-service providers what to do, Blair and the delivery unit eagerly enlisted centrally set targets instead. They were reinforced by carrots and sticks wielded by inspectors and other enforcers, with the PMDU at the apex ...

Instead of making providers accountable to citizens, the new regime made them accountable to ministers and the burgeoning bureaucracy of performance management.

Do quotas and targets enforced by a regulatory bureaucracy remind you of anything? Yes: they're called central planning and don't work any better in UK local government offices and police stations than in Soviet tractor factories ...

The Guardian 04 May 2008

Ministers have missed 122 of 346 Whitehall performance targets

Hospitals do rig waiting lists to hit targets

Reforming the regime