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Bonuses for a new aristocracy
• THE exposition of the accounts of the London borough of Camden (Peeping through the audit window – it’s a sight for sore council taxpayers, August 20), gave good service to local democracy as a practical reality.
Congratulations! Why do chief executive officers and many other senior people in local government, very well rewarded from the public purse in terms of job security, salaries, and pensions based on such final salaries at retirement, also need bonuses?
Are we to assume that these handsomely rewarded individuals will not do their best unless they also receive a further layer of cream? Surely, doing a good job is why they get a large salary in the first place?
Bonuses were originally created to compensate those in cyclically profitable businesses, often partnerships and small companies, when business was good one year and not when bad another year. As part of the traditional business culture, an employee in a bad year would get a modest salary only (no bonus) and, if unlucky, when things were very tight, perhaps the sack.
In a good year he or she would justly and reasonably get his or her share of the profits by way of bonus.
How totally unlike the circumstances of government employees.
They face no uncertainty in demand, revenue or income! They confront no genuine prospect economic redundancy! Even for those few who may lose their post, local government nationally is an economically sheltered employment exchange, enabling those with “redundancy” payments to bank the proceeds, often to move on to, removal-assisted, enhanced prospects and bonus elsewhere; even their final salary pension undisturbed by the rough winds of economics.
Extra reward by bonus has been largely illegitimately, smuggled into government employment in the last couple of decades. It has become part of the contagion of cost push inflation of the tax payers’ burden which has left senior public servants (not the ones at the bottom) as the new aristocracy of the marketplace, along with their senior cousins in Whitehall.
ROBERT SUTHERLAND SMITH
Widecombe Way, N2
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