| Two face court on terror charges Two men appear in court in Dublin charged in connection with a series of raids by police investigating dissident republican activity. bbc.co.uk |
Government publishes list naming senior civil servants and their salaries • Cabinet Office says it wants to shed light on civil service to make government more transparent, but unions say they hoped list will not infringe on privacy or be used to portray sector as bloated• Datablog: how do you use the new government information?The government today published an initial draft of a list naming for the first time every senior civil servant, their responsibilities and their salaries in a move designed to expose Whitehall to new levels of public scrutiny.The Cabinet Office said it wanted to shed light on the civil service to make government more transparent, but unions said they hoped it would not infringe on civil servants' privacy or be used to portray the sector as "bloated".The data shows that the Department for Education currently employs twice as many people in its corporate directorate, handling finance, human resources and PR, than it does in its school standards section.The list details 4,254 senior civil servants of director grade and above, including the 36 permanent secretaries responsible for running government departments. Each department has published their staffing details in organograms – charts showing each director, their salaries, responsibilities and who they are answerable to. The disclosure will prove valuable for members of the public but will also be seized on by lobbyists and journalists.The median salary in the senior civil service is £78,088 compared with £22,850 across the entire civil service. For permanent secretaries the median salary is £163,403. Senior civil servants also take on average £8,441 in bonus payments.Some departments put out additional figures for the number and salary brackets of junior staff, made anonymous. The Department for Education published a table of the number of employees by each division within the department.It reveals the DfE employs more people in its corporate division – covering finance, estates and human resources – than in its schools section. Of 2,442 junior staff, 932 are in the finance and corporate directorate, compared with 503 in the children and families section and 489 in the education standards offices.It also reveals that it now employs more people in its academies and free school units, employed to drive forward the coalition's expansion from the current 200 independent state schools, than for the entire early years division, which is responsible for pre-school education for every child in England.Civil service unions said they hoped the format the government had arrived at would not infringe on their members' privacy and aired suspicions that the list was part of a coalition strategy to portray the civil service as "bloated" as it moves to make redundancies after Wednesday's spending review.The list identifies the salaries of all civil servants at director level and above.Francis Maude, the minister for the Cabinet Office, said: "Today we have published detailed organisational charts showing how many people work in every branch and level of central government. For the first time anyone who wants to can see at a glance how many people work in any team in any department, giving an unrivalled insight into the way government works."Although I know these charts are not yet perfect, I believe that it is better that we publish the data we have as soon as we can in order to be as open as possible. Over the coming weeks even more data will be added and further details released so that the public can really hold us to account for how the government spends their money."Jonathan Baum, the general secretary of the FDA union, which represents senior civil servants, said: "We felt there was a right to protect people's privacy around salaries and it was not clear at all what the rationale was for publication. There is clearly a lot of pressure from No 10 and a manifesto and coalition agreement commitment to do this."The format today seeks to make a balance between protecting people's privacy and having good accountability. It's a compromise. It will show the overall staffing costs of running different parts of government departments. There is some suspicion this is just about setting up headlines about the bloated civil service, that would not be fair."Civil servicePolly Curtisguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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