by Elliot Keck, head of campaigns
We at the TaxPayers’ Alliance are known for many things. Our grassroots campaigns work, or our laser focus on government waste, just to name a couple. But we’re surely best known for our regular rich lists, where we compile lists of the highest-paid employees of various public sector bodies, measured by remuneration rather than salary as remuneration includes bonuses, pensions and other benefits ultimately funded by taxpayers. The most notorious of these is the town hall rich list, our annual database of all council staff receiving over £100,000 in remuneration. But there are, and have been others - city hall, BBC, quangos and GPs to name a few.
The primary purpose of these lists has always been to boost transparency. Taxpayers deserve to know who is making the big bucks. But while these lists are intended to be neutral, they all too frequently are used as tools to beat parts of the public sector over the head. Because the reality is that much of the public sector is failing us, miserably. They earn the big bucks, but they certainly don’t deserve it.
As we always try to make clear: it’s not the salaries, or the pay packets, we necessarily have a problem with. It’s the performance. Show us a well-run council, with low levels of council tax and good quality services, and we’d happily see them paid well in return. But that’s not the reality. And generally, there is not a great deal of evidence that simply paying more delivers more. It’s the culture that is the problem, not the pay scales.
Our latest rich list looks like it might provide an exception to this rule, and a wholly welcome one. The first ever multi-academy trust rich list found that 757 chief executives of these bodies received over £100,000 in 2022-23. Multi-academy trusts are responsible for multiple schools and originated in the noughties following the creation of the academy school system, under which schools, particularly failing ones, are removed from local authority control.
Some of this top brass receive seriously handsome pay packets. Take Dan Moynihan, chief executive for the Harris Federation, who received £565,000 in 2022/23, of which £487,500 was salary. Or Simon Beamish, chief executive of Leigh Academies, who received £370,000 in the same year. These are an order of magnitude higher than the average salary, and around double what even the prime minister receives.
But let’s zoom out and look at it from a performance perspective. Can these pay packets be justified? Well, the top ten chief executives by remuneration are responsible for a total of 290 schools. An impressive 264 of these are rated good or outstanding by Ofsted. In the case of the Harris Federation, it’s 49 out of 52. Bear in mind that these were mostly not well-performing schools when incorporated into these trusts. Many were failing and were turned around. We surely must give credit where credit is due.
Any public sector pay packets this large should be subject to scrutiny, and open to transparency. Which is precisely why we have published this. But for a long time we have said that we would be happy to see a well-paid public sector, provided it was a highly-performing public sector. This has rarely been the case, until now. And yet the Labour government’s relentless assault on academies risks crippling their autonomy - as my colleague Joanna Marchong has explained. They should abandon their plans for academies, embodied in the education bill. The evidence is clear: academies are delivering for their students. Therefore, they are delivering for taxpayers.