The Office for National Statistics have issued a new report on patterns in pay. There is a mistake on their graph of public and private sector pay - the label on the vertical axis should be £ per week not £ per hour - but it illustrates the growing divide quite neatly:
Part of that is down to staff at the nationalised banks moving into the public sector, but the ONS confirm that the gap would have grown anyway:
When these kind of statistics are released, critics come up with all sorts of dubious reasons not to take them seriously. I rebutted Polly Toynbee's best effort on Comment is Free. The best evidence we have suggests that public sector staff are better paid, work fewer hours and enjoy better benefits. With the scale of the crisis in the public finances, that just isn't sustainable.