back to article Tory questions identify government's best paid CIOs

Two chief information officers are in the civil service's highest standard pay band: health's Christine Connelly and work and pensions' Joe Harley. Christine Connelly is employed on senior civil service pay band three, with a salary of between £99,960 and £205,000 for her permanent contract as the Department of Health's …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Government bloody workers

    should just be cut off, not paid one brass razoo, they are like a bunch of needy and greedy children expecting handouts from us hard working lot, whilst they doodle on forms and concoct further misery to inflict on others.

    Come the revolution, I suspect we won't even be using walls.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Pint

      Not all of us

      I work bloody hard for less than 20k. I'm on call 24/7 with no perks except my pension. Clearly some are paid too much, but a) we're not all like that and b) believe it or not, the Govt generally want their pound of meat for what they pay you.

      Oh and C) (not that you made this mistake) for the terminally stupid out there, Government workers do still pay taxes. Unbelievably I've met people complaining that we don't know what it's like to pay tax!

      As far as concocting further misery goes, I don't get to do any of that, I get to feel that flack when the Daily Fail stirs up its readership!

      Pint, because even though it's a friday, that's the closest I'll get to it for some time

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Unhappy

        Indeed

        I get throughly cheesed off with how much our Exec group get paid and how much crap the frontline staff have to put up with for next to nothing in terms of wages. I wouldn't mind if weren't for the amount of hardwork you see a lot of staff put in compared to the 'swanning' around the town hall the Exec group do.

        To all the frontline staff of local authorities across the country, I'd like to say well done for all the hard work you've done with the current weather issues.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        ONS figures:

        Average Salary: Public Sector ~22K, Private Sector ~20K

        Average Weekly Working Hours: Public Sector 35, Private Sector 37.5

        Anuual Leave: Public Sector Average 4 days more

        Productivity change last decade: Private sector +28%, Public Sector -3%

        So let's dump the myths once and for all. There are many hard working people in both sectors but only one group is being shafted.

        1. Winkypop Silver badge
          FAIL

          Well then...

          ...you know what to do about it.

          If you're good enough.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Age?

    How old are they?

    There may be a trend of bumping up salaries in final year in order to maximise one's pension (if you know what I mean - final year salary and all that).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Megaphone

      Final salary pensions, what are they ?

      Oh yes that's were they pay a measly 3.5% (N. Ireland Civil Service) pension contributions and end up with a fat pension that I pay for.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    Just to pee people off....

    ...looking after the NHS, 100K doesn't seem that much.

    Bet there are many web designers, programmers and consultants on more than that per year...

    as for

    A/C "Government bloody workers"

    Fine, enjoy emptying your bins, treating your own wounds, building your own roads, putting out your own fires, policing your own neighbourhood, running your own school..

    Muppet....

  4. This post has been deleted by its author

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    DWP CIO

    If you check the published DWP accounts you'll find an entry for Mr Harley and his salary on page 34

    http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/resource-acs-2008-09.pdf

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    As always a pay band isn't the same as a salary....

    strictly speaking the band 1 person in HM Treasure could be paid more (£116k top end) than those in band 3 (£99k bottom end).

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    And the problem is...

    Ok, I'm going to put the cat amongst the pigeons here, but what the heck is the problem?

    Assuming they are performing, you'd expect to have someone fairly kickass at the head of department that spends in excess of a billion pounds. In fact you would expect to get the someone who is incredibly good. In those situations you will be competing with the top CIO of financial institutions.

    You need that kind of salary to attract the best. There will be few people in the country with the required experience to manage that size department.

    Sure I'm opening myself to a whole bunch of cynical comments on how these departments are all rubbish and therefor the head must be rubbish as well. I really don't know whether the departments are any good , or whether under that leadership we've seen improvement. My point is if you want someone that is good in that role expect to pay some serious money. If they are good their pay will be justified 1000x.

    Of course, we could put an IT support pleb in charge instead, whack his wage up £21k which will make him happy and see what happens with the 1.5Bn budget..... yeah...right

    1. BenDwire Silver badge
      Pint

      Re : And the problem is...

      "Of course, we could put an IT support pleb in charge instead, whack his wage up £21k which will make him happy and see what happens with the 1.5Bn budget..... yeah...right"

      Hmmm.. Put the PFY in charge of the NHS? Sounds like a interesting plotline for BOFH - over to you, Simon!

  8. Gordon 10
    Thumb Up

    Within the Range of Private Sector CIO's

    Seems reasonable to me. I doubt there are many Private sector CIO's paid under the 100k mark, as others noted, its possible for ordinary developer types to hit the wrong side of 50k.

    The NHS IT initiative comment is pertinent to though - however one suspects its due to kack requirements - this is where most IT projects fall down.

  9. Jonathan Richards 1 Silver badge
    WTF?

    By the numbers

    Sad though it may be, I looked up the sizes of those departments in their Departmental Annual Reports, and compared CIO Budget against headcount.

    Department | Employees (FTE 2008/9) | CIO £ per capita

    Home Office | 26,016 | £196

    Defence | 270,820 | £319

    Justice | 76,343 |£3,170

    Comm & LG | 5,376 | £5,655

    Int'l Dev | 2,400 | £10,417

    Work& Pensions | 102,374 | £11,624

    CS&F | 2,811.5 | £15,650

    FCO | 4,521 | £35,390

    Health | 3,468 | £432,526

    There's no good way to post a table here, but the bottom line is that Health spends *over two THOUSAND TIMES* as much on CIO function per person than the Home Office does. What am I missing?!!1!

    1. Chris Stafford

      You're missing the NHS

      Almost none of the staff managed and ultimately kitted out with IT by the department are civil servants directly employed by the department. Mostly they work for the NHS, which is one of the largest employers in the world.

    2. Mike Flex

      By the numbers

      Jonathan Richards 1 wrote:

      "Health spends *over two THOUSAND TIMES* as much on CIO function per person than the Home Office does. What am I missing?!!1!"

      Are you using number of civil servants in the Dept of Health for headcount but using expenditure across all of the NHS?

  10. blackworx
    Happy

    Treasury

    "HM Treasury was the only department to report that its CIO, Karen Delafield, is on pay band one"

    Funny how the beancounters' office is the only place where it's actually quite difficult to screw a ricockulously obscene salary out of your own budget.

  11. RW
    Flame

    @ AC 17:01 GMT

    "You need that kind of salary to attract the best."

    I call bullshit. What's needed is more of a K-Mart blue light special attitude toward hiring executives: maybe not quite as good, but a whole lot cheaper. Considering that Britain is essentially bankrupt, even if the IMF hasn't yet come knocking on the door to haul the chancellor away, where does the idea come from that the UK can even afford the best? Can't afford it, seems to me.

    Frankly, most management positions could be filled quite well by wandering out to the nearest bus stop and tapping some random person on the shoulder. The management caste has managed (excuse the pun!) to put forth the meme that they're special. They're not; at best they act like a bunch of Dilbertesque pointy-haired bosses, at worst they actively terrorize their underlings, the people who actually do useful work.

    When I was still working, I was moaning to my immediate supervisor about the CEO's penchant for fucking the dog and other assorted wasteful sillinesses. Reply? "Oh, but he's the CEO, he can do anything he wants!" My response? "He's paid a great deal of money and should therefore be held to a much higher standard of behavior."

    I wish I had a photograph of the puzzled non-comprende look on the supervisor's face.

    In moments when my imagination runs wild, I dream of a society in which there are two rules of management compensation. One, that no one in an organization can make than a fixed-by-law multiple of what the most poorly paid minion makes. A factor of 4.0 or maybe 5.0 would be about right. Two, that all managers must have at least 10% of the drones under them making more, on the grounds that anybody can "manage", but only a few can do truly specialized work demanding real talent, experience, and education.

    Apologies to our Divine Moderatrix for going off on a rant, but over compensated, under worked, utterly unqualified managers are a particular peeve of mine.

  12. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    WTF?

    @Jonathan Richards 1

    Very intersting numbers.

    My guess was salary proportional to IT budget (roughly).

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    More pissing people off

    Those salary ranges don't look unreasonable. I've known "consultants" making bottom end of that range "teaching" Windows s**t. True they don't get the big fat mega pension that the civil service gets. Particularly since Gordon put is greasy fat mitts into everyone else's pension pot (His first action as chancellor was to tax the income of the whole private pension industry, got to fund Ex Ministers pensions some how).

    If you compare those incomes again public sector salaries for CIOs they wouldn't look out of order. If you want to be really pissed off by other peoples salaries go compare your IT works salary against the idiots who make up the average company sales force.

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