To think that contractors in the public sector should have their pay capped?

[DivingBell]

I know this is going to be a contentious issue. I am not a troll...Shiney and her penguins, Oxo Tower, etc (although how this disproves my trolldom I don't know!).

Someone I know has always worked in the public sector. He's quite senior (mid-director level I suppose). A few years ago he decided to go self employed and now contracts in various local authorities. He has just realised (I know!!) that his current employer pays him an hourly rate, rather than his usual day rate, and that over the last 5 months he has been there he has accumulated well over £120k.

Understandably he is over the moon and is wanting to work there for as long as possible (and work as many hours as possible). But it just sits slightly uneasily with me. I am (usually) all for free enterprise, but bloody hell! I guess to me it feels a bit like getting a builder in to do an extension - you want to pay a fixed price, rather than a day rate as you know they will draw the job out for as long as possible if it's the latter. I do also understand that contractors will always command a higher figure than permanent staff, as they don't get all the usual benefits with being employed.

With all the current cuts in public sector, is this individual really worth in excess of £250k per year? Knowing him as I do, I actually seriously doubt it.

So, aibu to think there should be some kind of cap on contractors' pay, so that they are paid an appropriate amount for the job they are actually doing?

Um....I think that manufacturing extra hours required to do a simple job was fleecing. They were asked to produce an outcome and gave a ridiculously convoluted (sp?) way of doing it, which the person managing the contract before did not have the technical knowledge to pull them up on.

And if he could not work out the much simpler way to do it, you have to question his competence I'd have thought.

"They pay four times the going rate for gardening contractors, plumbers and electricians too, not because they negotiate that, but just because thats what they pay"

You might find that there are good reasons for that.

I should add that it was just coincidence that DH had the knowledge of that language - so I do wonder how often this stuff goes on. I know this is partly the fault of the public sector too - it's terrible at being an intelligent customer (apols for horrible phrase!)

Pendeen, out of interest, what are the good reasons for doing that?

I work in the civil service and a few years ago we were employing contractors with project management skills on several hundred pounds a day. Two were on £2k/1k A DAY. I thought it was fucking outrageous but the argument was they had to pay that to deliver the project as there weren't enough internal people with their skills.

This is true because I saw the invoices - they were sent to my boss.

I believe that is it rarer now to employ contractors and more In house people are bring trained up. I

There were quite a few contractors who trained in the private sector but all their jobs were moving from one Govt dept to another delivering projects. The equivalent civil service jobs would pay between about £30 - £60k a year depending on grade.

My DH is a contractor (not in the public sector), he has had various discussions with people over 'he must be raking it in', when they find out his out goings before he even takes any money to live off, they soon realise that the higher day rate is not all its cracked up to be.

Contractors don't show up as head count, and are therefore a way of bypassing head count caps.

I don't think pay should be capped because sometimes that rate may be necessary.

I do however think that public sector very often wastes money that the private sector would never do, not generalising but negotiation skills tend to be slacker when there is no board breathing down your neck about margins and profitability. Ditto charities from my experience.

What OneHandFlapping said. There are plenty of former public sector workers now selling their expertise back to the public sector as consultants after being made redundant.

It's what happens when you shrink the civil service and start cutting their pay in the race to the bottom.

softlysoftly I do however think that public sector very often wastes money that the private sector would never do, not generalising but negotiation skills tend to be slacker when there is no board breathing down your neck about margins and profitability. Ditto charities from my experience.

That's my experience / observation as well. I think that it comes down to the fact that it is not "earned" money.

FWIW, I work in the public sector,and every time we hire an external contractor we have to write an accompanying document to show that we have found the cheapest person with the necessary skills, that we have not hired a crony of ours, etc etc.

Quite often we do pay someone a high daily rate, because we want someone with extremely specialised knowledge/ experience.

Ime there is a phenomenal amount of governance involved before big spends. Unfortunately this governance gets called 'bureaucracy' and is therefore a Bad Thing. For a while, governance was all the rage, but since cuts have really, really started to bite actually getting the job done at any cost (spesh with a minister breathing down your neck) takes precedence.

And a shedload of money gets spent buying in expertise that the public sector let go...

DivingBell

Tales of "four times the going rate for gardening contractors, plumbers and electricians " may be mostly apocryphal but for example the amount a plumber could charge a houseowner for doing a small repair is not the same rate he would be able charge a housing association or council for the same job on one of their properties due to the additional burdens of legislation and accountability.

The opinin of this situation as stated above: "Well there's your problem isn't it? Incompetence" is sadly all too common, but is not really very helpful or informed.

Pendeen, I would suggest that scale of economy should be at play; so after taking additional legislation into account, the fact the work will undoubtedly be on a far larger scale should more than offset this.

"The opinin of this situation as stated above: "Well there's your problem isn't it? Incompetence" is sadly all too common, but is not really very helpful or informed."

Wasn't trying to be helpful particularly, just expressing an opinion. Feel free to disagree of course, but I remain of the view that paying 4x going rate without any attempt at negotiation is probably at least partly due to incompetence somewhere down the line.

Agreed flowery.

Scale of economy would mitigate the increased costs but not the the extent you may imagine. As I said, such references are more often than not apocryphal stories howevee - as ever - I an more than willing to be proven wrong.

I was merely stating that such comments are not helpful. Unless you have several real examples of incompetence in mind then simply assuming that the increased costs for services such as plumbers and electricians are more likely to be as a result of incompetence rather than other factors is neither helpful to the debate or informed reasoning.