I’m sorry, but it’s simply fantasy to pretend that what Vince Cable proposed in September – in the document I linked to previously – is consistent with imposing a flat-rate £400 pay increase on the whole public sector.

Just read it, and you’ll see that what he was suggesting was quite different. If that’s too much trouble, simply reflect that you can’t have a civil service pay freeze while increasing civil service salaries by £400 a year!

Evidently those ideas were simply being floated then. Now they have been sunk. That in itself is to the good. But if only these processes of policy trial and error weren’t carried out quite so publicly … !

I’m sorry, but he is clearly not advocating any kind of pay freeze for the public sector in that article. He is advocating a flat-rate increase in pay. Apparently he has dropped both the freeze in total public sector pay and the indefinite salary freeze for the civil service.

It’s ridiculous to pretend that this is “a detail emerging after statement of broad principle back in September”. In September he was proposing the total wage bill should be frozen. Now he is advocating a rise of £400 per employee, which would imply a rise in the total wage bill of 1-2%.

“Most private sector workers, outside City banks, have accepted pay cuts or freezes. The public sector must expect comparable discipline”

He then makes the detailed proposal of an £8 a week rise, explaining
“this is a real increase for low-paid workers and a real cut for higher earners.”

Pretty clear I thought!

Thank you for the link to Vince Cable’s article, which I hadn’t seen.

Obviously this is a quite different policy from the one he was advocating in September. I note that there is no mention of pay being frozen in that article – either individually or in total.

As I said, in September Vince Cable was calling for total public sector pay to be fixed, and also calling for a salary freeze in the civil service, to last for several years. It’s all there in black and white in the document I linked to.

I’m pleased to hear that those proposals have now been dropped, but I remain disconcerted by the timescale of weeks on which policy positions are still being adopted and then abandoned.

The fixed rate pay rise suggestion was made by Vince in interviews this last week in connection with the pre-budget report. He said it on BBC News and wrote it in The Times. He suggested £8 a week. (Times article, para 8: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6949303.ece)

A “salary freeze” means that salaries are fixed, doesn’t it?

It isn’t a question of “analysis”, is it? Clearly the Guardian was reporting was Vince Cable had told them he was going to say in a speech.

But please be honest. Do you really think it’s possible to reconcile a proposal for a salary freeze for the entire civil service, lasting “several years”, with an aspiration to “protect, and even increase, salaries for lower-paid public sector workers”?

Thank you for extracting the relevant quotes which confirm the analysis in the Guardian report I quoted. And which in any case was explicitly presented as not party policy

When you consider that – for example – in 2006 a quarter of civil servants earned less than £15,430, this concept of an indiscriminate pay freeze makes it very hard to believe that Vince Cable has any genuine concern for the low-paid.

Cable proposed a freeze in total public sector pay, precisely as I said. To be fair there are a couple of passing references to the low-paid in the relevant section – “There may well be many individuals who can make a pressing case for more, particularly those on low pay, but in aggregate terms pay discipline is unavoidable” and further on a reference to the need to accommodate “pressures from low-paid staff some of whom are on or around minimum wage levels”. But those vague references are as far as it goes.

And to claim that Cable was calling for “a flat-rate public sector pay rise – so everyone gets the same amount of extra cash per week” is sheer fantasy. But curiously you don’t advise Stephen Robinson to check his sources!

Which goes on to say:
“But Cable will say that his proposal would not lead to an across the board pay cut for all public sector workers. The Lib Dems would hope to protect, and even increase, salaries for lower-paid public sector workers by cutting the salaries of highly paid managers and by scrapping managerial jobs. The plan would only apply to the next round of pay deals; the party would honour existing deals.”

I’d check your sources a bit more deeply. That seems like a call for an overall pay freeze in total budget terms but not applying to every worker.

“Vince Cable called for a flat-rate public sector pay rise “

The document I am thinking of called for no such thing. It proposed an overall freeze in public sector pay (it didn’t concern pensions). Certainly he said it might be possible for the pay of some groups to rise if the pay of other groups fell. But he didn’t say anything about safeguarding the low-paid at the expense of others, and he certainly did not propose a “a flat-rate public sector pay rise”.

And yet Vince Cable was calling for a freeze in total public sector pay, never mind a 1% cap!

Actually the net effect of the NI changes appears to be favourable to the low-paid.

I did see Vince interviewed this afternoon on the BBC 24 hour News channel. It lasted a few minutes and might easily have been missed with all the other interviews, but he was not left out.

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