Civil servants’ bonuses

I was horrified to learn recently about the Home Office’s disputed bonus payments to its senior Civil Servants. My horror wasn’t only created by the various scandals which have demonstrated that the department and therefore inevitably its officials are ‘unfit for purpose’. That was the trenchant phrase used by the new Minister, John Reid, as the scandals broke about his head. No, what worries me more fundamentally is the idea that public servants should receive payments above and beyond their salaries in the same way as executives are rewarded in business at large.

That, of course, is the point. These public officials, secure in their cosy positions, may well have envied their private counterparts who received whopping extras, paid to them allegedly to reflect their riskier environment. The bonus, it’s argued, is a merited mark of true achievement and/or compensation for the greater risk of losing the job.

That last argument is, without doubt, ridiculous. You are compensating a man or woman for the possibility that they will screw up, or be screwed by the organisation, in the future. In all common sense, the bonus should only be paid as an exceptional reward for a truly exceptional performance. When used as it is today, the bonus is merely a division of the loot among those who are well-positioned to get their hands in the barrel.

The Civil Service, however, generates no loot. All its income is provided by the taxpayer. The latter, in principle, pays the public servants a satisfactory sum which fully rewards a performance which should be exceptionally good at all times. If their performance drops below that level, they should be demoted or dismissed. But if bad performance is what you want, just adopt the present system in which mandarins
are neither demoted or dismissed, but appear to get extra reward for the failures over which they have presided.

How many civil servants have been rewarded with bonuses while presiding over the barely credible number of costly computeristion catastrophes that have cost so much public money? I’m not saying that the bonus system in private business works more efficiently. It doesn’t. It’s part of the broader scandal of excessive and excessively rising executive reward. But the Civil Service shouldn’t be emulating the indefensible. It should be concentrating on really earning its basic pay, and that is surely an unarguable, fit-for-purpose proposition.