Senior IT officials among top paid civil servants
Lend us a fiver then
Seven senior IT officials are on the newly published list of top paid civil servants.
In the list published by the government to provide greater transparency of high earners' salaries, Joe Harley, IT director general and chief information officer (CIO) at the Department for Work and Pensions, comes out top of the information specialists.
His salary of £245,000-£249,999 places him third on the overall list, behind John Fingleton, chief executive of the Office of Fair Trading on £275,000-279,999, and David Nicholson, chief executive of the NHS, on £255,000-259,999.
Among the other IT officials, John Suffolk comes second to Harley. He is paid £205,000-£209,999 in his role as chair of the Chief Information Officers' Council and the government's CIO, leading the formulation of ICT policy across Whitehall.
On the same salary is Christine Connelly, CIO at the Department of Health and responsible for the NHS National Programme for IT. Martin Bellamy ICT director at the Department of Health gets £160,000-£164,999.
Others on the list are: Phil Pavitt, who as CIO for HM Revenue and Customs earns £180,000-£184,999; Andy Nelson, CIO at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), with £190,000-£194,999; and Nick Ramsay, the MoJ's director ICT portfolio and programmes, with £160,000-£164,999.
The government has published the salaries of the highest paid civil servants in what it has described as a "radical shake-up of government transparency". It has released the name, job title, grade and salary level of senior civil servants across Whitehall with salaries of more than £150,000, making some of this information public for the first time.
The publication has been overseen by Francis Maude, minister for the Cabinet Office.
"Today is just the start of what we plan to do," said Maude. "We are determined to set an example for the wider public sector, and to create a 'right to data' as a core part of government business."
The Public Sector Transparency Board, made up of external experts and data users, and public sector data specialists will support public sector bodies in implementing transparency and open data.
This article was originally published at Kable.
Kable's GC weekly is a free email newsletter covering the latest news and analysis of public sector technology. To register click here.
COMMENTS
Been to the Daily Mail school of retard comments?
The Civil Service is big, encompassing everything from policy wonks to engineers to scientists. There are plenty of IT projects brought in on time and budget and plenty that aren't. To tar everyone with the same brush is lazy.
What?
So step 1 seems to be talking about the mix of people:
- Those whose jobs have been reorganized out of existence but get a few years grace at their old salary doing a new job rather than expensively making them redundant, which is pretty common in most large organizations and is basically a sign of basic decency and good sense any employer
- Those like IT staff who would be placed at low low salaries according to public sector pay norms, but actually have to be paid rather nearer the market rate in order to get anybody to do the job. Try getting rid of them and watch everything break.
Not sure whether step 2 is a rant about a union that ceased to exist 17 years ago or a racist sideswipe at some Nigerians to be honest
@I'd be Interested to see
Depends on what you are comparing their salaries with, commercial banks etc. about the same, I think. The SI's they face off against, a good deal more.
But consider the size of the organisations, the NHS dwarfs any UK private sector organisation.

IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
What you need to know about cloud backup
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Top 10 SIEM implementer’s checklist