The
Government must adopt a regional pay regime to combat discrepancies between
public and private sector income levels, said a leading labour economist.
Professor
Andrew Oswald, head of economics at Warwick University, says the public sector
remuneration system must start paying differently in different areas if it
wanted to attract and retain workers.
“The
failure of the public sector to reflect these differences in its national wage
scales is producing severe problems in expensive areas of the country,” he
said.
Private
sector Londoners, for example, earn 50 per cent more than equivalent workers in
other parts of the country. The gap means their public sector colleagues end up
as the proverbial poor cousins in a city experiencing rising costs.
Oswald
said the current London income weightings, where they exist, were failing to
keep pace with rising costs. Booming house prices in the South East are also
exacerbating the income gap.
By
Paul Yandall
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