David Cameron’s latest foray into social policy in today’s Guardian is to introduce, or consider, a pay ratio of 20:1 between the highest and lowest paid in public services has more holes in it than a lump of Swiss cheese when you look at the track record of high and low pay in Tory-run councils up and down the country.

But instead of a public mea culpa for the behaviour of Cameron’s own councils, he makes a number of mis-statements that wouldn’t pass a basic fact-check. He states brashly that the living wage “is actually a Conservative policy: Boris Johnson has already introduced it in London.” In fact, the policy was adopted in 2005 by Labour’s Ken Livingstone and the Greens at the GLA – well before Boris Johnson even considered running for mayor of London.
While Johnson, for presumably the same tactical reasons as Cameron today, did not reverse it – not the same thing – no one can point to any Conservative authority where a living wage has been initiated and introduced in the country.

I’m sorry but the track record of Tory authorities shows that if pay policy is in their DNA, it’s been to increase senior pay and depress low pay further by outsouring to giant private sector providers. Moreover, on the ground Conservatives spoke out against it at the time, and continued to resist.
In June 2007 then mayor Ken Livingstone clashed with Conservative members of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority after they voted against plans to pay cleaners the (then) living wage of £7.20. Brian Coleman, chair of the LFEPA at the time, claimed: “Paying London fire station cleaners the London living wage of £7.20… is just ridiculous.”

Where progress has been made on the living wage in the capital, it has been in Labour authorities.

The Tory track record on pay has to date not been so much on helping the lowest paid, it’s been rather the reverse. Top pay in Tory-run authorities in particular has shot through the roof.

Cameron asks Guardian readers to join him in his crusade on pay ratios. He would achieve more success if he could get some of his own councils to join him first. Westminster and Wandsworth, Tory flagships, have seen senior pay massively increase over the past five years.

Wandsworth and Westminster council now have over 30 employees each earning above £100,000, the highest in the capital. Tory-led Kent county council paid 41 staff six-figure sums last year, more than any other local authority and up from just nine in 2003-4. They include its outgoing chief executive who will receive a £200,000 payoff on top of a £220,000 annual package.

While top pay has gone up, model Tory councils have commissioned and outsourced low-paid jobs – mainly cleaning contracts, school catering staff and care workers – to a web of temp organisations paying rock-bottom wages, whose terms and conditions are hidden by commercial clauses.
Calls for transparency are brushed off by excuses around confidentiality and market sensitivity. A commission set up by Labour in Tory-Lib Dem Camden (which will have to be forced by government now to reveal the chief executive’s pay package) was told that it was “too costly” to examine wages in private firms and “against the public interest” to divulge senior salaries.
Unions would also point out that Cameron, too, is silent on pay levels for private firms doing public sector work – would a pay ratio apply just inside public bodies, and not to private organisations undertaking public functions – like mega-outsourcers like Capita or Serco?

Pay inequality is surely an issue which needs to be tackled across the country, in conjunction with bankers bonuses and city remuneration. But Cameron is either not brave enough to do this or, more likely, doesn’t believe in it in the first place – having only called for voluntary restraint on bankers’ pay.
Rather, the worrying implications of his policy statement today presses the ‘Tory model’ of local government even further – something Labour would be wise to focus on in the coming weeks.

Photo: atomicShed 2008