Not so brief briefing

There were many Qs at lobby today about public sector pay after the PM said civil servants who earned over £150,000 would be named. Try reading out loud the answer given to one question below.

Hack: Just to check on the speech today. The Prime Minister talked about people working for publicly funded broadcasters and anyone earning over £150,000. Will this mean actually publishing their salaries or what will that actually mean?

PM’s spokesman Simon Lewis: First of all the chief secretary will approve pay levels in excess of £150,000 for all civil servants. And that is with immediate effect and that is obviously on appointment, so it’s not retrospective. Any job application or advertisement that goes live now, that is in process. [In] a category of jobs where ministerial approval is not required, then the expectation will be that the relevant secretary of state will expect all organisations in their sectors, where there are salaries in excess of £150,000 to publicly justify those. So this is about transparency, which we think is very important as well. Ditto any bonus over £50,000. The other important point of this is Bill Cockburn has been asked by the Prime Minister, and he is writing to him today, to look at the whole area of public sector pay in respect of those earning above £150,000. Bill will put together a group, which I think will comprise, for guidance, the senior salary reviews pay review body plus other representatives and they will report by the time of the budget. So the really important point here is the principles. The Government can obviously take control of those jobs where we have direct responsibility for signing them off, but there’s a raft of jobs, for your point, including organisations which are covered directly by ministerial appointment where we think it’s really important that we use the principles of transparency and accountability to shine light on them. There’ll probably be certain categories that will not be covered by this, clinicians probably being one category. But the driving principle here is the Prime Minister’s very strong view that it is time for a complete change in culture in the top pay in the public sector and this is a very effective way of moving this forward and clearly we want to make sure that the Cockburn Review looks as widely as possible. That’s probably a rather long winded answer to your question, but does it kind of cover what you were asking?

Hack: Well, no.

Wriggle it, and not just a little bit...

There was a distinct wriggling feeling about the answers relating to Kelly that were given in the Lobby this morning.

The discussion was all about the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) – the body that will put in place the Kelly review, or so we thought.

Hacks were pressing PM’s mouthpiece Simon Lewis on three issues:

1) Who will get to appoint IPSA?

2) What powers will it have to reject parts of Kelly?

3) When will it report?

The answer to the first question was that it will be the Members Estimate Committee (Harman, Bercow and co), in some sort of guise.

Lewis repeated that the important thing was that appointments were made in a “fair and open” way, correcting my assumption that the most important thing was that it was independent (a fair assumption, given the I in IPSA).

While highly unsatisfactory in its substance, the answer was actually the most satisfactory in terms of clarity.

Lewis responded to the second question on ‘powers to reject’ saying that it was “for IPSA” to take Kelly’s report and implement it as it saw fit within its remit.

It felt like an answer that was preparing the ground for at least some of Kelly to be ditched.

The answer to question three was a straight forward “I don’t know”, which applied even when Lewis was pressed to say whether IPSA would report before the election.

If, as some are starting to suspect, Kelly’s review is kicked into the long grass or watered down beyond recognition, I’ve no doubt the Government will pay the price at the ballot box.

Scotland wins independence…

Apparently Number 10 now recognises that Scotland has a Government, rather than just an executive. At least for a short while this morning it did.

Simon Lewis was doing his first tentative Lobby briefing as the PM’s official spokesman – he has just taken over from Michael Ellam who left recently.

The session was dominated by the controversy over the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Al-Megrahi.

Lewis referred to the Scottish “Government” (it was all their decision to release a bad man) until halfway through when one hack pointed out that previously it had been taboo to refer to anything but the Scottish “executive”.

A Government, of course, has much more power than an executive.

Looking nervous Lewis said he thought he’d been told to use the word “Government” instead of “executive” and then asked his assistant, who laughed sheepishly and said she didn’t know which was the right term either.

To be fair to Lewis it was his first outing – no doubt it’ll be a sharp learning curve.