Warming up to an important task

摘要

With a cast-iron guarantee of generating heated debate among politicians and the media at a local and national level, public sector pay levels have, in recent years, become one of the contentious issues that local government has had to deal with. It is an issue which started to gather momentum in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, where as private sector employment and pay levels suffered, public sector workers were singled out as a group which was overpaid and benefiting unfairly as the nation tried to balance the books. The result is that as we head towards the end of 2015 we can not only look back on an unprecedented period of public sector pay restraint across all levels of local government but, as a result of the measures in the July budget that will keep future pay rises capped at 1 %, we can look forward to four more years of the same.