Recommendation 16

Other longstanding civil service pay issues include the existence of pay disparities between departments for staff at the same grade level. For example, differences between the higher executive officer (HEO) pay band at the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) and HMRC mean that the highest HEO salary in Defra’s pay structure is £1,601 less than the lowest HEO salary HMRC offers.32 Additionally, as at March 2022, senior executive officer (SEO) median salaries varied by up to £6,100 across departments.33 Pay disparities can lead to unhealthy and unproductive competition among departments for staff, for example where there are several departmental employers in a local area or where departments are trying to attract staff with scarce specialist skills.34 The Cabinet Office told us pay disparities of this kind might reflect differences in jobs in different departments, even though those jobs had been graded at the same level.35 However, it did acknowledge that departmental pay differentials in the same location could “add tensions” and that there might be a case for greater pay coherence across departments where jobs at the same grade were more similar.36