Recommendation 17

Departments vary quite substantially in their approaches to performance-related pay, including how much they spend on it. For example, departmental per-head spending on performance-related pay in 2021–22 ranged from £13 to £1,366 per employee, for staff 27 C&AG’s Report, para 3.2 28 C&AG’s Report, para 1.10, Figure 6 29 Q56 30 Q54 31 Q56 32 C&AG’s Report, para 3.4 33 C&AG’s Report, para 3.5 34 C&AG’s Report, paras 16–18 35 Qq60–62 36 Qq63–64 Civil service workforce: Recruitment, pay and performance management 13 below SCS level.37 The Cabinet Office expressed surprise about the level of variation in departments’ performance-related pay arrangements, remarking that the extent of this variation was higher than it would have expected. It added that the new pay and reward strategy promised in the Civil Service People Plan would need to look harder at the role performance-related pay should play in the civil service, with the intention of rewarding employees for higher output and higher quality of work.38 We also asked the Cabinet Office how it guards against the risk of indirect discrimination where the quantity and quality of an individual’s work may be measured more easily in some roles than in others. It told us that objective data will become increasingly available in this area, and that there are “some checks and balances” in how people moderate performance across individuals.39 Performance management