Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what recent assessment he has made of trends in the level of public sector pay in the last five years.

The Government’s pay policy has always been designed to strike the right balance between being fair to public servants and being fair to all those, including public sector workers themselves, whose taxes pay for them.

That approach has not changed, and the Government continually assesses that careful balance. The current assessment is that salaries in the public sector are, on average, comparable to those in the private sector with the additional benefit of higher pension entitlements in many cases.

The ONS publishes the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), which includes median gross annual earnings in the public sector. A time series of this data from 1997 to 2017 can be accessed via the following link:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/datasets/ashe1997to2015selectedestimates