Evidence to Senior Salaries Review Body

In September we provided written evidence to the Senior Salaries Review Body for its 2010 report. The period of the report covered 2008-09 and so our evidence concerned the period covered by last year’s annual report.

Janet Paraskeva, the First Civil Service Commissioner, also gave oral evidence in November.

In our written and oral evidence we gave our broad conclusions on senior recruitment for the period:

• levels of recruitment have remained high though was a slight reduction on the previous year (98 competitions in the year compared to 104 in 2007/8)
• the Civil Service is continuing to attract strong fields of candidates
• current remuneration arrangements do not appear to be a barrier to attracting high quality candidates
  
• there was an increase in the percentage of successful candidates from within the Civil Service (63% as compared to 41% in the previous year)
• there was an increase in the number of successful candidates who were female (35% as compared to 24% in the previous year)
• the gap between the average starting salaries of successful candidates from within the Civil Service and those appointed from outside had narrowed