Pay ratios point to massive inequality

The Fair Pay Campus Report simply cannot be compared to the Hutton Review of Fair Pay as it does not use the same methodology when calculating pay ratio figures. The Hutton Review used the ratio between bottom pay spine point and median VC pay. The most recent pay ratio using this methodology is 16.3:1, the same as it was in 2007/08 and in line with a decade of consistency in relation to the top to bottom ratio. In fact, Will Hutton’s final report recommended using a ratio between median pay and top pay – another consistent ratio in HE at 6:1 for the past decade. Hutton explained that the bottom to top pay ratio is not an appropriate measure of fairness, would create perverse incentives for outsourcing, could impact on recruitment and retention of senior staff, and fails to reflect the distribution of pay in a workforce as the ratio as this is determined by two individual earnings - the lowest paid person and the highest paid person (often not the VC) irrespective of the size of the organisation. Finally, the Young Greens report only compares the pay of senior staff in universities to the public sector and moves the goal posts by including apprentices in its HE data but not in others. Why do they choose to disregard that universities are not part of the public sector – they are highly complex not-for-profit institutions which are autonomous from government (and increasingly more so) and operate in a highly competitive and internationalised environment – and not to use more appropriate comparisons?

The highest-to-lowest metric may not be the most robust, but as a snapshot the Young Greens' findings are revealing. The final comment from UCEA2 above is perhaps even more revealing, however. Universities are indeed "highly complex", "autonomous from government" and "operate in a highly competitive and internationalised environment" - but why might this justify massive pay ratios, on any metric? In view of precisely these factors, might we not hope for UK universities to be at the forefront of recognising the value of all workers and reflecting this in their pay scales?