Lots of F-words
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Lending Strategy used the Act a few years ago to reveal how the FSA had indulged in a £250,000 spending spree on its Canary Wharf art collection, an example of corporate self indulgence which its press team originally denied, claiming that the collection had been acquired in the form of gifts over time.
But that’s on par with former Lord Chancellor Derry Irvine’s Pugin wallpaper at £600 a roll, compared with what a response to a request by the Liberal Democrats under the Act has just now revealed.
This shows that FSA staff received £19.7m in bonuses in April, following a year of regulatory failure that is unprecedented in recent history, unless we compare it with the previous year when we saw the run on the Rock.
The figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show that the FSA paid £19.7m in bonuses to its 6,195 staff last year, with £4m of that going to executives earning over £100,000.
Drilling down the data reveals that the top bonus paid out at the FSA was £90,000. Interestingly 170 staff earn over £100,000 a year and the average bonus for this top 7% was £22,485 while for the minions its was around £4,100.
Liberal Democrat shadow culture, media and sport secretary, Don Foster described the payout bonanza as bizarre, adding by way of understatement: “We all accept the need to attract top-quality workers to the public sector but in some cases it appears these bonuses have been paid out despite serious failings."
He also thought that bonuses should only be paid where someone has performed beyond the call of duty, a view which those growing fat on the watchdog gravy train clearly regard as novel. Take for example the response of the Office of Fair trading which, compared with the FSA, paid out a modest £564,000 to its 700 staff – barely enough to buy a decent art collection at today’s inflated prices.
It said that it did not see these payments as bonuses in the traditional sense of the word “but are instead non-consolidated performance related payments designed to improve performance and, especially for senior staff, ensure that there are no rewards for failure and that part of their pay must be re-earned every year rather than just awarded in recognition of time served.”
Just how anyone in the FSA qualified for a bonus under those terms last year is a mystery to me. Regulatory failure has ensured that FSA executives unhappy with their remuneration can’t desert their posts for fat cat salaries in the City as was their wont in the past, so retention of their talents isn’t the issue.
Perhaps, like MPs they feel that they are under-rewarded and see bonuses in the same light as MPs justified their expenses – they are just their little way of getting what they truly deserve.
Thus MPs fiddled while the UK economy went up in smoke and the FSA got bonuses for playing their part in the inferno. But of course all the time they were ticking the right boxes and keeping to the letter of the rules but that’s something easy to do when they wrote them.
Source:
Lending Strategy
