Part of my solution is the rule of ten, that no-one should earn more than ten times the lowest paid person in their organisation. Since in many organisations there will be people on the minimum wage of £7.20 an hour or £14,976 a year, this comes in at around £150,000. Which ties in well with the pay of £142,500 of our Prime Minister. He sets a good example in this matter, if not in others.
While the head of our own, humble technical college here at Epsom, aka NESCOT, pays herself £363,000 a year. An amount which was recently doubled, at a time when her staff were labouring under a long running pay freeze. And then one wonders about the average earnings of the graduates of NESCOT. How many of them flip burgers for McDonald's or stack shelves for Sainsbury's at said minimum wage? Burgeristas and shelfistas respectively, to give them their proper job titles.
Part of this is probably down to the fact that she moonlights as the head of a technical college for women in Jeddah. No doubt a worthy endeavour, if not in a not very worthy place. Moonlighting which proper employers did not used to allow; they wanted 100% of their employees' attention, not what was left over after swanning around abroad. Another part is perhaps her commission on the Saudi dosh which she has drawn into the otherwise depleted NESCOT coffers.
Sadly, a greed which seems to have infected many of our institutions of health and education, institutions which were once run on more modest lines by more modest people.
PS 1: perhaps she really got her OBE for services to our otherwise dire balance of payments.
PS 2: perhaps also we need to commission a consultancy study from PWC to determine the best way to implement the rule of ten, taking into account part-timers, zero-hours contracts, service contracts, contracting out, outsourcing and all the other funny little ways in which salaries are packaged up and parcelled out.
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