As we understand it, Left Unity is now claiming that the government’s pay announcement of 4.5% (plus 0.5% for the lower paid) actually amounts to the government increasing the pay budget by £4.1 billion pounds.

This does not make sense.

If £4.1 billion represents 5% of the pay budget, then that means that the overall civil service pay bill is in the region of £82 billion.

The latest published figures show that there are 510,000 civil servants. Take away the 31,000 who work in the Scottish and Welsh civil services, you get 479,000 in the UK Civil Service.

If you divide £82 billion by that figure, then you would get an average pay of £171 thousand.

If you divide £4.1billon by that figure you get an average pay increase of over £8.5 thousand!

If that was our average pay increase and pay, then we don’t think there would be a pay dispute.

So why tout a figure that is wrong? Firstly, human error, that is someone made a mistake when doing the sums, but behind that, is the need to show that that the pay announcement is not just big, no in fact, it is a huge deal, and nothing says huge like a price tag of a few billion quid.  

The fact is that the leadership have ‘won’ us the lowest pay in the public sector. That’s why we are campaigning for a NO vote in the upcoming ballot. No amount of mathematical spin can disguise the fact that the money that the government is paying out is not enough. We can and should get more but that requires us to still remain in dispute.