Responding to recent newspaper reports that the Cabinet Office is proposing pay rises of up to 88 per cent, Prospect deputy general secretary Jenny Thurston said:

"The unions have been highlighting the significant differential between our members in the senior civil service and their counterparts in the private sector for many years and are heartened that this message now seems to have gained some resonance with civil service employers.

"Our members are long overdue a decent pay uplift and that will be the basis of our submission to the senior salaries pay review. Prospect’s own findings mirror those in the report commissioned from Towers Perrin, that even at the entry level for the senior civil service, earnings are approximately half of those paid to comparable jobs in the private sector."

But on behalf of 500 senior civil servant members in Prospect, Thurston said that the union would oppose any measures that linked an increase in pay with additional performance measures and management practices to those already in place.

"The senior civil service forms the backbone of the policy making machinery. It provides successive governments with stability while ministers come and go and we will fight to defend our members against any deal that introduced measures that could threaten their ability to fulfil their roles effectively."

Prospect will call for any uplift to senior pay to be rolled out across lower grades in recognition of the increased demands to maintain standards of service delivery in the face of proposals to cut one in five civil service posts.