Civil service pay to be reviewed next?
Salaries of civil servants may be next in line to be relooked, following the review of ministerial salaries.
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister-in-charge of the Civil Service Teo Chee Hean has hinted yesterday in his first comments on the issue that there is such a possibility. Principles resulting from the committee reviewing ministerial salaries may be used when considering salaries of top civil servants, reported Channel NewsAsia.
While salaries in the civil service are already reviewed regularly to ensure competitive remuneration, DPM Teo said he was open to applying the recommendations from the ministerial salary review for the civil service.
"If there are useful principles and guidelines which can be applied to benchmarking for public officers, civil service officers, then I suppose those will also be taken into account when we do our market comparisons," said DPM Teo, at a promotion ceremony for the Home Affairs Ministry on Monday.
Under the current system, the pay for top civil servants is linked to that of ministers. A senior permanent secretary in a ministry can earn as much as his minister, for instance.
He said it is possible to de-link such political salaries and top civil servants' salaries.
"In some countries, that's done," he explained. "There are similarities in the work they do but I'd say political service and public service — you can differentiate between the two."
On the composition of the eight-member review panel, DPM Teo added that it was useful to have members in the committee who have experience in a variety of sectors — social, labour and private sectors — and reiterated that their key objective was to decide "a reasonable level of compensation and what's reasonable to recognise the values and ethos of political service", as Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had said at the Cabinet swearing-in ceremony.
The eight-member committee unveiled on Sunday, headed by National Kidney Foundation chairman Gerard Ee, has been tasked to review the salaries of the President, Prime Minister, political appointment holders and Members of Parliament.
