Parking in King Street which is in the city centre of Manchester £6.80 for two hours
Parking in THE CITY of London is £2.50 per hour

Which reminds me: [url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2012/mar/09/council-tax-in-it-together-anomalies?newsfeed=true£7.4m house in Westminster subject to same council tax as £155k house in Nottingham (£1300 pa)[/url.

What? Where has this come from? You've completely lost me there.



It is expensive to live here but I wasn't complaining about it.

Make sure you don't mention the Wandsworth Council Tax rates to our friend The Chair Maker too

You said that you deserve the high parking fees because you voted in the Tories. I just told you what, imo you really deserve and that is to be embarrassed about the way they are going about things and treating vunerable members of society.

I actually didn't think that was difficult to understand

Umm it was meant to be a tongue in cheek post. But for the sake of argument, if you want to park where I work in London, it costs £4.40 an hour.

I was being sarcastic...

Details are murky. The wording is that public sector staff should have "pay brought into line with private sector salaries in their regions" (e.g. [url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17411117here[/url). The proposed mechanism appears to be that public sector workers in some regions will not receive a pay rise until the private sector salaries in those regions reach some (as yet unstated) target. Presumably (though again it's not stated), any pay rises thereafter will somehow be linked to regional prosperity.

Good idea





My Band B council tax would come down by £700 in Wandsworth. I expect the area I live in would be considered 'poor'...

No matter how its dressed up, there will still be a divide in pay within the same organisation. Like I state previously hubby has gone for two jobs in the private sector, exactly the same job he is doing now only in a different environment but the pay difference was £10,000 so how exactly will it be decided what the equvillent is in private sector when there is a huge difference.

That's right. There is already with London weighting, mind. Oftentimes there's a salary scale with multiple spine points, where people in the same office - doing the same job - are paid differently for no reason other than the length of time they've been employed (true where I work, for example). The question is not whether there is a division of this sort, but whether it's fair, justified, or reasonable.



That's only one of the many problems with the proposal, as reported - it's not clear how any such equivalence, or 'private sector pay rates', is meant to be established.

The other side of the coin is if the idea is public pay matches private can we expect the public sector workers in London to brought up to the average pay levels of the private sector there?

I am sure its going to work both ways isn't it? Large salary increases all round?

Surely our government should want to make living in the North more attractive. If they widen the gap between the pay then eventually you will finish up with worse teachers, nurses etc.. in the north and it will be a spiral downwards for the northern areas. Going from the TES private sector teachers get paid more than public sector teachers in Yorkshire, so would this mean an increase in pay for public sector teachers in Yorkshire? Somehow I doubt it, this is just a crude way of making the South richer and the north work for minimum wage or a bit above to keep the south rich.

The problem with such a means of spurious "rate matching" is that it works on the principle that for every job in the country there is a "grade" and for that "grade" there is a "rate",

Now that works perfectly well in the civil service, as anyone who has worked in the civil service knows almost every job has a grade and every grade has a salary band and its known and publicised so that you know exactly where you stand on the ladder of hierachy.

Unfortunately the civil servants who make policies tend to think that the rest of the world all works the same way too - but is doesn't, not even close.

Take a lowly accounts clerk processing invoices all day long - a civil service accounts clerk will have a clearly defined grade and a band of remuneration limits, low to high.

The exact equivalent accounts clerk working for a private company will be paid whatever the hell their employer wants to pay them, starting from the national minimum wage and quite often ending at the national minimum wage too, there will probably be minimal or zero pension provision in the job, we won't go into the sick pay provisions...

Point is that there is nothing to compare it to, you are not comparing eggs with eggs, there are no scales of pay in the private sector.

It's more expensive down south in the hope that it'll keep our northern bretheren from moving there.

Unfortunately, it hasn't worked. They still come down and tell us how much better it is where they come from, whilst still taking the coin.

Wouldn't have happened under Danelaw eh?










Yes, I'm being ironic before you lot get all viking on me.

If regional pay rates are good for teachers, nurses etc.. why not MP, Doctors, tesco, M & S, John Lewis and many more?

Basically, the kind of people who stopped Fabrice Muamba dying on the pitch today either only exist in the south or else only deserve the same pay if they are in the south.

Low blow

Can my kids have a reduction in their university fees because i am a northener and cannot pay £9k a year

Is he saying that national pay rates are keeping public sector pay down? Not only that but also that he thinks this is a good thing?

If they come to London they can recieve additional support, yes.

I'll tell you what would be an unforseen by-product of regional wage rates, the long held desire that all governments have had to de-London-ise the civil service, to move various departments out of London and the south east to the provinces.

A dozen or twenty years ago the Dept of Health & Social Security (as was) built The Kremlin at the bottom of The Headrow in central Leeds - an impressive Stalin-esque new location for a huge wedge of London based civil servants who were given incentives to move "oop north", swap their one bed flats in Tower Hamlets for four bed detached properties in Alwoodley and stroll the Yorkshire Dales every weekend rather than cower behind barricaded doors or throw petrol bombs off your communal balcony.

It was a godsend for me at the time because we had a property for sale and the estate agents were racking up the house prices on a daily basis "the London DHSS house buyers will love your house" they gushed, and they did, we doubled the price of our house in the five years that we lived in it and then sold it to a Yorkshire immigrant for ten grand more then we had initially asked for it.

Can you imagine what would happen now ?

Would you relocate to another part of the country for less money on the flimsiest of excuses that your shopping won't cost as much every week (it still will) ?

I don't know - it sounds like it though, even if he didn't mean it



A related point is that the current mess with public sector pensions is an indicator of what could happen. There's a huge variation in schemes across the public sector (I forget the number), which are having to be negotiated individually with the government, hence some of the delay in resolving last year's dispute. It will be interesting to see the administrative cost of handling regionalised or zonal pay structures.

Feel free to disagree on a factual basis.

The last few decades have seen a steady drip, drip of a nasty attitude that public service workers are lazy, poor, overpaid, doing non-jobs, wouldn't survive in the 'real world' of the private sector - which itself is the only legitimate form of work.

Decent people don't need services and the people working in them should, for the reasons stated earlier and because only scummy chavs need services and are benefit dependent, be paid poorly etc etc. Plus, of course, that they're to blame for the financial crisis.

It is entirely and absolutely legitimate to use current affairs to point out the errant nonsense of this attack. And also since there is another attack taking place, with much of the same sort of lies, on the NHS itself - indeed, a massive lie told by Cameron in his election campaign.

As someone noted elsewhere, when a 23 year old collapses, I don't want the paramedics treating them to be employed on the basis of what's cheapest.

No, actually it won't.

Can't comment on the major Supermarkets as don't deal with them, but in dealing with all the major national coverage symbol groups and C&C wholesalers I can say that the vast majority of them have regionalised price books which used to be based upon the TV regions, now it's a bit more sophisticated with the data retrieval and analysis available.