Last updated on September 20th, 2023 at 12:15 pm
Reading Time: 2 minutesExecutive Summary
They’re Not.
It’s fair to say that I was vexed yesterday morning. Why was I vexed? This
Black police paid less as ethnic pay gap widens, Met figures show
Pardon me, but what a load of bollocks.
A Met study of average wages found that black and Asian police officers working in London were paid £1.80 an hour less than their white colleagues last year, compared with £1.52 in 2017. All 37 senior officers on salaries of £100,000-plus were white, it found, while ethnic minority officers received fewer and smaller bonuses than their colleagues.
The report, which looked at the pay of 37,257 Met employees, of whom 6,349 are Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME), found the gap was even worse when all staff – not just police officers – were taken into account. On average, it said, BAME staff receive £2.05 less per hour than the average white member of staff, a mean pay gap of 9.67%.
Within the Police Service nationally (that includes the Met Robert) Police Officers and Police Staff are ALL paid the same according to Rank or Grade and length of service. There may be minor variations for certain skills payments or London Allowance etc but there is ABSOLUTELY NO variation for ethnicity or gender.
The payroll computer is absolutely blind to race and gender. Pay-scales are freely available on t’interweb and nowhere do they state “subject to race or gender”.
This article and its insidious, divisive headline serve no purpose whatsoever apart from driving a wedge between Police and Community, including potential BAME applicants who might be deterred from applying by this headline.
Both the Police Federation and the Commissioner should be taking the Grauniad/Observer to task and seeking a retraction and apology.
Sadly some of the Twitterati have already been taken in and claim to believe this story, and have already invoked the obligatory outrage, as illustrated in this thread;
https://twitter.com/redsarah99/status/1086784602721697794?s=21
A mild reply to the tweetist above (well, I thought it was mild) got me Blocked
https://twitter.com/alanw47/status/1086986712193163265?s=21
But wait, it’s not all bad news today.
FREE NEW YEAR BONUS
Just as I was beginning to calm down yesterday, I stumbled across this that raised my vexation level back to ‘CRITICAL‘ again,
Under the Tories’ Austerity Programme, while you were having your wages frozen, pension contributions raised, pension benefits slashed, our beloved MPs have benefited from Pay Rises totalling 17.7% since 2010. Don’t feel sad for them though, if they are a Minister, or member of a Committee they will get even more, so it’s not all bad.
