Foreign aid fat cats: Those dishing out Britain's aid earn TWICE as much as average worker
OVERPAID mandarins in charge of Britain’s foreign aid budget receive salaries almost double those of average workers, it has been revealed.
Justine Greening is the minister in charge of big-spending DfID
Bureaucrats at the ring-fenced Department for International Development (DfID) – which boasts an austerity-busting budget of £12 billion a year – trouser an average of £52,700 a year.
The department, led by cabinet minister Justine Greening, is one of just two Whitehall departments to have increased its spending.
The other is the Department for Energy and Climate Change, previously headed by former Labour leader Ed Miliband and disgraced ex-Liberal Democrat MP Chris Huhne.
The pay of five bureaucrats at DfID eclipsed the Prime Minister’s bumper salary of £150,000, while over a fifth of civil servants in the department took home more than £60,000 a year.
Ed MIliband was the inaugural Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change
An average full-time worker in the UK can hope to make £27,600 a year – while the median pay across the civil service as a whole is just £24,980.
Civil servants at other ministries, including the Treasury, Home Office and Department for Health, have been laid off in their tens of thousands and are enduring pay freezes.
The sky-high salaries are not included in the Department’s huge aid budget – which amounts to 0.7 per cent of the national income.
Critics have accused the costly department – set up by Tony Blair in 1997 – of wasting taxpayers’ money “to make some middle class people feel better about themselves”.
Other Whitehall departments have borne the brunt of harsh austerity measures
You would think if they were so committed to the cause they would want more money from their budget spent on helping the world’s poorest and less on privileged bureaucrats
Tory MP Philip Davies, a former ASDA worker, said: “It is certainly no surprise that the most wasteful Government department, where money is no object, is happy to let salaries rip for their own staff.
“You would think if they were so committed to the cause they would want more money from their budget spent on helping the world’s poorest and less on privileged bureaucrats.
“Instead it is the most hard pressed in the UK who have to pay for all this largesse.”
And influential backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg added: “The least productive, most fashionable and Left-wing dominated ministries are, unsurprisingly, the greatest burden on taxpayers.”
Defending the exorbitant wage bill, a DfID spokesman said: “All our staff are paid in line with standard Civil Service rules.”