Revealed: top-earning civil servants

Coalition ‘pulls back curtains on corridors of power’ and releases names of mandarins earning more than £150,000

The government last night released the names of 170 senior civil servants who earn in excess of £150,000 – more than the prime minister’s wage – in the first step towards publishing swaths of data about public spending.

The controversial move reveals the identities of dozens of senior Whitehall mandarins who earn up to 10 times the national average wage and cost the public purse a total of £29,254,835.

The highest earner on the list is John Fingleton, the chief executive of the Office of Fair Trading, who earns between £275,000 and £279,999 a year – nearly double the prime minister’s £142,500 salary.

David Nicholson, the chief executive of the NHS, earns between £255,000 and £259,999 – including £45,000-£50,000 for a rented flat and expenses for living in London. Several more are paid six figure salaries but only work part time.

The total cost of the senior civil service could however be much higher. The cabinet office confirmed that they had only published the details of government employees who agreed to their earnings bracket being published. Eleven people refused to reveal the information and the government chose not to publish a further three after it was deemed “inappropriate”.

The coalition plans to publish the name, job title and earnings of every civil service employee earning more than £58,000 by next year, promising to “pull back the curtains to let light into the corridors of power”, said the Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude.

On Friday the coalition will also publish a database of all government spending programmes. The move has put the coalition on target for a furious battle with the unions, who have promised to protect their employees’ privacy and fight for an opt-out, so civil servants can choose to withhold personal information.

But the coalition has made it central to plans to tackle criticisms that there are too many high earners in the public sector. Maude said: “Transparency is at the heart of the government’s programme … All departments will open up their data in the weeks ahead.

“We are pulling back the curtains to let light into the corridors of power. By being open and accountable we can start to win back people’s trust. Openness will not be comfortable for us in government but it will enable the public to hold our feet to the fire. This way lies better government. Transparency is key to our efficiency drive, and will enable the public to help us to deliver better value for money in public spending.”

Today’s figures do not reveal precise salaries but a £5,000 bracket into which each earner falls. It contains 172 names. Only 32 are women, suggesting that there is a glass ceiling on the careers of women in the senior civil service.

Joe Harley, the director general of the Department for Work and Pensions, earns between £245,000 and £249,999. It makes his income higher than that of Sir Jock Stirrup, the chief of the defence staff at the Ministry of Defence (£240,000–£244,999) and even Sir Gus O′Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary and head of the civil service, who earns between £235,000 and £239,999.

Most of the salaries of permanent secretaries, the most senior civil servant in each government department, are already published in annual reports, but dozens more are revealed in today’s lists and it is first time they have been published jointly for comparison.

Jeremy Heywood, the permanent secretary at No 10, earns between £150,000 and £154,999.

Sir Michael Scholar, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, also earns between £150,000 and £154,999 and works “at least three days per week”.

Matt Tee, the permanent secretary for government communications, introduced by Labour to counter spin allegations, earns between £160,000 and £164,999.

The Ministry of Defence dominates the list, with 28 entries, and outside the main government departments the schools inspectorate Ofsted lists five staff members earning more than £150,000 a year, including Christine Gilbert, the chief inspector, who is on between £195,000 and £199,999.

Jonathan Baume, the general secretary of the FDA union for senior civil servants, said: “Before this goes further we need to have a serious discussion about what it is ministers are seeking to achieve. How do we maintain and get the balance between the public’s right to know and personal privacy right?

“What are the practicalities about keeping this accurate and up to date? People’s jobs change weekly, how do you keep it up to date? Ultimately there are privacy issues but it depends what formats it comes in, what will be made available and what the opt-out will be.”

• Civil service
• Coalition government

Polly Curtis

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BP clashes with scientists over deep sea oil pollution

Obama team ‘incensed at being kept in the dark’ as company denies existence of underwater oil clouds

BP has challenged widespread scientific claims that vast plumes of oil are spreading underwater from its blown-out rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The denial comes as the oil giant prepares for a new operation to put an end to the worst oil spill in US history – which could see the leak get worse before it gets better.

The company’s challenge to several scientific studies is likely to put it further at odds with an increasingly angry Obama administration, which has accused it of playing down the size of the leak in an effort to limit possible fines.

BP’s chief executive, Tony Hayward, said it had no evidence of underwater oil clouds. “The oil is on the surface,” he said. “Oil has a specific gravity that’s about half that of water. It wants to get to the surface because of the difference in specific gravity.”

Hayward’s assertion flies in the face of studies by scientists at universities in Florida, Georgia and Mississippi, among other institutions, who say they have detected huge underwater plumes of oil, including one 120 metres (400ft) deep about 50 miles from the destroyed rig.

BP’s claim is likely only to further anger environmentalists and the White House, which has grown increasingly suspicious of the company’s claims to be frank and transparent on developments. The president’s environmental adviser and director of the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, Carol Browner, has accused BP of misstating the scale of the leak.

“BP has a vested financial interest in downplaying the size of this,” she said on CBS television. “They will pay penalties at the end of the day, a per-barrel per-day penalty.”

Ed Markey, chairman of the House of Representatives environment committee, has also accused BP of underplaying the scale of the disaster and suggested that it may have a criminal liability.

“The fine that can be imposed upon them is based on how many barrels [pour in to the sea]. It could wind up in billions of dollars of fines,” said Markey. “They had a stake in low-balling the number right from the beginning. They were either lying or they were incompetent.”

In the White House, under increasing criticism for not taking charge of the effort to stop the spill, some officials are saying they have been misled by the company or kept in the dark at key moments.

The Politico website reported that the Obama team was incensed that the company failed to inform it for a day and a half after suspending the failed “top kill” operation to plug the spill using rubber tyres and mud.

The dispute comes as the company readies its latest effort to contain the flow of oil in to the sea, following the failure of top kill. The new plan involves an intricate operation to cut the top off the damaged riser that brought oil to the surface of the destroyed rig. The intention is to create a flat surface to which to attach a valve that would divert the oil into a pipe and on to a ship.

But slicing the top off the damaged pipe may result in oil flowing into the sea at a faster rate until the new valve is fitted. Even if successful, the operation would only limit, not entirely stop, oil from flowing into the sea. If this measure failed, BP’s best hope of halting the oil would remain the drilling of a relief well that would ease the pressure on the damaged one. But the US government has warned that the spill could continue into August.

The attempts to stop the oil flow have been given added urgency by the start of the hurricane season tomorrow.

Forecasters are predicting an unusually high number of storms over the next six months. If the oil is still spread across the sea, a hurricane is likely to disperse it over a much wider area and push it deeper into marshlands and other inland areas, making the environmental disaster even worse.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting between eight and 14 hurricanes this season, with perhaps a similar number of smaller storms.

The US military has ruled out taking charge of the operation to stem the flow of oil from the blown-out BP rig. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, today said that military chiefs had looked at the available equipment and concluded that “the best technology in the world, with respect to that, exists in the oil industry”.

A day earlier, the former US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said the military should step in because the crisis was now “beyond the capacity” of BP to stop.

• Deepwater Horizon oil spill
• BP
• Oil spills
• Obama administration
• Oil
• United States
• Oil
• Oil and gas companies

Chris McGreal

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Louise Bourgeois dies, aged 98

Grande dame of American and European art, whose work was founded in childhood

Louise Bourgeois, the French-born, American-based artist best known for her sculptures of vast metal spiders, died yesterday in a New York hospital at the age of 98. Bourgeois, who only found widespread acclaim late in life, had suffered a heart attack at the weekend, a spokeswoman said.

With her death, American and European art has lost not only a tremendous and hugely influential artist, but a direct link between the art of the 21st century and belle epoque Paris, with cubism, symbolism, surrealism and abstract expressionism, and all that followed.

Born in Paris, on Christmas Day 1911, she recounted that the attending doctor had told her mother, “Madam, you are quite ruining my day.” Her personality and her art were to match, and there are few artists who have claimed so outspokenly that their work has been founded in childhood and adolescence.

Her parents ran a prosperous family business devoted to the repair and resale of medieval and 17th and 18th century tapestries and textiles, living above the showroom in Paris.

As a child, Bourgeois had a talent for mathematics. In adolescence, she began helping in the workshop of the business, repairing the destroyed lower portions of old tapestries, sewing fig-leaves on to the genitalia of the naked figures on works destined for prudish American collectors. At about this time her philandering father introduced his lover, an Englishwoman called Sadie, into the household as the children’s tutor. From her, Bourgeois learned English, as well as jealousy and hatred.

All of this became part of the Bourgeois legend and the engine of her art. As an emigre French artist who moved to New York in 1938, her career developed slowly. Critical and commercial success only came when she was in her 60s. Although it was not until 1982 that New York’s Museum of Modern Art gave her a retrospective – the first it had ever mounted of a woman artist – she was by then already well-known, if regarded as uncategoriseable, marginal, even eccentric. The exhibition transformed her into the grande dame of American art.

In the same year, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe took a number of famous portraits of Bourgeois. She wore a black coat of monkey fur and carried something under her arm as a sort of prop: a big, obscene black latex sculpture, resembling a gigantic penis and balls. She insisted it was not a phallus at all. It was, she said, her little girl. In Mapplethorpe’s images, Bourgeois smiles mischievously for the camera. The image is immensely seductive.

Bourgeois made sculptures in all kinds of media; she made wonderful prints and drawings, created claustrophobic installations and fabricated little sewn dolls and giant metal spiders with equal care. She even recorded herself singing childhood songs, broadcast in an empty Venetian tower.

There were many-breasted creatures, beautifully carved marble hands, things that were sexual and strange and filled with secrets and barely suppressed violence. Refusing to describe herself as a feminist, she was one anyway. She has lessons for all artists alive now – inpersistence, commitment and individuality, and in the difference between art made as an adjunct to a career, and art borne out of inner necessity.

Bourgeois made great work and bad work, and didn’t care to choose. She even published her insomniac bedside drawings.

“My memories are moth-eaten”, she wrote recently, in a crabby hand, next to a beautiful, abstract drawing. We have lost a great artist, but the art goes on.

Adrian Searle is the Guardian’s art critic.

• Louise Bourgeois
• Art
• Sculpture
• France
• United States

Adrian Searle

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Louise Bourgeois dies, aged 98

Grande dame of American and European art, whose work was founded in childhood

Louise Bourgeois, the French-born, American-based artist best known for her sculptures of vast metal spiders, died yesterday in a New York hospital at the age of 98. Bourgeois, who only found widespread acclaim late in life, had suffered a heart attack at the weekend, a spokeswoman said.

With her death, American and European art has lost not only a tremendous and hugely influential artist, but a direct link between the art of the 21st century and belle epoque Paris, with cubism, symbolism, surrealism and abstract expressionism, and all that followed.

Born in Paris, on Christmas Day 1911, she recounted that the attending doctor had told her mother, “Madam, you are quite ruining my day.” Her personality and her art were to match, and there are few artists who have claimed so outspokenly that their work has been founded in childhood and adolescence.

Her parents ran a prosperous family business devoted to the repair and resale of medieval and 17th and 18th century tapestries and textiles, living above the showroom in Paris.

As a child, Bourgeois had a talent for mathematics. In adolescence, she began helping in the workshop of the business, repairing the destroyed lower portions of old tapestries, sewing fig-leaves on to the genitalia of the naked figures on works destined for prudish American collectors. At about this time her philandering father introduced his lover, an Englishwoman called Sadie, into the household as the children’s tutor. From her, Bourgeois learned English, as well as jealousy and hatred.

All of this became part of the Bourgeois legend and the engine of her art. As an emigre French artist who moved to New York in 1938, her career developed slowly. Critical and commercial success only came when she was in her 60s. Although it was not until 1982 that New York’s Museum of Modern Art gave her a retrospective – the first it had ever mounted of a woman artist – she was by then already well-known, if regarded as uncategoriseable, marginal, even eccentric. The exhibition transformed her into the grande dame of American art.

In the same year, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe took a number of famous portraits of Bourgeois. She wore a black coat of monkey fur and carried something under her arm as a sort of prop: a big, obscene black latex sculpture, resembling a gigantic penis and balls. She insisted it was not a phallus at all. It was, she said, her little girl. In Mapplethorpe’s images, Bourgeois smiles mischievously for the camera. The image is immensely seductive.

Bourgeois made sculptures in all kinds of media; she made wonderful prints and drawings, created claustrophobic installations and fabricated little sewn dolls and giant metal spiders with equal care. She even recorded herself singing childhood songs, broadcast in an empty Venetian tower.

There were many-breasted creatures, beautifully carved marble hands, things that were sexual and strange and filled with secrets and barely suppressed violence. Refusing to describe herself as a feminist, she was one anyway. She has lessons for all artists alive now – inpersistence, commitment and individuality, and in the difference between art made as an adjunct to a career, and art borne out of inner necessity.

Bourgeois made great work and bad work, and didn’t care to choose. She even published her insomniac bedside drawings.

“My memories are moth-eaten”, she wrote recently, in a crabby hand, next to a beautiful, abstract drawing. We have lost a great artist, but the art goes on.

Adrian Searle is the Guardian’s art critic.

• Louise Bourgeois
• Art
• Sculpture
• France
• United States

Adrian Searle

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Gove: firms may profit from schools

Education secretary tells teachers of academy plan and says that if schools want profit option, he will discuss it

The government has “no ideological objection” to businesses seeking profits from the new generation of academy schools and free schools, Michael Gove has said.

But the education secretary said his preference was for teachers and other experts to decide how to run and improve schools and said he expected most academies to be run as philanthropic projects.

“I am a Conservative, I do not have an ideological objection to businesses being involved but the professionals should make that decision,” Gove told an audience of teachers at Hay Festival. “My view is that school improvement will be driven by professionals not profitmakers.”

It is the first time Gove has publicly backed private companies profiting from running schools’ services since he became education secretary and announced a major expansion of academies. Companies could profit from running schools using existing legislation which allows governing bodies to contract out the running of their school to a company that can charge a management fee. A handful of schools already operate under this model but in the last years of the Labour government it was not encouraged.

Several international school operators have invested in England in anticipation that the academy programme, particularly under the Tories, would open up a new market for them. In Sweden, where the Conservatives drew their inspiration for the free school model, the ability for school providers to profit is seen as crucial for getting new providers into the state system. It is deeply opposed by many of the teaching unions in the UK – and those on the left of Gove′s Liberal Democrat coalition partners – but the Conservatives have become more receptive to the idea.

Under the management fee model, the school governing body remains not-for-profit but all the services – from teaching to school lunches and cleaning – can be run by private companies.

Citing an example of Havelock Academy in Grimsby, which is sponsored by the Conservative party donor David Ross, co-founder of Carphone Warehouse, Gove insisted all the groups his department was discussing about running academies were not-for-profit organisations.

Pressed on whether he would accept an academy or new “Swedish-style″ free school run for profit, he said if teachers and parents in an area were clamouring for that option he would sit down and “have a cup of tea” with the business concerned.

Outlining the Conservatives’ vision of dramatically extending the number of academy schools by switching the focus from failing schools to allowing schools judged “outstanding” by Ofsted to fast-track their move to academy status, the education secretary said the new academy schools would “be asked and expected to take under their wing an underperforming school” as part of their new status.

“We believe that the academy movement has been successful because improvement in education is driven by heads and teachers,” he said.

“The most important thing you can do is raise the quality of experience that individual students have with their teacher.”

Grilled by teachers in the audience over Ofsted’s attempts to raise standards by downgrading many assessments of schools and teachers from “good” to “satisfactory”, which has damaged morale in many schools, Gove admitted that “Ofsted needs radical reform″.

“We need to change the way in which it works pretty comprehensively,” he said. Gove also said there would be money for the Swedish-style free schools and insisted that they were not an expensive option. “Sweden introduced its reforms after a banking crisis and in the teeth of a recession in the 1990s,” he said.

He said George Osborne, the chancellor, had ring-fenced education spending this year and had told Gove that his education budget would rise again next year. Gove also reassured the audience that the Tories would maintain Sure Start.

After the event, many of the teachers were critical of the new education secretary although slightly mollified by his promises to guard the education budget and protect Sure Start.

“The academy idea was a poor idea to begin with. Taking it from improving the worst schools to boosting the strongest is plain stupid,” said Jenny Paterson, who is a secondary school teacher from Goole, Yorkshire.

• Michael Gove
• Education policy
• Academies
• Secondary schools
• Ofsted
• Conservatives
• Guardian Hay festival

Patrick Barkham

Polly Curtis

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Louise Bourgeois dies, aged 98

Grande dame of American and European art, whose work was founded in childhood

Louise Bourgeois, the French-born, American-based artist best known for her sculptures of vast metal spiders, died yesterday in a New York hospital at the age of 98. Bourgeois, who only found widespread acclaim late in life, had suffered a heart attack at the weekend, a spokeswoman said.

With her death, American and European art has lost not only a tremendous and hugely influential artist, but a direct link between the art of the 21st century and belle epoque Paris, with cubism, symbolism, surrealism and abstract expressionism, and all that followed.

Born in Paris, on Christmas Day 1911, she recounted that the attending doctor had told her mother, “Madam, you are quite ruining my day.” Her personality and her art were to match, and there are few artists who have claimed so outspokenly that their work has been founded in childhood and adolescence.

Her parents ran a prosperous family business devoted to the repair and resale of medieval and 17th and 18th century tapestries and textiles, living above the showroom in Paris.

As a child, Bourgeois had a talent for mathematics. In adolescence, she began helping in the workshop of the business, repairing the destroyed lower portions of old tapestries, sewing fig-leaves on to the genitalia of the naked figures on works destined for prudish American collectors. At about this time her philandering father introduced his lover, an Englishwoman called Sadie, into the household as the children′s tutor. From her, Bourgeois learned English, as well as jealousy and hatred.

All of this became part of the Bourgeois legend and the engine of her art. As an emigre French artist who moved to New York in 1938, her career developed slowly. Critical and commercial success only came when she was in her 60s. Although it was not until 1982 that New York′s Museum of Modern Art gave her a retrospective – the first it had ever mounted of a woman artist – she was by then already well-known, if regarded as uncategoriseable, marginal, even eccentric. The exhibition transformed her into the grande dame of American art.

In the same year, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe took a number of famous portraits of Bourgeois. She wore a black coat of monkey fur and carried something under her arm as a sort of prop: a big, obscene black latex sculpture, resembling a gigantic penis and balls. She insisted it was not a phallus at all. It was, she said, her little girl. In Mapplethorpe’s images, Bourgeois smiles mischievously for the camera. The image is immensely seductive.

Bourgeois made sculptures in all kinds of media; she made wonderful prints and drawings, created claustrophobic installations and fabricated little sewn dolls and giant metal spiders with equal care. She even recorded herself singing childhood songs, broadcast in an empty Venetian tower.

There were many-breasted creatures, beautifully carved marble hands, things that were sexual and strange and filled with secrets and barely suppressed violence. Refusing to describe herself as a feminist, she was one anyway. She has lessons for all artists alive now – inpersistence, commitment and individuality, and in the difference between art made as an adjunct to a career, and art borne out of inner necessity.

Bourgeois made great work and bad work, and didn′t care to choose. She even published her insomniac bedside drawings.

“My memories are moth-eaten”, she wrote recently, in a crabby hand, next to a beautiful, abstract drawing. We have lost a great artist, but the art goes on.

Adrian Searle is the Guardian’s art critic.

• Louise Bourgeois
• Art
• Sculpture
• France
• United States

Adrian Searle

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Revealed: top-earning civil servants

Coalition ‘pulls back curtains on corridors of power’ and releases names of mandarins earning more than £150,000

The government last night released the names of 170 senior civil servants who earn in excess of £150,000 – more than the prime minister’s wage – in the first step towards publishing swaths of data about public spending.

The controversial move reveals the identities of dozens of senior Whitehall mandarins who earn up to 10 times the national average wage and cost the public purse a total of £29,254,835.

The highest earner on the list is John Fingleton, the chief executive of the Office of Fair Trading, who earns between £275,000 and £279,999 a year – nearly double the prime minister’s £142,500 salary.

David Nicholson, the chief executive of the NHS, earns between £255,000 and £259,999 – including £45,000-£50,000 for a rented flat and expenses for living in London. Several more are paid six figure salaries but only work part time.

The total cost of the senior civil service could however be much higher. The cabinet office confirmed that they had only published the details of government employees who agreed to their earnings bracket being published. Eleven people refused to reveal the information and the government chose not to publish a further three after it was deemed “inappropriate”.

The coalition plans to publish the name, job title and earnings of every civil service employee earning more than £58,000 by next year, promising to “pull back the curtains to let light into the corridors of power”, said the Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude.

On Friday the coalition will also publish a database of all government spending programmes. The move has put the coalition on target for a furious battle with the unions, who have promised to protect their employees’ privacy and fight for an opt-out, so civil servants can choose to withhold personal information.

But the coalition has made it central to plans to tackle criticisms that there are too many high earners in the public sector. Maude said: “Transparency is at the heart of the government’s programme … All departments will open up their data in the weeks ahead.

“We are pulling back the curtains to let light into the corridors of power. By being open and accountable we can start to win back people’s trust. Openness will not be comfortable for us in government but it will enable the public to hold our feet to the fire. This way lies better government. Transparency is key to our efficiency drive, and will enable the public to help us to deliver better value for money in public spending.”

Today’s figures do not reveal precise salaries but a £5,000 bracket into which each earner falls. It contains 172 names. Only 32 are women, suggesting that there is a glass ceiling on the careers of women in the senior civil service.

Joe Harley, the director general of the Department for Work and Pensions, earns between £245,000 and £249,999. It makes his income higher than that of Sir Jock Stirrup, the chief of the defence staff at the Ministry of Defence (£240,000–£244,999) and even Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary and head of the civil service, who earns between £235,000 and £239,999.

Most of the salaries of permanent secretaries, the most senior civil servant in each government department, are already published in annual reports, but dozens more are revealed in today’s lists and it is first time they have been published jointly for comparison.

Jeremy Heywood, the permanent secretary at No 10, earns between £150,000 and £154,999.

Sir Michael Scholar, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, also earns between £150,000 and £154,999 and works “at least three days per week”.

Matt Tee, the permanent secretary for government communications, introduced by Labour to counter spin allegations, earns between £160,000 and £164,999.

The Ministry of Defence dominates the list, with 28 entries, and outside the main government departments the schools inspectorate Ofsted lists five staff members earning more than £150,000 a year, including Christine Gilbert, the chief inspector, who is on between £195,000 and £199,999.

Jonathan Baume, the general secretary of the FDA union for senior civil servants, said: “Before this goes further we need to have a serious discussion about what it is ministers are seeking to achieve. How do we maintain and get the balance between the public’s right to know and personal privacy right?

“What are the practicalities about keeping this accurate and up to date? People’s jobs change weekly, how do you keep it up to date? Ultimately there are privacy issues but it depends what formats it comes in, what will be made available and what the opt-out will be.”

• Civil service
• Coalition government

Polly Curtis

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BA flyers face summer of disruption

With no end to the industrial dispute in sight, Unite, the union representing cabin crew, threaten to hold another strike ballot

British Airways passengers face further disruption over the summer after Unite, the union representing cabin crew, threatened to hold another strike ballot.

With no end to the industrial dispute in sight, Unite’s joint general secretary, Tony Woodley, said that the union would “stand up″ to BA management, led by chief executive Willie Walsh, until “they learn some manners”. He also accused the airline of using “bullying″ tactics, referring to flight attendants who were suspended for writing Facebook comments and sent private emails concerning a “name and shame” list of pilots who volunteered to help break any walkout. BA said at the time that it would not “tolerate intimidation of our staff”.

Speaking to delegates at the union’s policy conferencetoday, he also repeated the offer to Walsh to call off the action by agreeing to reinstate travel concessions to striking staff.

Cabin crew are currently halfway through the second of three five day strikes, hitting the busy Bank Holiday weekend. The last walk-out begins on Saturday and finishes at the end of the following Wednesday.

The next ballot, which should take five weeks to complete, is likely to begin this month. If members vote for more action, a week’s notice has to be given ahead of a walk-out. A Unite source said notice of further walk-outs could be served for August. Unite cannot ballot on the same issue twice. It has already balloted on BA’s imposition of the reduction of cabin crew numbers on long haul flights. The next ballot is likely to centre around BA’s alleged “bullying and harassment”.

Woodley also claimed that the right to strike is “hanging by a thread″ because of “employers who would rather sue than settle”.

BA has twice gone to the courts to try to secure a ruling that ballots held by Unite were unlawful by arguing that the union had not followed the correct procedures. It succeeded in December, when strikes over the Christmas period were averted, but last monthUnite won an appeal against the airline to overturn a High Court injunction which would have blocked the current round of action. In April, Network Rail used similar tactics when it stopped a strike by the RMT, the railworkers union.

Woodley urged the candidates for the Labour leadership to uphold the right to strike.

But Marc Meryon, partner at Bircham Dyson Bell legal firm, said that the law had not changed over unions′ ability to hold strikes. “The test is whether a union has taken all reasonably practical steps to correctly ballot its members. There is now increased willingness among employers to scrutinize more carefully unions′ compliance with the law. Unions have got away for quite a long time with not making a proper effort to put their house in order.  Employers are now more willing to take a chance on it and make a legal challenge.”

He said that BA’s failed attempt to overturn the current round of action had damaged public support for the airline. “In terms of the PR angle, BA’s failed appeal has given the union some public sympathy with the impression that it has been hard done by, whereas before, arguably more public sympathy sided with BA.”

BA has vowed to continue legal proceedings to declare the strikes unlawful, which would entitle it to damages against the union if it won. But the maximum it could claim is £250,000, compared to the estimated £100m cost to date of the dispute to the airline.

• British Airways
• Trade unions
• Air transport
• Willie Walsh

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German president quits over gaffe

Abrupt resignation over ‘misunderstandings’ adds to pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel

Germany’s president, Horst Köhler, resigned without warning today, after intense criticism of remarks in which he suggested military deployments were central to the country’s economic interests.

Köhler’s departure leaves a vacuum that will only add to Angela Merkel’s growing political woes, amid criticism over a lack of decisive leadership, and a four-year low rating for her government in opinion polls.

Köhler, 67, was accused of advocating a form of “gunboat policy″ after saying that a large economic power like Germany, with its significant global trading interests, must be willing to deploy its military abroad.

Though a member of Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), he has previously managed to stay out of the political fray.

In a radio interview given on his return from a tour of German military bases in Afghanistan earlier this month, Köhler, a former head of the International Monetary Fund, said that the largely pacifist German public was finally coming to terms with the concept that their country could no longer avoid involvement in military missions, which helped “protect our interests, for example, free trade routes, or to prevent regional instability, which might certainly have a negative effect on our trade, jobs and income”.

The remarks were seized upon by the German left, who accused Köhler of supporting a type of “gunboat diplomacy” and of betraying the thousands of German soldiers who are currently stationed in Afghanistan.

Jürgen Trittin, the leader of the Greens, said Köhler’s comments were inconsistent with Germany’s constitution and he accused the president of being a “loose rhetorical cannon”.

Members of Merkel’s centre-right coalition government accused him of a careless choice of words.

Ruprecht Polenz, the CDU’s foreign policy spokesman, said: “It was an unfortunate formulation, to put it mildly″.

Köhler’s office said his comments had been misinterpreted. Even though the radio journalist’s question had been about Afghanistan, the president had not been referring to Afghanistan in his reply, but to the deployment of German military to the Indian Ocean to help keep shipping lanes free of Somalian pirates.

Announcing his resignation at the presidential palace, Bellevue, in Berlin, he appeared flanked by his wife, Eva Luise, and looked ashen-faced and sometimes close to tears.

Köhler said he felt his office had not been afforded the respect it deserved, and expressed his regret “that my comments on an important and difficult question for our nation were able to lead to misunderstandings″.

Köhler’s decision marked the first time in post-war German history that a president has resigned with immediate effect. An election for a new president is due to take place within the next month.

Merkel said she “deeply regretted” Köhler’s resignation, and admitted it had come as a huge surprise to her.

“I tried to persuade him to change his mind, but that wasn′t possible,” she said, adding that Köhler had won the love and respect of the German people largely because of his talent for “thinking outside the box”. She would miss the former banker’s advice over financial issues in particular, especially at a time of economic crisis.

Denis MacShane, the former Europe minister and Labour MP for Rotherham, said Köhler had fallen victim to those who still saw Germany as a “post-1945 dwarf orphan of world politics”.

He added that Köhler had done nothing more than “express the self-evident truth that German military power was now an expression of German national interests”.

• Germany
• Angela Merkel

Kate Connolly

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Revealed: top-earning civil servants

Coalition ‘pulls back curtains on corridors of power’ and releases names of mandarins earning more than £150,000

The government last night released the names of 170 senior civil servants who earn in excess of £150,000 – more than the prime minister’s wage – in the first step towards publishing swaths of data about public spending.

The controversial move reveals the identities of dozens of senior Whitehall mandarins who earn up to 10 times the national average wage and cost the public purse a total of £29,254,835.

The highest earner on the list is John Fingleton, the chief executive of the Office of Fair Trading, who earns between £275,000 and £279,999 a year – nearly double the prime minister’s £142,500 salary.

David Nicholson, the chief executive of the NHS, earns between £255,000 and £259,999 – including £45,000-£50,000 for a rented flat and expenses for living in London. Several more are paid six figure salaries but only work part time.

The total cost of the senior civil service could however be much higher. The cabinet office confirmed that they had only published the details of government employees who agreed to their earnings bracket being published. Eleven people refused to reveal the information and the government chose not to publish a further three after it was deemed “inappropriate”.

The coalition plans to publish the name, job title and earnings of every civil service employee earning more than £58,000 by next year, promising to “pull back the curtains to let light into the corridors of power″, said the Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude.

On Friday the coalition will also publish a database of all government spending programmes. The move has put the coalition on target for a furious battle with the unions, who have promised to protect their employees’ privacy and fight for an opt-out, so civil servants can choose to withhold personal information.

But the coalition has made it central to plans to tackle criticisms that there are too many high earners in the public sector. Maude said: “Transparency is at the heart of the government’s programme … All departments will open up their data in the weeks ahead.

“We are pulling back the curtains to let light into the corridors of power. By being open and accountable we can start to win back people’s trust. Openness will not be comfortable for us in government but it will enable the public to hold our feet to the fire. This way lies better government. Transparency is key to our efficiency drive, and will enable the public to help us to deliver better value for money in public spending.”

Today’s figures do not reveal precise salaries but a £5,000 bracket into which each earner falls. It contains 172 names. Only 32 are women, suggesting that there is a glass ceiling on the careers of women in the senior civil service.

Joe Harley, the director general of the Department for Work and Pensions, earns between £245,000 and £249,999. It makes his income higher than that of Sir Jock Stirrup, the chief of the defence staff at the Ministry of Defence (£240,000–£244,999) and even Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary and head of the civil service, who earns between £235,000 and £239,999.

Most of the salaries of permanent secretaries, the most senior civil servant in each government department, are already published in annual reports, but dozens more are revealed in today’s lists and it is first time they have been published jointly for comparison.

Jeremy Heywood, the permanent secretary at No 10, earns between £150,000 and £154,999.

Sir Michael Scholar, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, also earns between £150,000 and £154,999 and works “at least three days per week”.

Matt Tee, the permanent secretary for government communications, introduced by Labour to counter spin allegations, earns between £160,000 and £164,999.

The Ministry of Defence dominates the list, with 28 entries, and outside the main government departments the schools inspectorate Ofsted lists five staff members earning more than £150,000 a year, including Christine Gilbert, the chief inspector, who is on between £195,000 and £199,999.

Jonathan Baume, the general secretary of the FDA union for senior civil servants, said: “Before this goes further we need to have a serious discussion about what it is ministers are seeking to achieve. How do we maintain and get the balance between the public’s right to know and personal privacy right?

“What are the practicalities about keeping this accurate and up to date? People’s jobs change weekly, how do you keep it up to date? Ultimately there are privacy issues but it depends what formats it comes in, what will be made available and what the opt-out will be.”

• Civil service
• Coalition government

Polly Curtis

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Revealed: top-earning civil servants

Coalition ‘pulls back curtains on corridors of power′ and releases names of mandarins earning more than £150,000

The government last night released the names of 170 senior civil servants who earn in excess of £150,000 – more than the prime minister’s wage – in the first step towards publishing swaths of data about public spending.

The controversial move reveals the identities of dozens of senior Whitehall mandarins who earn up to 10 times the national average wage and cost the public purse a total of £29,254,835.

The highest earner on the list is John Fingleton, the chief executive of the Office of Fair Trading, who earns between £275,000 and £279,999 a year – nearly double the prime minister’s £142,500 salary.

David Nicholson, the chief executive of the NHS, earns between £255,000 and £259,999 – including £45,000-£50,000 for a rented flat and expenses for living in London. Several more are paid six figure salaries but only work part time.

The total cost of the senior civil service could however be much higher. The cabinet office confirmed that they had only published the details of government employees who agreed to their earnings bracket being published. Eleven people refused to reveal the information and the government chose not to publish a further three after it was deemed “inappropriate”.

The coalition plans to publish the name, job title and earnings of every civil service employee earning more than £58,000 by next year, promising to “pull back the curtains to let light into the corridors of power″, said the Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude.

On Friday the coalition will also publish a database of all government spending programmes. The move has put the coalition on target for a furious battle with the unions, who have promised to protect their employees′ privacy and fight for an opt-out, so civil servants can choose to withhold personal information.

But the coalition has made it central to plans to tackle criticisms that there are too many high earners in the public sector. Maude said: “Transparency is at the heart of the government’s programme … All departments will open up their data in the weeks ahead.

“We are pulling back the curtains to let light into the corridors of power. By being open and accountable we can start to win back people’s trust. Openness will not be comfortable for us in government; but it will enable the public to hold our feet to the fire. This way lies better government. Transparency is key to our efficiency drive, and will enable the public to help us to deliver better value for money in public spending.”

Today’s figures do not reveal precise salaries but a £5,000 bracket into which each earner falls. It contains 172 names. Only 32 are women, suggesting that there is a glass ceiling on the careers of women in the senior civil service.

Joe Harley, the director general of the Department for Work and Pensions, earns between £245,000 and £249,999. It makes his income higher than that of Sir Jock Stirrup, the chief of the defence staff at the Ministry of Defence (£240,000–£244,999) and even Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary and head of the civil service, who earns between £235,000 and £239,999.

Most of the salaries of permanent secretaries, the most senior civil servant in each government department, are already published in annual reports, but dozens more are revealed in today’s lists and it is first time they have been published jointly for comparison.

Jeremy Heywood, the permanent secretary at No 10, earns between £150,000 and £154,999.

Sir Michael Scholar, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, also earns between £150,000 and £154,999 and works “at least three days per week”.

Matt Tee, the permanent secretary for government communications, introduced by Labour to counter spin allegations, earns between £160,000 and £164,999.

The Ministry of Defence dominates the list, with 28 entries, and outside the main government departments the schools inspectorate Ofsted lists five staff members earning more than £150,000 a year, including Christine Gilbert, the chief inspector, who is on between £195,000 and £199,999.

Jonathan Baume, the general secretary of the FDA union for senior civil servants, said: “Before this goes further we need to have a serious discussion about what it is ministers are seeking to achieve. How do we maintain and get the balance between the public’s right to know and personal privacy right?

“What are the practicalities about keeping this accurate and up to date? People’s jobs change weekly, how do you keep it up to date? Ultimately there are privacy issues but it depends what formats it comes in, what will be made available and what the opt-out will be.”

• Civil service
• Coalition government

Polly Curtis

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Gove: firms may profit from schools

Education secretary tells teachers of academy plan and says that if schools want profit option, he will discuss it

The government has “no ideological objection” to businesses seeking profits from the new generation of academy schools and free schools, Michael Gove has said.

But the education secretary said his preference was for teachers and other experts to decide how to run and improve schools and said he expected most academies to be run as philanthropic projects.

“I am a Conservative, I do not have an ideological objection to businesses being involved but the professionals should make that decision,” Gove told an audience of teachers at Hay Festival. “My view is that school improvement will be driven by professionals not profitmakers.”

It is the first time Gove has publicly backed private companies profiting from running schools’ services since he became education secretary and announced a major expansion of academies. Companies could profit from running schools using existing legislation which allows governing bodies to contract out the running of their school to a company that can charge a management fee. A handful of schools already operate under this model but in the last years of the Labour government it was not encouraged.

Several international school operators have invested in England in anticipation that the academy programme, particularly under the Tories, would open up a new market for them. In Sweden, where the Conservatives drew their inspiration for the free school model, the ability for school providers to profit is seen as crucial for getting new providers into the state system. It is deeply opposed by many of the teaching unions in the UK – and those on the left of Gove’s Liberal Democrat coalition partners – but the Conservatives have become more receptive to the idea.

Under the management fee model, the school governing body remains not-for-profit but all the services – from teaching to school lunches and cleaning – can be run by private companies.

Citing an example of Havelock Academy in Grimsby, which is sponsored by the Conservative party donor David Ross, co-founder of Carphone Warehouse, Gove insisted all the groups his department was discussing about running academies were not-for-profit organisations.

Pressed on whether he would accept an academy or new “Swedish-style” free school run for profit, he said if teachers and parents in an area were clamouring for that option he would sit down and “have a cup of tea” with the business concerned.

Outlining the Conservatives′ vision of dramatically extending the number of academy schools by switching the focus from failing schools to allowing schools judged “outstanding” by Ofsted to fast-track their move to academy status, the education secretary said the new academy schools would “be asked and expected to take under their wing an underperforming school” as part of their new status.

“We believe that the academy movement has been successful because improvement in education is driven by heads and teachers,” he said.

“The most important thing you can do is raise the quality of experience that individual students have with their teacher.”

Grilled by teachers in the audience over Ofsted’s attempts to raise standards by downgrading many assessments of schools and teachers from “good” to “satisfactory”, which has damaged morale in many schools, Gove admitted that “Ofsted needs radical reform″.

“We need to change the way in which it works pretty comprehensively,” he said. Gove also said there would be money for the Swedish-style free schools and insisted that they were not an expensive option. “Sweden introduced its reforms after a banking crisis and in the teeth of a recession in the 1990s,” he said.

He said George Osborne, the chancellor, had ring-fenced education spending this year and had told Gove that his education budget would rise again next year. Gove also reassured the audience that the Tories would maintain Sure Start.

After the event, many of the teachers were critical of the new education secretary although slightly mollified by his promises to guard the education budget and protect Sure Start.

“The academy idea was a poor idea to begin with. Taking it from improving the worst schools to boosting the strongest is plain stupid,” said Jenny Paterson, who is a secondary school teacher from Goole, Yorkshire.

• Michael Gove
• Education policy
• Academies
• Secondary schools
• Ofsted
• Conservatives
• Guardian Hay festival

Patrick Barkham

Polly Curtis

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