Is £100,000 a year enough for a top civil servant?

There's a popular trope in politics, driven particularly by the Tory media/News International, which says that top civil servants are paid too much - conning tax payers, not giving value for money and earning vastly more than those at the bottom of the profession. Tory ministers recently boasted of the amount they had 'saved' from public spending partly by sacking top staff or cutting their wages.

This is problematic for several reasons. First, ministers rarely consider whether the staff they sack will need to be replaced, creating either holes and problems in the delivery of services or leading to a re-hiring or expensive consultants. Secondly, 'savings' for the taxpayers usually means cuts they will have to endure in another form - as the government reduces fuel duty, imposes punitive rises in VAT and proposes canceling the top rate of income tax so they scrap essential services these could have paid for.

Thirdly, a point least often raised, is that the discourse of 'high pay' for top civil servants redirects attention from vast private sector salaries, the need for high quality individuals to run public services and the differential between pay in the public and private sectors. All of which is very helpful to a Conservative government filled with millionaires and desperate to slash and burn with as little censure or observations as possible, but we should be sceptical of any argument which turns cutting public expenditure into a virtue and casts public servants as grasping fat cats. Public sector pay is chronically low, we should never have to worry about paying 'too much' to those who provide services to the public, particularly to those who have managed to rise to the top. Good management is essential, particularly in a time of cuts, and it costs a lot of money to attract the kind of managers who will ensure that services survive the Tory government. Why shouldn't a top teacher earn a salary which, although much more than most other civil servants, is still less than any equivalent private sector salary? Which, after all, do we believe is most important?