I did this exercise for a Business Improvement District, which is kind of neither public nor private sector, a few months ago.

I looked at 2018 to July 2022. Generally private sector increases have been above public sector but between 2020 and 2021 private sector pay fell. However, in 2021-2022 civil service pay was frozen.

The private sector operates bonuses much of the time so you have to look at total compensation.

From May to July 2022 the rate of annual pay growth across all UK sectors for total pay was 5.5%, and the annual pay growth for regular pay was 5.2%.

Consumer Price Index plus Housing (CPIH) was 8.8% in July 2022 and CPI was 10.1%.

National Living Wage rose by 6.6%

Pay review bodies this year are recommending:
Armed Forces 3.75%
Doctors and Dentists 4.5%
NHS 4% for bands 6 and 7
Prison Service 4%
Teachers 5% to 8.9%
Senior Public Sector Salaries 3.5%

Do you still think the public sector faired better than the private sector? And by the way forget security of tenure, look at ability to move jobs. The number of job vacancies in the United Kingdom reached a record high of 1.3 million in the three months to May 2022. Before the pandemic hit that was an average of 785,000.

Brexit preparation required the recruitment of well over 50,000 officials - more than the number employed by Brussels to carry out all centralised EU functions. Assuming a cost/head of £40k to include salaries, accommodation, employers' pension contributions & NIC, etc., Brexit preparation cost at least £2 billion pa in staff costs.

Numbers spiked again from mid-2020 and there are currently around 97,000 more officials than in mid-2016. Some of this further increase will have been due to the Covid pandemic and some will have because of further Brexit preparations.

In May 2022, the Government announced that it intended to reduce the civil service to its pre-Brexit referendum size of 384k fte by mid 2025 - despite that an effect of Brexit was to repatriate a significant number of regulatory etc. responsibilities from Brussels, and required additional border control staff. The resultant number would be 91k lower than the (then latest reported) 2021 Q4 figure of 475k.

The Government announced later in 2022 that it had abandoned its target of cutting 91,000 civil service jobs.

So, maybe people don't see it as quite such a safe bet any more. It is at the whim of some pretty desperate and unprincipled people. Which brings us back to CONservative incompetence.

There might never be the right time for everyone but there will a better time than this. We simply cannot afford either upsetting the markets again, the tax rises that could mitigate that, or the service cuts which are the alternative. Never mind the inflation.

The Government don’t have any money. They only have ours or borrow some from the future generations. Do you really want them to be forced to give some of that away?

We are in this together and need to deal with it together. We can make plans now as reforms are needed but at the moment all those in work need to be content that they have and get on with it.

For the avoidance of doubt any comments in response to a previous post are directed to its ideas and not at any, or all, posters personally.

The last few years have been plagued by incompetence. We now have on all sides incompetent people who see politics as a career and too many have never had a real job.

Do you accept in full, as a Labour supporter ,the EHRC report on anti semitism in the Labour party?

Responsibility Deficit Disorder is a medical condition. Symptoms include inability to be corrected when wrong, false sense of superiority, desire to share personal info no else cares about, general hubris. It's a medical issue rather than pure arrogance.

I am not a Labour supporter, certainly not in it's current guise.

It's just amusing/revealing people still throw Corbyn's name about like it's of any relevance - I believe his preferred phrase for it is 'living rent free in people's heads' which evidently he is in yours.

Have a look at my post a couple of posts up for an alternative picture