Fair pay for a day's work, wherever you live

There is a sense of déjà vu, what with public sector walk-outs and high unemployment. Yet you can overdo the analogy. A lot has changed, thanks in large part to Labour's expensive 13 years at No 10. Hospitals are much better funded. Educational attainment is up. Perhaps most significantly, public sector pay now outperforms private sector pay. The differential across the UK is 8% on average, according to Treasury figures. In Glasgow, it's 17.5%. That's right: public sector workers, in many cases, are now better paid than private sector employees with similar qualifications.

This is something to celebrate and not just because, at last, teachers, nurses and other public servants are apparently being paid properly. It should also spell the end of lazy, outdated propaganda about public sector and private sector workers, in which the former are caricatured as saintly figures battling away at the front line for uniformly low pay while the latter are invariably represented as greedy bankers.

Yet according to the Government, this change in the fortunes of public servants is not to be celebrated; far from it. No, the Government wants to eradicate this pay discrepancy that outlandishly favours the public sector, by introducing local pay rates. Why? Because, they insist, paying teachers, nurses and council workers too much is bad for business.

To say this is perverse would be an understatement. After a bruising year of public service cuts, you might think healthy public sector pay would be a good news story for the Government to trade on. Instead, it insists the higher rate of public sector pay means business cannot compete. Setting public sector pay rates according to the strength of the local economy in Glasgow, south Wales or London will not only save the Government money, but also boost private sector investment and job creation, or so the story goes.

That is debatable, yet even it were true, it is a policy that dismally fails the fairness test. The notion that a teacher working in Aberdeen should be paid more than one working in the east end of Glasgow is simply not fair. If you do the same job for the same Government department, you should be paid the same, regardless of location.

It's hardly the end of the world if public sector workers get paid a bit more than private sector staff. Variations in pay within the same locale are natural; they already exist within the private sector. Two middle-ranking executives with similar qualifications working in the same town but for different companies might be paid at quite different levels and the sky doesn't fall in.

Local pay rates would also risk widening the gap between wealthy, high salary areas and deprived, low wage ones by increasing the influx of cash to the former and reducing it or holding it down in the latter.

It could also further penalise those who are already low paid. Government figures show that women working in the public sector in Scotland, for instance, are paid 19% more than their colleagues in the private sector. Yet a great many of them, as the Labour MP Ann McKechin pointed out last week, are on low pay grades where every fiver counts.

The Coalition Government will decide whether to adopt the policy in the summer; if they do recommend it, it will be up to the Scottish Government to decide whether it wishes to implement it in areas it controls such as the NHS, though it could in theory be imposed regardless on those Scottish public sector workers answerable to Westminster departments.

If it is introduced, there is a real risk of creating low pay ghettos, where both wages and house prices are held down. Those areas that are already deprived will suffer the most. Public sector workers may be getting paid a bit more, on average, than their private sector counterparts, but it's hard to see how forcing a race to the bottom would benefit anyone.