“State workers are paid nearly eight per cent more than those in the private sector to do exactly the same job.

For the first time, the Office for National Statistics compared workers who do the same job, are the same age and sex, and live in the same region. They found the difference in pay was an average of 7.8 per cent.”

Daily Mail, 6th July 2011

Following the recent strikes over cuts to public sector pay and pensions, the level of benefits and remuneration given to workers in the public and private sectors have been a prominent and contentious issue.

There have been numerous attempts before to compare public and private sector pay, all of which have come up against the same problem of accounting for the difference between two very different job sectors.

For example, when it was reported in May that public sector workers enjoyed 43 per cent better pay than their private sector counterparts, the General Secretary of the trade union Unison hit back that it didn't account for factors such as the proportion of skilled jobs in the public and private sectors when compiling data producing potentially misleading conclusions.

When Full Fact looked at the issue, we found that these criticisms were well founded when applied to the 43 per cent figure, although attempts had been made in the Policy Exchange report from which the claim was drawn to account for these differences.

So when the Daily Mail reported earlier this week that the ONS (Office for National Statistics) had showed that those in the public sector earn on average 7.8 per cent more than those in “exactly the same job” in the private sector, we thought the issue deserved another look.

Here the Mail is referring to the ONS's analysis in its Estimating differences in public and private sector payrelease. This does indeed suggest that, allowing for differences in “types of job and characteristics of employees... as far as possible,” workers in the public sector enjoyed 7.8 per cent better pay.

But does the fact that public and private sector workers are matched by “skill categories” mean that they perform “exactly” the same job as someone in the equivalent category?

The ONS stipulates in the report that finding direct points of comparison between the two sectors is problematic (there are, for example, few jobs that compare to police officers' work in the private sector).

To compare public and private sector pay, the ONS therefore split workers up into skill levels for the purpose of the research, however it is important to note that compositional differences still exist within skill levels between the public and private sectors, so it is not necessarily fair to claim as the Mail does that the comparison is between “exactly the same job[s].

However the Mail does point to some of the reasons given by the ONS for the differences in pay levels.

For example, the ONS report goes specifies that 72 per cent of public sector workers have A-level qualifications or higher compared to 57 per cent of private sector workers. When only those with degree-level qualifications are compared, private sector workers enjoy better pay than those in the public sector by some 5.7 per cent.

Similarly, the ONS argue that the fact that data was gathered outside of the main bonus season may “account for some but not all of the difference.”

So while a number of difficulties remain in making these kind of comparisons between public and private sector pay, the efforts of the ONS to account for these mean that the Mail's latest report on the issue is better grounded in evidence than previous attempts that we have seen.