When Gordon Brown turned on the public spending taps seven years ago, there was general delight at the end of years of underspending on public services. But some of us warned of the dangers of giving overgenerous awards without reforms that would ensure taxpayers’ cash was spent wisely. And so it came to pass. There has been waste on an epic scale as public sector managers have gorged on the torrent of cash. Improvements in public services did occur, but they were hardly value for money when compared with the tens of billions of pounds poured in.

There was one consequence that was harder to spot at the time: the rise of the public sector fat cat. Today we report research from the TaxPayers’ Alliance, a group which campaigns for the aims of “lower taxes and better government”. It shows there are now 17 people in the public sector earning more than £500,000 a year and one, Adam Crozier, chief executive of Royal Mail, who takes home more than £1m.

Top earners in the public sector have continued to rake in ever larger amounts even as the prime minister has tried to put brakes on the gravy train for lowlier public sector employees. While Mr Brown wants rank and file government employees to settle for salary increases within the government’s 2% inflation target, the top 300 have seen their pay rise by an average of nearly 13% over the past year. Even the prime minister is falling behind in the pay race. His salary of nearly £189,000 ranks him only 143rd in the list. Such is the acceleration of salary increases at the top in the public sector that this compares with Tony Blair’s ranking of 88th last year.

Defenders of large public sector salaries will say that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys and that people handling large budgets and matters of national importance deserve to be properly rewarded. And it is true that some have deserved better salaries and have worked hard for their money. Apologists will also point to the private sector, where rewards at the top are far larger than anything the state can offer and, in the City, are on a scale that borders on the obscene.

The trouble is there is little evidence that the taxpayer is getting value for money from its highly paid public sector elite. In Labour’s ever-larger public sector tent, reward is linked only tenuously to performance and is often given even in circumstances of failure. In the private sector, executives resign or are sacked when things go wrong, as we have seen with recent high-profile departures from the top American banks, albeit with enough cash to ensure that they never have to work again. At the top of the public sector, job security and generous pensions are the norm. Comparing public and private salaries is like comparing apples and pears.

Yet such comparisons are used to bump up public sector salaries. Those who work for Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, must be paid as much as the people they regulate, so 11 of those listed in the top 100 are from that body alone. The National Health Service, whose budget has increased by 50% in real terms since 2000, has its own burgeoning elite; at least 80 NHS people in the list earn more than £150,000.

There is another issue. The TaxPayers’ Alliance obtained its information by digging through the annual reports of 126 public sector bodies. Their figures, as the group admits, are almost certainly an underestimate. Some bodies are opaque about salaries, while there is no easy way of discovering how many GPs, for example, earn more than £250,000 a year. Taxpayers should be able to find out easily how much the government pays on their behalf, as happens in the United States.

Yet the public sector gravy train looks like continuing its well upholstered journey for some time. As always, the government promises to get tough on public sector waste. It should start by looking at those sitting round the tables in its own boardrooms, how much they are getting paid and what value they deliver.