WHEN Stephen Carter ran Ofcom, the telecoms and broadcasting regulator, he kept a life-size poster of Michael Caine, star of the British gangster movie Get Carter, behind his office desk.

The £90m building bulges out of London’s riverside next to the site of the Rose Theatre where Shakespeare once trod the boards.

Today it is revealed as the epicentre of the public sector “fat cat” world. Ofcom has no fewer than 11 executives in the top 100 of a new “rich list” of public servants produced by the TaxPayers’ Alliance.

Carter, its former chief executive, leads the pack. The topiary in the front garden of his £2.9m house in Barnes, southwest London, is as exquisite as you would expect from a man who has been paid more than £250,000 to stay at home on “gardening leave” for eight months.

Even with so little time in the office Carter, 43, was the biggest earner at Ofcom last year. As the outgoing boss he picked up a total remuneration in salary, pension and benefits of £396,565.

While he was in charge at Ofcom, rigged phone-ins on GMTV generated £35m in revenues. Although it imposed a £2m fine, and the Serious Fraud Office has said it might investigate, Ofcom intervened only after the scandal was exposed by journalists.

ITV attempted to make the most of revenues from phone-ins, text messaging and “red button” voting on shows including Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway and the The X Factor.

In all, Ofcom has 13 of the 300 places on the rich list. It claims it is not really in the public sector because its funding comes from the television and radio industry.

But it collects £61m a year from broadcasters, including the BBC, which is funded by licence fee payers. It is also listed as a public corporation in Whitehall under the joint auspices of the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.

Neither the BBC nor Ofcom would say how much the corporation pays, but Ofcom has said it wants the BBC to pay another £32m a year from 2014 for digital broadcasts.

Ofcom, which was launched at the end of 2003 to replace the work of five previous agencies, says that from the outset “we decided to employ fewer, better-paid staff”.

Carter had already been well remunerated before arriving for work there. A one-time Labour activist, he had received a pay-off and bonus of more than £1.6m from his previous employer, NTL, the cable company, even though it had filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States.

Patricia Hewitt, then trade and industry secretary, ratified Carter’s appointment to Ofcom before her department launched an inquiry into excessive pay-offs for top executives. He was put on gardening leave when he resigned from Ofcom after three years amid rumours that he might become the new head of ITV. Instead he has now become chief executive of Brunswick, the consultancy firm, on an undisclosed salary.

Ed Richards, the new chief executive at Ofcom and a former adviser to Tony Blair on media and telecoms, earned £392,343 last year. Even Dominic Morris, who runs Richards’s office, received £213,223. That is only £1,700 less than Alistair Buchanan, who is chief executive of Ofgem, which oversees gas and electricity markets worth billions of pounds a year.

Kip Meek, Ofcom’s chief policy partner, left last year and was paid £125,335 for five months’ gardening leave. Sean Williams, the partner who oversaw competition policy, resigned in March of this year but was still paid a bonus of £40,000. The regulator says it is “entirely appropriate” to give him the sum to reflect his contribution during the previous year.

Ofcom claims the practice of imposing gardening leave is appropriate because of the confidential and commercially sensitive information seen by Carter and Meek while at work.

Carter said last week: “I am on the TaxPayers’ Alliance hitlist but the numbers say what the numbers say. It doesn’t seem to be a matter of fairness or unfairness. It’s a matter of fact.

“People must decided whether Ofcom is delivering value and I don’t think there is much debate about that.”

He added: “Efficiency of public bodies is a very legitimate debate. Funnelling that debate through individual salary makes good copy but poor analysis.”

But Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “Taxpayers have a right to know how much senior public sector officials are being paid because only then can we judge whether they deserve their remuneration.

“Too often public sector executives are rewarded handsomely even when they fail. At a time when the government is rightly aiming to restrain public sector pay increases to 2%, these top officials shouldn’t be hiking their pay by six times as much.”

The 300 people on the list all received at least £150,000 last year from government departments, quangos and other public bodies or corporations.

Not all are funded by the taxpayer but they are regulatory bodies set up by the government or public corporations such as Royal Mail.

At the top of the league table sits Adam Crozier, the group chief executive of Royal Mail, who saw his total package increase by 21% last year to £1.25m, while he cancelled the second mail delivery and increased the price of stamps. He lives in a £1.6m house in Weybridge, Surrey.

Mark Thompson, the director-general of the BBC, had a 2.35% increase to £788,000. He is fifth overall and is one of 10 BBC employees on the list, which has been compiled largely from public accounts.

It does not mention Jonathan Ross, who earns a reported £6m a year from licence-payers money, or other presenters and executives below board level.

Another broadcaster, Andy Duncan, chief executive of Channel 4, which receives a large state subsidy, collected £622,000 last year, an increase of 13.3%. He presided over a series of onscreen fiascos, including a row over racist abuse against Shilpa Shetty, the Bollywood actress, which led to calls for his resignation. His package included a bonus of £149,000.

John Tiner, chief executive of the Financial Services Authority, earned a 14% increase to £652,577 last year. His package included a performance-related bonus of £95,000. The FSA at last started securing scalps after two years without a single catch.

Under Gordon Brown the list is likely to grow further. Last week he announced in the Queen’s speech that seven new publicly funded bodies would be created in the new parliamentary session. They include a committee on climate change to advise on carbon emission targets. The number of quangos has ballooned since Labour came to power, despite a pledge from Tony Blair in 1996 to consign them to the “dustbin of history”.

Their total cost has increased by 60% since 2003. There are now nearly 900 quangos and agencies with 30,000 members, costing taxpayers at least £340m every day.

The public sector list features 10 people working on the 2012 London Olympics. They include David Higgins, chief executive of the Olympic Delivery Authority, who earned £631,000, and Lord Coe, executive chairman of the London Organising Committee, who collected £285,000.

Median earnings across the whole economy rose by 2.9% in the year to April to £457 a week, £23,764 a year. The latest figures show that earnings are rising by 3.7%, including bonuses.

The 82 highest-paid people within the NHS are on the list. Most are directors at hospital trusts. They earnt an average of £181,956 each - compared with the starting salary for a nurse of £22,000.

The highest-paid is Norman Lindsay, director of turnaround at Whipps Cross University Hospital NHS Trust in north London. He collects £395,000 a year - roughly equivalent to a nurse’s annual salary every three weeks. Sir Jonathan Michael, the former chief executive of the trust that runs both St Thomas’s, the hospital nearest to Downing Street, and Guy’s, received £231,000 last year. He is now at BT.

The report does not include dozens of NHS doctors and dentists who now earn more than £250,000 a year. They declare their earnings to HM Revenue and Customs which itself has eight names on the public sector rich list.

Other names include John Woodward, who earns £230,000 a year, a rise of 13.4%, as chief executive of the UK Film Council. Along with all his 85 staff, he is entitled to free cinema tickets worth £250 per year and £100 towards membership of a gym.

Peter Hendy, the Transport for London (TfL) commissioner, earned £435,200 last year - including a performance bonus of £115,200. The report calculates that it takes him 4 hours 11 minutes to earn every £1,000, roughly equivalent to the time taken by his daily commute to the office and back to his home in Bath. His rail travel is subsidised and he has a free Oyster card on the London Underground.

The 3m Tube users who suffer late, cramped and dirty trains on the London Underground might bridle at his blog on MySpace, the internet meeting place.

“Wow!” he said in one recent post. “Gordon Brown was photographed on the Tube on his way to work while a famous American actress flashed her Oyster card on the TV last week saying that buses were the fastest way to get around London.

“I’ve never heard of Kim Cattrall though I understand that the show she was in, Sex and the City, was pretty popular. I was impressed that this lady, despite her wealth, chose to use an Oyster card which saves her money! It is great to see that people from all walks of life are using public transport and appreciating it for what it is.”

While Hendy is stargazing, Tube drivers appear to be concerned with more serious matters. “District Dave” blogs about passenger safety and TfL’s decision to buy Metronet, a Tube line maintenance firm that had gone into administration.

A spokesman for Hendy said: “TfL is building a world-class transport system for a world-class city. The salary of the commissioner will reflect the importance and success of that work. If we need to pay competitive salaries to secure people with the talent and experience of Peter Hendy we will do so.

“Under Peter’s leadership, TfL has seen a continued increase in bus and Tube passenger numbers, with a record one billion using the Underground in the year to April 2007. This summer London successfully hosted the start of the Tour de France leading to a further increase in cycling numbers.”

So who protects the public from its highly paid servants? The current auditor-general, Sir John Bourn, makes an appearance himself at 149 on the list, with total remuneration of £185,725, which includes travel expenditure of £26,667 incurred when Lady Bourn accompanied him on official business. He is to retire in January, following controversy over his office’s £392,000 three-year claim for “travel and sustenance”.

Is he worth it?

SIR JOHN GIEVE, a Whitehall mandarin who has moved up the ranks to become a deputy governor of the Bank of England, tops a list of people the TaxPayers’ Alliance says have been rewarded for failure.

Gieve was moved from the Home Office after a scandal over the number of freed foreign prisoners who were supposed to be deported, and problems with the accounts.

That he should be put in charge of the financial system’s stability at the Bank was described by Sir Richard Bacon, a member of the Commons public accounts committee, as “pure Gilbert and Sullivan”.

Gieve, 57, took a break just as Northern Rock’s troubles began in August.

John McFall, chairman of the Treasury select committee, accused him of being “asleep in the back shop while there was a mugging out front” as Gieve admitted he had not read Northern Rock’s interim accounts before the crisis.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance is also highly critical of Rose Gibb, former chief executive of Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS trust, who was paid £150,000 last year while presiding over a fatal outbreak of clostridium difficile.

Others on the alliance’s list include Adam Crozier, chief executive at Royal Mail, and Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC.

Additional reporting: Anna Mikhailova, Laila Sennah

Read the Taxpayers Alliance's full report

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