A typical public sector worker now earns £74.20 a week more than his or her private sector counterpart, it emerged yesterday.

Figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that pay rises in the public sector were more than three times those in the private sector during the past year.

The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Ashe) said that, in the year to April 2009, the weekly pay of full-time employees in the public sector was typically £539 — up 3.1 per cent on 2008.

For the private sector the figure was £465 — up 1 per cent in the same period. Other ONS figures emphasised the growing disparity between the public and private sectors.

For example, hospital and health service managers received an average pay rise of 5.8 per cent, while police officers had rises, on average, of 3.1 per cent and secondary school teachers of 2.9 per cent. Veterinarians, however, had their pay reduced by an average of 16 per cent; shopkeepers’ pay fell by 8.2 per cent, and bricklayers had a pay cut of 7.9 per cent.

It is the first time since the ONS began making the comparisons in 1997 that public sector salaries have outstripped private sector pay by so much. Public sector pay rose at its fastest rate on record in the year to April.

But the ONS gave warning that the survey, based on a 1 per cent sample of records held by HM Revenue & Customs, could have been skewed by a decision to reclassify private sector staff at banks that were bailed out by the taxpayer — Lloyds TSB, Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS — as public sector workers.

Had those banks remained in the private sector, the median weekly pay of full-time public sector employees would have been £537 — a 2.7 per cent increase, rather than a 3.1 per cent rise. For the private sector, the figure would have been £468, not £465 — a 1.6 per cent rise instead of 1 per cent.

The ONS said that the main reason for the widening gap was that some parts of the public sector had agreed multi-year pay deals before the downturn.

It also disclosed that there were now 242,000 jobs that paid less than the national minimum wage. The ONS said that the figures could not be used as a measure of illegal activity because it had been impossible to identify from the data workers such as apprentices and other trainees who are exempt from the minimum rate.

The Ashe survey also contains fascinating detail on the salaries people earn in specific occupations. Product, clothing and related designers had an 18.2 per cent fall in mean salary, to £29,484, while tax experts’ pay fell by 13 per cent to £29,223. Other losers included trading standards inspectors, falling by 4.5 per cent to £32,415, while market research interviewers suffered a 4.5 per cent drop to £8,799.

Despite claims of a sharp rise in executive pay, the ONS also found that directors and chief executives saw their mean annual salary fall to £172,716 — a fall of 12.7 per cent. Farm managers’ pay, meanwhile, rose by 11.4 per cent to £29,632 and travel agency managers had a 12.6 per cent rise to £29,269.

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