MoD bonuses: a 'travesty of justice'?

The £47m handed out to officials in the Ministry of Defence is part of the bonus culture that has grown beyond banking to become pervasive in the public sector too.

Being a civil servant at the Ministry of Defence is a "very difficult and sometimes dangerous job", said Home Secretary Alan Johnson this week. That's why 50,000 of the 85,000 officials working in the department have been granted a total of £47m in bonuses between them since the start of the year.

Dangerous? Well, I'm sure "staple guns can nip a bit", says Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. But in reality, this is just part of the bonus culture that has grown beyond banking to become pervasive in the public sector too. Only a "tiny percentage" of these officials have been to Afghanistan. Nor do we know of anyone among the 23,000 staff employed at the MoD's procurement arm who has lost their job, or even their bonus, after an official report in August described it as "incompetent from top to bottom".

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Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.