To ask Her Majesty's Government (a) what the total monetary value of Senior Civil Service non-consolidated performance pay awards was in the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, (b) how many and what proportion of the Senior Civil Service staff in the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform received performance pay awards by SCS pay band, and (c) how those awards were distributed by pay band and award category, for each of the past five years for which data are available. [HL3365]

The creation of BERR was announced in June 2007 in a machinery of government change and this was applied retrospectively to 1 April 2007. Non-consolidated non-pensionable performance awards are paid to staff in the Senior Civil Service (SCS) to reward delivery of business objectives and personal contributions to wider organisational goals. Performance awards are part of the pay system across the whole Senior Civil Service, and are used to reward high performance sustained throughout the year, based on judgments of how well an individual has performed relative to their peers. The performance-related pay scheme is designed to help drive high performance and support better public service delivery.

The size of the non-consolidated performance pay pot is based on recommendations by the independent Senior Salaries Review Body.

The Government have frozen the percentage of the pay bill available for SCS non-consolidated pay for 2009-10. These figures are not yet available.

The information available is shown in the tables below.

Table 1 Total monetary value of SCS non-consolidated performance pay

Table 2-Distribution by pay band and award category FY 2007-08