Look at what happens when the Daily Mail and/or opposition MPs find out that an IT boffin is being paid more than a nurse. They stoke unjustified outrage until the hospital is forced to outsource to Crapita to hide its costs.
It would definitely seem reasonable to shield a high-tech risk-taking organisation from overtly political attacks that ultimately jeapordise its mission - even the need to accept and handle FOI requests, correctly applying an existing exemption, will introduce more friction on an R&D-heavy, tech first organisation. If the programme managers are expected to spend a day a week checking FOIs to ensure the exemption claimed is accurate and valid, this just detracts from the mission.
It's strange this is the aspect people hare focused most on - one easy way to avoid the issue would be to set it up within the MOD as a defence research facility (as DARPA was). Making it more civilian focused may give better outcomes, but you raise a good point that if this initiative is held back by inability to pay market rate (and performance bonuses), it may end up worse in the long run.
But you're probably right that public visibility has spoiled other perks that are otherwise part of a functioning job—travel to conferences, overnight stays, on-site food outlets; it feels like they've all been cut from fear that they could end up as a bile-filled column in the Mail.
As an aside, I've gladly said to many people that as an IT boffin, nurses should be paid more than me!
A general "pay scale" mindset is also part of the issue - when you try to put everyone on a scale that was designed around a model of generalists, it starts to fall apart when you need specialists skills that industry also wants. Government simply won't get the skills it requires, with the experience needed, if it insists on paying a 10-year experienced senior engineer with niche skills less than their non-technical generalist senior.
> But you're probably right that public visibility has spoiled other perks that are otherwise part of a functioning job—travel to conferences, overnight stays, on-site food outlets; it feels like they've all been cut from fear that they could end up as a bile-filled column in the Mail.
This is definitely a factor too. There is often a culture of cost-cutting in the wider public sector for the purpose of "being seen to be frugal". I've watched people (in their best intentions to be frugal) waste huge amounts of money, through short-sighted attempts to save money through false economies. Think people booking hotels dozens of miles from their destination to get what they perceive to be a cheaper room, without then thinking about the travel cost and time. Think booking a budget airline ticket to get to the wrong side of London, then rushing across London to get to the airport late for an expensive long-haul flight they now had to re-book... Or booking a hand-baggage only fare for a flight they know they'll take hold luggage for, then paying airport rates to check in luggage.
I've seen dedicated public servants doing early morning rush-hour trips to London to avoid staying overnight, because their "hotel allowance" per night wasn't enough to stay in London. The cost-differential between their ensuing peak-time early morning train ticket and an off-peak one the night before was such that they could have covered the "surplus hotel cost", had a nice dinner, and still had change left over. Computer says "no", common sense says "yes". All, as you say, to ensure nobody is seen as benefiting from anything remotely resembling a "perk".
All this makes it really hard to hire in good people, sadly.
One hundred percent... we probably all have stories of this that could go on forever! For my part, one of the most costly ways I've seen it manifest is a culture of treating staff time as free in comparison with any expenditure. Getting a purchase—even say a £10 book—is a protracted process that ends up draining hours of multiple peoples' time trying to find and convince a budget holder and get the right forms signed, and even that often doesn't meet with success. It's a double-whammy for wastage because there's not just the gross cost of funding staff doing this, but the opportunity cost of lost productivity on whatever else they would have been working on.
