31st January 2013, 06:05 PM
The truth is that the rationale for the RO link to minima has always been a bit of a stretch. The argument goes that firms that don't pay above the minima "may have difficulty recruiting or retaining appropriately skilled staff" to work at the required standard. This is a different thing to finding out whether they do in fact have such difficulty, or indeed whether that difficulty has an effect on the standards of the work of the RO. To me the most hopeful part of the announcement was the intention to look at FAME as a an employer body which actually has the power to address pay across the profession - in many ways IfA has had to make the running in a lot of areas where FAME would be the obvious forum.