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Top earners

The name, job title, grade and salary level of senior civil servants with salaries of more than £150,000 were released today. This is the first time that some of this information has ever been made public.

The top earners on the list are:

• John Fingleton - Chief Executive Office of Fair Trading: £275,000 - £279,999
• David Nicholson - NHS Chief Executive: £255,000 - £259,999
• Joe Harley - IT Director General & Chief Information Officer DWP: £245,000 - £249,999
• Sir Jock Stirrup - Chief of the Defence Staff and Air Chief Marshal: £240,000 - £244,999
• Gus O'Donnell - Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service: £235,000 - £239,999
• Jeremy Beeton - Director General, Government Olympic Executive: £225,000 - £229,999
• Stephen Laws - First Parliamentary Counsel: £225,000 - £229,999
• Paul Hemsley - Director of Finance, Ordnance Survey: £220,000 - £224,999
• Clare Chapman - Director General of Workforce, DH: £220,000 - £224,999
• David Green - Director of Revenues and Customs Division, Crown Prosecution Service: £210,000 - £214,999
• Robert Parker - Parliamentary Counsel: £210,000 - £214,999

More names will follow from September as the government has promised to publish the name, grade, job title and annual pay rate for most senior civil servants and Non-Departmental Public Body officials with salaries higher than the lowest permissible in Pay Band 1 of the Senior Civil Service pay scale. (This is around £60,000 per year.)

• Download the civil service high earners list (PDF, 25K)

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• Download the civil service high earners list (CSV, 19K)

Future commitments to transparency

The prime minister has written to Cabinet ministers setting down commitments for making information public. These include:

• all new central government Information and Communication Technology (ICT) contracts to be published online from July 2010
• all new central government tender documents for contracts over £10,000 to be published on a single website from September 2010, with this information to be made available to the public free of charge
• new items of central government spending over £25,000 to be published online from November 2010
• all new central government contracts to be published in full from January 2011
• all UK international development spending over £25,000 to be published online from January 2011

Plans also cover local government spending and local crime data.

Public Sector Transparency Board

Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, will chair the new Public Sector Transparency Board based at the Cabinet Office. The Board will be responsible for setting open data standards across the public sector and developing the legal right to data.

Other board members will include Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, from the University of Southampton, and Tom Steinberg, founder of mySociety – some of the country’s leading experts and advocates on transparency and open data.