OXFORD University vice-chancellor Louise Richardson tells the Commons Education Committee that her “salary of complete emoluments, including pension”, to a total of £430,000 should not be subject to regulation but rather “the focus should be on the process” (Oxford Mail, February 22).

Prof Richardson has always argued over her two years in office that her pay package is consistent with global market norms and has to  be “competitive” to ensure  the best people, presumably meaning people like herself, are likely to apply.

Fine, but could she perhaps also say how fortunate she is to be at the top of a very privileged top table when it comes to pay. Prof Richardson will know that Oxford is riven by stark divisions between rich and poor, with at least 8,000 children in the city living in extreme poverty, not because their parents are without work, rather that they are on poverty wages in one of the most expensive cities in Europe. Arguably even more children in Oxfordshire are subject to destructively low levels of household income in what community thinker and activist Richard Bryant has termed “structural inequalities in income distribution...reproduced and embedded in local communities”.

Prof Richardson has variously conceded that many Oxford University and college employees are poorly paid but she doesn’t want “to reduce what we do to simple matrices”. Well poverty and deprivation are certainly matrices, of the very worst kind. Of course Prof Richardson wasn’t talking to the Education Committee about Oxford as a whole, but how much does she really know about the city and the county in which she now lives in a fine grace and favour establishment in North Oxford? Not her job to think beyond her immediate duties and responsibilities cannot be an acceptable answer.

BRUCE ROSS-SMITH
Bowness Avenue, Headington