Following newspaper reports that some contractors supplied by Hays are earning as much as £2,000 a day, RBS says it has little or no influence over the rates earned by contractors.

An RBS spokesman told Recruiter: “The rate we pay for these individuals is set by the market on advice from our recruitment consultants, so we have to pay what the market rate is.

“We can challenge this and we do as a matter of course, but ultimately there is only so much influence we can have over this.”

The comments came after newspaper reports that an employee of Hays revealed pay rates of some 3,000 temporary contractors working at RBS, which is 84% owned by the tax payer.

The information was inadvertently sent to 800 recipients at RBS. It is understood the highest earning contractors are those with specialist accounting and IT expertise.

According to newspaper reports, Hays has apologised to RBS and launched an internal investigation. Hays told The Times: “We are taking the unauthorised release of this information extremely seriously.”

Recruiter understands that fewer than 10 of the 3,000 contractors whose pay rates were disclosed are paid £2,000 a day.

The spokesman told Recruiter he couldn’t comment on whether, with this information coming to light, RBS planned to ask Hays to review its contracts and rates.

He said that RBS’s concern was “the security of information and the wider relationship with Hays rather the specifics of individual contracts”.

And he declined to rule out the possibility that contractors supplied by other agencies earned similar amounts. “These are very specialist senior contractors, and in that sense the contractors with Hays are more likely to be more highly paid than other contractors.”

The RBS spokesman refused to say whether the £2,000 a day that newspaper reports say some contractors earned was the pay rate or the rate Hays charges RBS. “This remains confidential,” he says.

Asked whether it wouldn’t be cheaper and more cost effective to use some of the 2,000 staff who are expected to lose their jobs in GBM [RBS’s investment bank] in the next 18 months to carry out the work done by the highly paid contractors, the spokesman said that some of the 3,000 contractors would be included in any future job losses at GBM.

Recruiter gave Hays the opportunity to respond, but as recruiter.co.uk went to press, Hays had not replied to our questions.