Chancellor George Osborne has announced that public sector pay will be frozen for two years for those earning more than £21,000 a year.

The move is designed to curb public spending as the coalition government seeks to address the UK’s deficit.

The freeze was welcomed by Richard Banks, co-founder of employment consultancy Careerplan4.me, who said: “It’s just an injection of the reality that the private sector has had to deal with for the last couple of years.”

But Gillian Hibberd, immediate past president of the Public Sector People Managers’ Association, which represents more than 1,000 senior HR professionals, disagreed. She told Recruiter: “The two year pay freeze was slightly unexpected – we expected it to be one year.

“It feels like a long, slow poison. When we tell people to make big changes, we tell them to make it short and sharp.

“There’s a perception that the public sector is one homogenous whole – it’s not. For example, there are teachers who will be part-way through three year deals which they have negotiated, that will have their pay frozen.”

The chancellor also announced implied cuts in central government departmental budgets of 25% over the next four years (with the exception of Health and International Aid).

John Wilson, from interim recruiter Russam GMS’s public sector division, told Recruiter: ‘It’s definitely going to be tougher: there are not going to be same number of opportunities in the public sector. However, the pressure in the public sector is to be more cost effective, and to do more with less, and this is an area where interim managers have got proven ability.”