2nd opinion: Heroes with five zeros?

I have become an avid consumer of a special kind of pornography. When I am in a strange town, it's as if I'm taken over by a primal urge. I'm propelled down the high street, to glance furtively into certain windows; I stand there checking no one is watching me in my shame, then turn to gratify my lust – for house prices.

I can't help myself. It's all those noughts behind the £ sign. What a turn-on. Just how much does a terraced two-bed fetch here; what sort of discount are they offering for houses near the river; how do prices compare with that centre of sin, London?

I must also own up to a similar vice that has been creeping up on me. I indulge it weekly when Housing Today drops on the doormat and I open it at the back to look at the job ads before anything else. You see, my latest passion is finding out what people in the public and non-profit sector get paid. That teasing phrase "six-figure package" – what exquisite delight.

Much fuss was made the other week about Bradford council offering £200,000 for a new chief executive, more than the prime minister gets. But the issue, really, is that since the ad specified someone with high-level local government experience, the pool from which the candidate has to come is quite small. The salary will not draw in anyone new, merely up the earnings of someone already in the game.

Are there any objective criteria for such awards? I did a little calculation. Bradford, with half a million people, pays its council chief £200,000; and as a metropolitan district it has school, social services and regeneration responsibilities. South Kesteven, the Lincolnshire district, is offering nearly £86,000. Its population is a quarter of Bradford's but it is offering 43% of Bradford's salary, with no major service responsibilities. Curious.

Housing appointments throw up disparities, too. Ridgehill, the stock transfer association in Hertfordshire that is joining William Sutton, wants a chief executive at £72,000. That's £14.40 a year for each dwelling managed, or a salary-to-turnover ratio of some 0.51%. Minster General is willing to pay £58,000. It's smaller. So that's £32.20 a dwelling. Family Housing in Birmingham is willing to pay its director of operations £26.10 a dwelling and Bield in Edinburgh wants a chief executive at £5.40 per tenant.

Meaningless calculations, you will say, ignoring the subtle differences in organisational form, cost of living and so on between these different bodies. Well, maybe, but might it also be that boards are swayed by recruitment consultants and pick up ideas of a going rate. Such anomalies (if that is what they are) are not peculiar to housing. You can earn £10,000 a year more directing communications for the Bart's health trust than you can running the Dorset ambulance service, with its 540 staff and 77,000 emergency calls a year. Is communication between Bart's and the public really so much more onerous, or is it that many more people want to manage ambulances in the West Country? Can cost of living alone explain such differences?

No government, especially this one, is going to want to delve too deeply into the mystery of remuneration – a royal commission on differential rewards, say. There is, in fact, a commission of sorts looking at local government pay, albeit for the lower ranks. Yet there are more questions to be asked. Does anyone in public service (including social housing) need more than £X a year to motivate them, to stop them diving off into the private sector? Of course not. The problem is deciding what value to put on that X.