Salaries in Brighton and Hove are more than £3,000 below the average wage in Britain - despite the city being one of the most expensive places to live in the country.

The average salary for a job advertised in the city over the past six months is £28,749, £3,219 less than the average British salary of £31,969.

Jobs search engine AllTheTopBananas.com analysed 3,118 jobs advertised in Brighton between June and November this year.

The search engine analysed other towns and cities across Sussex including Crawley, Eastbourne, Worthing, Chichester, Hastings and Lewes.

Despite a drop in the average salary of £800, Hastings fared best with an average salary for adertised jobs of £30,141.

Eastbourne came out worse with an average salary of £22,894.

More surprising was Crawley's average salary which went from £29,472 to £23,715, a huge drop of almost £6,000.

In Worthing, the average salary worked out at £25,733, a rise of just over £100, in Chichester the average salary is £24,703, a drop of more than £100 and in Lewes the salary has risen from £25,110 to £25,754.

Tony Mernagh, executive director of Brighton and Hove Economic Partnership, said salaries in the city had been below the national average for a long time.

He said: ìThe reason why it is like that is almost certainly because we do not have enough high paid jobs to pull that average up.

ìOur low paid jobs are no worse than anywhere else but a lot of people do them.

ìIt is obviously a bad thing and one of the things we need to do is increase the the number of high paid jobs in the city so people do not have to commute to London to work.î He said people have a much better vested interest if they work where they live and this would also free up entry level jobs which are filled by people who are far more qualified than they need to be for the job they are doing.

Mr Mernagh said: ìOne of the priorities of the city is to increase the number of high paid jobs.

ìWe would look at the sectors which pay more and try to attract more companies like that to Brighton and Hove. Companies like digital media, e-learning, digital content, gaming and gaming software all pay well.

ìWe need to do two things so that businesses like that will come here. They want a fantastic quality of life, a well-qualified workforce and they want grade A quality office space.

ìThe office space is where we stumble a bit because we have a lot of it but it was built in the sixties and seventies.

ìThere are a number of options but none of them have planning consent.î What is the worst job you have ever done? Tell The Argus at www.theargus.co.uk