Council Spending Uncovered 4: The Town Hall Rich List 200833

You are very good at giving misleading information. I was included in the list of council staff that were paid more than £50k in your Jan list. You need to know that due to services being outsourced, and then redundancies the lis is now somewhat lower. At the same time services have been reduced to levels that are unsatisfactory. The comparisons you make to Govt ministers salaries and other people outside public service are wrong as you seem to ignore other expenses and extras that they enjoy. So if you want some credit, take the credit for this partly due to your inaccurate, much discredited, biased research.

It’s interesting to see you break this story in a week when the CEO of HBOS spent over £414,000 pounds on HBOS shares just PART of this year’s bonus. Would be good to see alist of CEOs who earn less than £25,000!

Tax payers have a right to know how much local officials are being paid and what their connections are with non-governmnetal organisations/charities. What saddens me even more is that Oxfam, the well-known anti-poverty charity which also campaigns to eradicate poverty in the United Kingdom, gives the appearance of becoming an arm of the Labour party. The deputy director and head of campaigns of Oxfam’s UK Poverty Programme loves publicly to condemn Conservative policy proposals. This Oxfam senior manager writes on her blog: “Some Tory councillor in Kent wants to sterilise benefits recipients. You know the people that write frothingly awful rightwing-as-fuck comments below any blogpost about the welfare state? Well, one of them actually got elected! Christ.” David Cameron’s appointment of Richard Balfe as his envoy to the trade union movement provides another opportunity for this Oxfam official to sneer at the Tories. She writes: “a Conservative envoy to the union movement. Note how the virulent anti-union rightwinger gets hushed up in the comments by the nodding heads.” She also wants to put more money in the pockets of families living below the poverty line whether in work or not through tax credits and benefits is, and is a staunch supporter of Gordon Brown’s tax credts, even though there is sufficient evidence to suggest that tax credits hide poverty rather than addressing it. What makes this Oxfam manager’s public statements about the Conservative party even more unacceptable is that she happens to be a Labour Councillor in Oxford and a local Labour party spokesperson on poverty in the UK. Isn’t there a conflict of interests here, I wonder.

I seem to remember some years back that local councils were faced with the choice of either raising the salaries of council employees to get a professional executive or elevating the role of councillors from volunteers with expenses reimbursed to local representatives paid a salary in recognition for the time required to make sure the council worked efficiently. Am I missing something here, or have we ended up with both financial burdens and no evidence of any meaningful improvement in services – in fact mostly the opposite. Now we have the sorry sight of councillors looking to jump on the ridiculous pension largesse enjoyed by council employees (catching up with the backlog of which is forming yet another significant part of this year’s inflation busting rise in council tax.) There is little evidence I can find in our local council of any effort being made to provide better services at cheaper costs – or manage the budget more efficiently. For example some £200,000 was wasted on an ill-thought out open-air concert last summer and all we had was an apology. No resignations, no firings, no demotions – no responsibility. Is it any wonder nobody takes any of them seriously anymore – apart from themselves. And there are enough of them – 26 in Mid-Sussex, or around 1 for every 2,000 people. If that was translated into Westeminster representation we would have more than 13,000 MP’s!!!

Here we go again, perpetuating the myth that “quality services” will arise if we hand over massive funds to Local Authorities.
Due to the incentive structures, LAs are incapable of providing anything that even approaches “quality”. The vast funds they already extract from us only go into quangos, bloat, pointless middle management, political correctness, plus (grudgingly) a few crummy services that are of any public value.
Let’s compare LA salaries with company directors: directors only get paid and keep their job if they deliver what their customers want. LA executives get paid regardless, and are usually rewarded for failure.

Paul Jacklin is completely wrong to suggest that council tax “goes up above the rate of inflation every year” because there is no incentive to improve. Councils have to meet increasing demands from the public for social care, improved roads etc etc AND yet the central Government cuts the level of support it gives to councils – especially in the South. Many councils have cut away the management layers and “back office staff”, saving millions of pounds and still keeping the front line services. West Sussex CC has saved £30m over the last two years doing this. The reason the council tax is going up is the poor levels of Government grant and above inflation cost increases of things like landfill tax and materials for road repairs. If you don’t want cuts in services then council tax has to go up to meet the shortfall in Government grants.

I don’t really know what all the fuss is about!! These people have been grossly overpaid since Adam was a lad!!
Still, let’s not worry too much because the European Union will soon be knocking them all out of touch.

Suffolk County Council has to be the worst offender; they have recently finished a multi-million glass palace in Ipswich and recruited a new chief executive at K220 per annum. Against public opinion, they are closing down all our excellent Middle Schools and, for those of us in rural areas, provide few or no services for their two-thirds of everybody’s council tax. Isn’t it time that this inneffectual and expensive layer of government was removed across Britain?

Here in sunny Milton Keynes we’ve had the Borough Council chief officer told to `resign or be sacked’-we’ve got the Borough’s chief education officer resigning (for `health’ reasons). A senior councillor falling on his sword- all three are because of a damning report on the failure of MKBC’s schools programme.One new school almost fell down! Less than fulsome apologies have been grudgingly ground-out but not by all!
It seems to me incredible that we have three simultaneous failures of such terribly talented `high-flyers’ said to be worthy of our trust and monetary largesse. The truth is they are just `people like us’ and not worthy of such high self-regard. They are cetainly not worthy of our high regard!

Why the pointless comparisons with the basic pay of the Prime Minister and Cabinet Ministers? We all know their basic pay, and the pay of MPs in general, is but one component of a generous package of pay and pensions and even more generous allowances they are desperate to keep secret.

BERNARD MOORE says “Here we go again, Local Authority bashing. If the public want quality services then they are going to have to pay for them”.
We get 1 star service yet we pay 5 star prices. All this rubbish about paying for top quality people is just a red herring. I doubt that one of the highly paid executives would last five minutes in the private sector. How many have been head hunted by private companies? These people are just a bunch of freeloaders riding the gravy train. Private companies wouldn’t give them the time of day. 100% increase in council tax in 10 years. Is there a 100% increase in service? I think not, though I bet some of these people have seen a 100% increase in salary. Like everyone in the public sector they think they are doing the world a favour just by turning up for work.
We are now taxed at the highest rate in history. There is going to come a point when the private sector cannot generate money as fast as the public sector spends it. I should think we’re getting close to that point now.

Bernard Moore: “If the public want quality services then they are going to have to pay for them”. The usual gravy train myth spouted by greedy government pigs with their snouts in the trough. The trouble is Bernard that the “quality services” are mostly piss poor and many of the “executives” on high salaries are mediocre at best. It’s a gravy train of exploitative greed. The fat cats earning these huge amounts are the same who decide on the number of redundancies for the poorer staff struggling further down the food chain. Disgusting! Indefensible! And you, Bernard Moore, if you are party to such blatent greed, should hang your head in shame, not dare to post comments attempting to defend these greedy bloodsuckers!

You are aware that publishing the details of 100K + pay is a statutory duty within the accounts?

As well as being monopoly providers of services, councils are also effectively monopoly purchasers as well, especially in social services. It is not surprising that they act as they do. Take Worcestershire Social Services as an example – they are fairly typical. Since the National Minimum Wage was introduced in 2002 it has risen cumulatively by 31%. Fees paid by WCC to providers of care services for adults with learning disabilities have risen only by 11%. Those services are predominantly provided by small businesses who don’t have the power to fight back, and whose employees are generally not well paid at the best of times. Wages are typically some 65-70% of costs, and service user/staff ratios are usually fixed, so ‘efficiency savings’ are not possible. This year, WCC are only increasing fees by 1% because they are “significantly under funded”. Yet your report shows salary increases for their fat cats of 5.9%-12.6%, and I bet their other staff have had decent pay increases as well. So those who actually provide the service suffer so the bureaucrats get their pay increases.
This is not fair, not good government, and not sustainable.
Local government has become an unsupervised law unto itself. It must be tackled.

This report doesn’t appear to be particularly well researched and shows considerable bias. There are huge problems with local government, many of which can be traced back to constant central government meddling. Without balance in research you’ll just supply more holes to pick out of your campaigns.
What we need is a like-for-like study across sectors, particularly the voluntary and community sector. VCS organisations are often funded through central and local government. The larger organisations pay similar wages to their senior management but have nowhere near the level of accountability that council employees will have for their actions.
It’s wrong to assume that taxation is the sole income stream for councils. From what I’ve seen council tax does not go anywhere near funding the entirety of a council’s work. Councils are responsible for a whole range of services that people are simply unaware of, or take for granted.
A large town council overseeing a population of around 300,000 will have an annual expenditure of around £350 million – but will have around £1.3 in receipts from Council Tax.
Many councils are largely reliant on competetive funding streams for a variety of services. Monies like Lottery Funding, European Interventionist funding and funding from trusts and foundations. Many services like museums, youthwork, sports development and community services are entirely funded by these sources.
There are also commercial operations within Councils competing in the open market for services like street cleansing, refuse collection social housing and social care.
I don’t want to come across as an apologist for local government actions. But there is a need for balance and accuracy in comparative data if campaigning is to get anywhere. This report doesn’t really provide that.

I wrote this letter to the Hereford Times. As usual, it was not published. This is because the paper is now controlled by New Labour sympathisers (ex Trinity Mirror Group Executives):
‘In the same week that I received notification that my Council Tax for 2008-9 will be equivalent to my nett State Pension, I read that Herefordshire Council’s former Chief Executive was the eighth highest paid Council employee in England.
Having rid itself of one overpaid irrelevance, it appears that the Council has now hired twelve more ‘Directors’ at a salary of over £100,000 apiece. Who actually voted for this insanity?’
I read the last item in the Leominster Journal, an independent free newspaper.
In the Hereford Times, none of this was disclosed, but there was an article disputing the Taxpayers’ Alliance Rich List, notably Neil Pringle. As you may know, this person was Chief Executive who had to leave the Council when it was revealed that he had an inappropriate relationship with one of his own employees, who, in turn was involved in a computer system debacle costing Herefordshire Taxpayers £4million. He left witha large pension as is customary for employees protected by public sector unions.