Mar 2011 17

Responses to the Town Hall Rich List45

The Town Hall Rich List always gets quite a reaction.  There has been some great coverage, Elle – 19 from Hertfordshire – told the Sun she was stunned to hear 48 council fat-cats had each received more than £250,000 last year. She said: “It brought to mind a quote by John Morley, first Viscount Morley of Blackburn, who said ‘In my creed, waste of public money is like the sin against the Holy Ghost’.”

There has been some criticism.  The LGA argue that it is just a blip, a result of a lot of redundancy payments.  That is certainly part of the story but there are three reasons the findings are still very serious.  First, the amounts being paid have been high and rising for a number of years, as we have shown in the Town Hall Rich List series.  The sustained pattern of generous rewards for senior staff at local authorities can’t be explained away as a blip.  Second, the rise this year can’t entirely be explained by redundancy payments.  We looked at the average for all those in post for the full two years and found an average 3.8 per cent rise in total remuneration.  Finally, it is important those redundancy payments are properly scrutinised.  We have seen real scandals before with excessive payments to council bosses leaving their posts, like the long running anger over the scandal of Barbara Lockwood’s £364,000 payout at the East Riding  of Yorkshire council.

We’ve also had a call from the London Borough of Hillingdon for a correction.  Basically they are complaining because some of the information they supplied is incomplete, and as a result the percentage change figure couldn’t be complete either.  Here’s our little e-mail exchange:

First, after she initially got in contact complaining the report was inaccurate Emma Boon clarified the situation:

Hi,Thanks for your feedback on the Town Hall Rich List 2011, I have checked the data for Hillingdon and it is correct.  We do not twist information and it is all rigorously checked.   You might not like the way it is presented but it is part of a consistent methodology to allow fair comparisons between different years and staff.  Here is the full report in case you have not seen original source: http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/thrl2011.pdf

The notes next to the DCEO’s details on p145 clearly state that 08-09 figs are a part year salary and give full year equivalent.  The percentage increase relates to the two columns to the left of it (total remuneration 08-09 and 09-10) and is correct in keeping with our methodology so there is no correction to be made.

Best,
Emma

EMMA BOON
Campaign Director | The TaxPayers' Alliance

Charlotte Stamper, Public Relations Officer at the council, wasn’t happy:

Hi Emma,Thanks for the reply.

I understand what you've done but your methodology is wrong - in this one example you are comparing apples with pears unfortunately. Where you have the figure for 2008-09, the part year figure does not include pension contribution which it should do given that the heading for the column is 'remuneration' and that you have included it in the 2009-10 column.

If you are not including pension contributions, the columns should read 'salary' and not 'remuneration'.

So the figure for the pro-rata salary and pension contribution in column 2008-09 should be £159,420. We are not disputing the figure of £165,000 for 2009-10.

Whether or not it is your methodology, comparing part year salaries without pension contributions with pro-rata salaries including pension contributions is not only wrong, but very misleading.

Please make this correction so the percentage increase column reads 3.5 per cent.

Many thanks. Please let me know if I can help further.
Charlotte

Charlotte Stamper
Public Relations Officer
Corporate Communications
London Borough of Hillingdon

Here is my reply:

Charlotte,Emma has asked me to respond to your request for a correction.  The report perfectly represents the information that was available to us, so one will not be forthcoming.  We will by all means publish additional information if your council wants to be open with its residents and make possible proper scrutiny of remuneration for all senior staff.  But that will not amount to a correction, as there is nothing to correct.

In many cases staff served only partial years in one of the years studied, leading to high percentage changes.  Or we only had partial information.  Others received significant redundancy payments.  We included the percentage changes for all those in the Rich List to ensure the report was complete but also detailed notes so readers could get the fullest picture we could provide.  To complement that, we worked out an average which only included those in post for the full two years.

Your council’s accounts for 2009-10 are attached.  On page 37 the term “Remuneration Band” is used as the header for a table column which delineates the remuneration of staff, excluding pension contributions.  So the London Borough of Hillingdon uses the same terminology that the London Borough of Hillingdon is asking us to issue a correction for using.

Before you start attacking external research perhaps you should check these things over with your finance department, or even better read the accounts yourself.  You would find other interesting information like the substantial losses the Borough has suffered from putting its residents’ money in Icelandic Banks – despite clear warnings they weren’t safe.  Clearly the council’s senior staff are earning their high pay. I will be publishing this e-mail on our website, in the interests of a transparent debate.  And residents can decide if the Borough’s significant publicity budget is well spent.

Best,
Matt Sinclair

MATTHEW SINCLAIR
Director | The TaxPayers' Alliance

We then received the following response:

Matthew,

Thank you for your email. Hillingdon Council is very open with our residents and we publish senior staff pay on our website and in our council magazine. The problem is not with this information being available; it is with it being presented in a warped way.

I take on board your point about the wording of 'remuneration' but that still does not explain why the columns in your table give such a different impression to what the reality actually is.

Burying this information in a large report has the potential to mislead and as you may understand, residents will be very alarmed to read that an officer is having a pay rise of nearly 50 per cent when in fact it was only 3.5 per cent.

I am disappointed you have resorted to petty comments rather than adequately addressing what are genuine concerns.

Please do include my replies to your emails on your website.

Charlotte

Charlotte Stamper
Public Relations Officer
Corporate Communications
London Borough of Hillingdon

To which we replied:

Charlotte,
The notes are no less prominent than the increase in remuneration. They are in the same row of the same table. We haven’t buried them at all.
We have just published to our blog, with your earlier reply, and to be honest I don’t think this little exchange is worth adding to that.
Best,
Matt
MATTHEW SINCLAIR
Director | The TaxPayers' Alliance

And finally:

Matthew,

In the interests of transparency and fairness, please include all correspondence, including this and my previous email.

Many thanks
Charlotte

Charlotte Stamper
Public Relations Officer
Corporate Communications
London Borough of Hillingdon

Clearly, their devastating arguments have us on the ropes.

If you aren’t impressed by attempts to evade accountability over senior staff pay, you might want to let the council leader know, Councillor Raymond Puddifoot. You can e-mail him here.

Related Posts

  • Blarg1987

    Now I do agree it is a good idea, to publish this data, but will you also be naming and shaming tax avoiders which cost the tax payer billions of pounds as we have to make up for the short fall in tax reciepts through general taxation, and also CEO’s who’s main income come from tax payers contracts who are on hundreds of thousands if not millions of pounds a year all thanks to us the tax paying public?

  • Steve Collins

    I’m still confused as to why privately-funded lobbyists, such as the TPA, have set themselves up as the arbiter of what does and does not constitute excessive pay in the public sector? Who’s to say that the salaries contained in this report are not the going rate? You? If so, on what grounds?

    Will the TPA also be publishing an equivalent list for all those morbidly obese cats that are paid many times more off the back of taxpayers’ money? I’m talking about the private sector companies that derive a major portion of their revenue from the public purse from their outsourcing activities and from subsidy.

    I very much doubt it.

  • Pingback: The TaxPayers’ Alliance ‘rich list’ « Charlotte Stamper's blog

  • http://twitter.com/MatofKilburnia Mat M

    How much do you earn Matthew Sinclair? You claim to represent ME as a taxpayer which is one reason why your total remuneration is public interest, you’re also attacking the pay of others so in the interests of your credibility you must tell us how much you, and all senior staff at the TPA earn.

    • Orac54aq

      As Matthew Sinclair isn’t paid out of taxpayers’ money, it’s none of anyone’s business what he earns. As Council Chief Executives are paid out of money confiscated from the taxpayer, the taxpayer has a right to know.

      How difficult is that distibnction to grasp?

      • David Brown

        I agree that government spending needs scrutiny but not for the benefit of lobby groups promoting agendas that are detrimental to the public good.

        Matthew Sinclair is supported by large businesses who want to control local services, creating huge profits at the tax payers expense. Serco, Enterprise and other companies cream money from us that could be more efficiently used.

        Both traditional left and right wing thinking on this issue is wide of the mark.

  • Tom Spencer87

    What is ‘excessive’ pay? Pay is based on the market and what organisations need to pay to attract the proper calibre of candidate. By what criteria have the TPA judged these positions not to be worth £250k?

    I’d like to know. Matthew, perhaps to could enlighten me?

    • Markstr

      I’ll enlighten you. Clerk number 1 or as they are laughably referred to as chief executives should earn no more than £50-£60k. Now if they feel that they are worth so much more then test the market to see how many private companies (not those that they have nice relationships with by wasting our money on council contracts) are willing to employ them on a salary of £150-£200k. For every company that makes a genuine offer they could have a salary increase of say £10k. For every company that does not make any genuine offer they could lose £1k.

  • http://twitter.com/mjhsinclair Matthew Sinclair

    @Steve Collins and @Blarg1987,

    We’ve done a number of reports looking at the issue of contracts with private sector firms and whether taxpayers are getting good value in certain areas. For example, see Taxpayer funded lobbying and political campaigning and Big Government Projects Over Budget.

    @Mat M,

    People have to pay council tax and therefore senior staff in local authorities are paid at the expense of taxpayers. That means people have a legitimate interest in knowing how much, to come to a judgement on whether they are getting good value. No one has to donate to the TPA, you have no legitimate interest in how much I am paid. However, I can reassure you that I would not come close to making it onto the Town Hall Rich List.

    @Tom Spencer87,

    Ultimately that judgement can only be made by local taxpayers. That’s why we have put extensive work into campaigning for greater transparency – and publish full disaggregated data in our reports. This information wasn’t published in councils’ accounts until TPA campaigning and a victory in a case with the Information Commissioners’ Office led to politicians pledging to require publication. However, given the other failures we have seen at local authorities, and the fact that benchmarking is too often done by the Society Of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE), I think remuneration is excessive in many cases.

    Best,
    Matt

    • Blarg1987

      Thanks for that, but do you have a definitive list naming and shaming individual CEO’s or companies who have gained large public sector contracts and comparison just out of curiosity.

      Cheers

    • Dave

      I welcome the publication of the Town Hall Rich List, which I think is a useful contribution to our knowledge of pay levels at the top of councils.

      However, any such report should present a comparison that may properly be made. Explanatory notes, which I agree are fairly clearly presented, are nonetheless easily missed by people who (like me) tend to look at the headline percentage increases. TPA surely understands this every bit as clearly as I do.

      I regard Matthew Sinclair’s defence as wholly unconvincing, and the concerns of the council press officer broadly reasonable.

  • Double Gloucester

    I’m a strong TPA supporter but I’m with Emma from Hillingdon on this, Matthew. Your figures must show the true increase in salary year on year if they are to be believable. By making a 3.5% pay increase look like a 50% pay increase you actually undermine the credibility of your own data. People react in outrage, the true position is then explained to them, and thereafter they take all TPA figures with a large pinch of salt.

  • Charlie H

    For me, ‘excessive pay,’ is when you have a bunch of chumps, whose skill set would have them earning far less in the private sector, earning hundreds of thousands in town halls. There are a lot of factors that come into play but I have met many, many individuals who work in town halls and are earning a fortune, who when you meet them come across as uninspiring and, for want of a better word, wet!

    • Macaw090

      Idiot.

      • joe davy

        Genius (lol)

        • joe davy

          Macaw090 please note heavy irony in my last post, often difficult to get across in print but believe me, it is there!

    • Dave

      I’m not in favour of excessive pay in any sector of the economy, and I am prepared to accept that the maintenance of large remuneration packages at senior levels in the public sector sits very uneasily beside the cuts being made at lower levels and in services provided.

      However, who is Charlie H to determine that we “have a bunch of chumps, whose skill set would have them earning far less in the private sector, earning hundreds of thousands in town halls”? Where’s his evidence for this comparison of skill sets?

      I have worked in both the public and the private sectors. Let me assure Charlie H that the public sector most certainly does not possess a monopoly of “chumps”. It’s just that those in the private sector often earn vastly more.

      • Markstr

        dave, the difference is that wer have to pay via our taxes for the chumps in local council.

        • Dave

          Yes we do, and I don’t defend “chumps”. Where people perform poorly, especially at senior levels, they should go.

          However, it occurs to me that I’m currently paying rather a lot of tax to support “chumps” in the private sector. My pension fund is suffering because private sector “chumps” are delivering poor shareholder value. And, both directly and indirectly, I’m routinely paying for goods and services at prices inflated by the overblown salaries of private sector “chumps”.

          As I’ve said elsewhere, the public sector does not possess a monopoly of incompetence and overpayment. And I’m paying heavily for it in all sectors. There is no “difference”.

  • Andyourpointiswhatexactly

    An average increase of 3.8% — hardly a massive rise, not least when you consider many staff will have had their workloads added to as other staff have been made redundant.

    • Markstr

      3.8% for £200k salary without NI and pension contributions, holiday entitlement, sick pay, lollies to twins twons etc £7,600 plus all the rest above, let’s say £20k increase. How many years worth of council tax is that for you?

      • Orac54

        I work in the private sector and my pay has increased by 4.5% since 2008. Hands up who has got an increase of less than 3.8% per annum in the private sector?

  • PT

    Forty eight serial snouters taking in excess of £12,000,000 out of the public purse in just one year? Come on, it’s only taxpayers money after all, why would anyone begrudge these ‘public servants’ making a living wage at our expense?

  • Anonymous3

    Why shouldn’t government workers be paid well???

    • John

      They should (be paid well, that is). How well? However, many of these salaries look grossly over the top to me. I’ve worked in local gov as well as private sector; I honestly don’t believe we need to pay anything like these sums for what are, in fact, extremely secure posts.

      • Markstr

        Fingers crossed that eric pickles will sort many of them out. Let’s see how many frontline staff the so called council elite are prepared to sacrifice to keep their troughs full. Oink! Oink!

        • Anonymous

          If Haringey is anything to go by, the answer is “lots”.

    • Joe davy

      The deal used to be quite simple- you work for the state and have job security, excellent pensions and an easy ride at work compared to the private sector who had job insecurity, had to provide their own pensions and had to fight like hell to succeed in a world where you could earn more than the public sector.

      But now the public sector want job security, gold plated pensions and the same pay as the private sector. (and of course a cushy ride!)

      Well excuse me but NO, NOT ACCEPTABLE. The tax paying public do not agree with you, or your ideology so frankly you can “jog on”, not today thank you. We are not buying!!!

      • Dave

        Joe Davy is fully entitled to his opinion, and I am quite sure that others share his views. However, I fail to understand his authority to speak for “the tax paying public” in quite such a simplistic and all-embracing manner, especially when many of these tax payers are the ones whose public sector salaries and pensions are on the chopping block.

        Bear in mind too that, whilst there may well be excesses, there are also many public sector workers whose remuneration packages are rather less than “gold plated”.

        I have pensions in both the public and the private sectors. Neither is “gold plated” although the public sector one is, I accept, the better of the two.

        However, neither of my pensions compares at all well with the “diamond encrusted” handouts provided to all too many private sector leaders, quite regardless of their performance.

        • Markstr

          More fool you for believing the pensions hype that politicians promoted since the 80′s. It is no good whining on message boards, it is your MP who needs to get an earful on a regular basis. Without organisations like TPA many people would simply be mumbling into their cereal about issues like this.

          • Dave

            Oh dear! When sensible argument runs out, resort to abuse, eh?

            Call me a fool if you like, but I’m no more whining on this website than you are. Indeed, I try to be constructive. I accept that TPA has performed a useful function but I don’t believe or agree with everything it says. It has an agenda.

            As for “believing the pensions hype”, I don’t. The difference is that I don’t believe it from CBI, IoD, etc., either.

          • Markstr

            Then what made you start the pension? It was no more abuse than saying it is Saturday today, but if you were offended i apologise. What exactly will their agenda cost us. i don’t exactly what the cost of the LGA agenda is costing us, but it has got to be billions.

      • Markstr

        Well of course they do. Where else could you reward incompetence,unaccountability, greed and laziness with such largesse except for public servants.

        • Dave

          Incompetence, unaccountability, greed and laziness are, I suggest, routinely rewarded throughout all sectors and levels of business. It is manifestly untrue to suggest that these traits are somehow absent in the private sector whilst they run amok in the public sector.

          • Markstr

            So what frontline local and county services are the private sector affecting by their so called largessse.

          • Dave

            That’s not the point I’m making. But I’d say private sector organisations like Capita have been paid through the nose by all of us, often for services no better or worse than those they took over.

            However, my central point is quite simply that there’s heaps of poor practice in all sectors – public AND private. I’m more than willing to accept the need for public sector reform, but please don’t tell me that these same excesses don’t occur in the private sector. They do.

          • Markstr

            Is it not the local authority who also have contracted to the likes of capita etc. How about the housing associations whose staff routinely cross over from one side to the other.

          • Orac54

            The big difference is that waste in the private sector tends to be weeded out by competition. Market forces do their work. There’s no market in the public sector, so it bloats. But as the public sector is by definition mostly funded by those who work in the private sector, they have a right to

            a) expect public sector employees – but especially the highly-paid ones – to feel the same pressures as them and

            b) be accountable

          • Blarg1987

            As dispatches showed the other night on channel 4, private sector contracts in which CEO’s get paid millions of punds (most of which comes from the tax payer) causes lower pay and conditions at the bottom end of the pay ladder which decreases productivity and moral, if they were paid the same as these people in the public sector, say 150,000, the tax payer of local councils still get millions of pounds back.
            The problem is there is no accountability of these companies unless you are a shareholder or large investor which the majority of us are not, and as a small shareholder like the majority of the british public are, I must add I also want coroprete greed in the private sector decreased as it is at the expense of my share dividen and more then likely your future pension.

    • Markstr

      They should at £6.00 ph.

  • http://twitter.com/benfurber Ben Furber

    Thanks for writing this post Matthew, arguing with a press officer trying to do her job certainly looks like a good use of your time. Especially when you threaten her and try to get people to grass her up to her boss’s boss’s boss – nice one.

    So what percentage of Hillingdon’s budget is spent on publicity? Bet it has gone up this year, not like the council is having to make massive savings and has been letting staff go.

    I’m also so glad you put her name on your website, that’s really professional, she totally deserves that too. How dare she suggest that you guys go something wrong – the nerve!

  • http://declineofthelogos.wordpress.com/ Adam Bell

    Actually, their arguments do have you on the ropes. They’re accepting their errors in their terminology in a reasonable and fair fashion, and you’re refusing to do the same – and then attempting to derail the conversation with other issues. Bizarrely, you then seem to believe you win the debate, despite other commenters on this thread pointing out that you haven’t.

    What an odd chap you are. Bet your funders can’t wait for Elliot to get back.

  • realist

    The TPA specialises in micro analysis of data which it seeks to present as significant. Thus vast amounts of space is devoted to the minute total of council staff payed over £100,000 which is are portrayed as an astonishing catastrophe for the public purse. The fact that, in dodgy deal after dodgy deal, public money is shovelled by the ton into the coffers of private sector companies which then pay not hundreds of thousands but tens of millions to their entirely undeserving senior staff merits no attention whatsoever. This tells us all we need to know about the TPA agenda. The way tax is avoided and public money is abused by the private sector is a form of welfare dependency which dwarfs all the favourite topics of the gutter press and the TPA benefit fraud, council non jobs and all the other right wing diversions. Of course some public servants are greedy and overpaid, but everyone knows they are rank amateurs in this compared to the squadrons of heros of capitalism wih their snouts buried in the trough.

  • PT

    The publicity over the weekend afforded to Andrea Hill of Suffolk County Council, just about kills off any apologist argument in support of the vastly overpaid fat-cats who are ripping-off the British taxpayer. Not only does she skirt a basic £218K per annum, but she now charges the taxpayer for her studio taken (communications) photographs! God help us what else she might be charging the public at large – the mind boggles!
    Time to call a complete hold on this terrible abuse of public funds.

  • Ted

    Just another Tory stooge, why indeed waste valuable time…