A lot of “Oink Oink” at the County Hall Trough

This week The Guardian announced; “Pay frozen for 1.4m council workers” but that’s just the front line staff who are suffering the fiscal constraint, the CEOs have still got their noses firmly stuck in the trough…

It was revealed yesterday that Paul Walker, the CEO of Hartlepool Borough Council, who is currently paid a salary of £168,000 pa, is to receive a £10,000.00 pay rise, backdated to April 2009. Obviously residents and council staff alike are outraged. The proposal has rightly been branded as “scandalous and disgusting”. The increase in his remuneration package actually equates to nearly as much as the annual salary of some of his staff, how can that be right?

BBC: More than 9,000 public sector employees are earning a higher wage than the prime minister… (Read more)

The BBC database (download) contains the remuneration details of nearly 40,000 individuals working in the public sector who were paid £100,000 or more in the financial year 2009/10 or 2008/09. It makes for some interesting reading.

43% of council chiefs got paid more than £150,000 last year. The Communities Secretary Rt.Hon. Eric Pickles MP was quoted recently as saying that staff salaries needed to be “democracy proofed”. He also said councils needed to be sure “they didn’t sully their reputation by taking decisions behind closed doors” and “reward chief executives when they should be focusing resources on protecting frontline services”.

Locally, the CEO of North Yorkshire County Council is paid around £50k more than the Chief Constable and the pay band average for a headteacher in the county is £117,500.00 pa. All this at a time when the Local Authority and Police Authority are announcing sweeping cuts and staff redundancy.

BBC News: Millions of pounds of cuts to jobs and services have been announced by councils and police in North Yorkshire… (Read more)

Some would say the constant driver of people’s disgust about pay structures within local authorities is simply a matter of jealousy. There may be a very small element of that however; continuing to financially reward those individuals who have controlled and directed the economic melt-down and demise of our public services can’t be right. Can it?

Yet another clear case of the pigs looking after number one and bollocks to the rest me thinks!