Council Salaries
Roger Helm asks:
"Who are the 9 Greenwich council staff, reported in the Standard this week, as earning 100,000+ a year. What do they do for us each day to justify this money."
This is possibly more a question for another website, GreenwichWatch - www.greenwichwatch.blogspot.com - than me. Annoyingly I didn't see the Standard article so I don't know the context but I'd certainly be interested to know in which capacity these guys are employed. I suspect they may be contractors rather than salaried staff, but this is merely conjecture.
Does the Standard mention these council staff by name or even position? If not, how can we be sure that they've actually got it right and not, ahem, misunderstood the situation? I'm not setting myself up to defend the council, BTW, but I am in the embarrassing position of not knowing coucil staff pay levels.
Does anyone have any more info? Are there any council positions that we might actually consider to be worth 100k?
"Who are the 9 Greenwich council staff, reported in the Standard this week, as earning 100,000+ a year. What do they do for us each day to justify this money."
This is possibly more a question for another website, GreenwichWatch - www.greenwichwatch.blogspot.com - than me. Annoyingly I didn't see the Standard article so I don't know the context but I'd certainly be interested to know in which capacity these guys are employed. I suspect they may be contractors rather than salaried staff, but this is merely conjecture.
Does the Standard mention these council staff by name or even position? If not, how can we be sure that they've actually got it right and not, ahem, misunderstood the situation? I'm not setting myself up to defend the council, BTW, but I am in the embarrassing position of not knowing coucil staff pay levels.
Does anyone have any more info? Are there any council positions that we might actually consider to be worth 100k?
posted by The Greenwich Phantom at
09:28
5 Comments:
The full list, which names & shames, is available at the Taxpayers' Alliance (PDF file).
I have my own views on this, but I won't sully your charming blog with my vitriol. Perhaps I'll wait for GreenwichWatch to pick up the story before I vent my spleen.
No - really - vent away...vitriol good.
Thanks for the link. It's in very annoying PDF format but illuminating all the same.
I wonder if they're working on the "pay peanuts; get monkeys" ticket? Are these people actually good at their jobs?
I would certainly impound the pay of whoever commissioned the outside "expert" to sort out the roads in East Greenwich last year, who spent god-knows-how-much to come up with a plan the locals hated and that even the people at the council road-planning coalface threw out on the grounds of it being totally unworkable.
Now THAT's where I see money being wasted.
Is the Director of Education good at his job? Well... Greenwich's schools are universally recognised as amongst the country's worst.
Is the Director of Strategic Planning good at her job? Wretched, random, out-of-place developments springing up all over the place; appeals being taken to the Planning Inspectorate because the Council were too slow in replying to the original application.
Is the Director of Culture & Community good at their job? Er... not entirely sure what they do, to be perfectly honest. Oh, here goes... looks like they're happy to take credit for Jamie Oliver's school dinner initiative which wouldn't even have started had it not been for Mr Oliver's fat-tongued genius. But I can tell you from my involvement in schools finance that the council hasn't put up the money to pay for it so it's been paid for out of the existing schools' budgets by making cuts elsewhere.
Is the Director of Finance good at his job? If he were, perhaps I wouldn't have to complain about the permanent inscrutability of our Council Tax booklets and the Council's financial statements. And I'm a chartered accountant, God only knows what lesser mortals make of them.
Is the Director of Human Resources & Organisational Improvement good at his job? Not if you judge him on council workers' sickness records.
I could go on... these are not of the calibre of listed company directors. A company with a turnover of £1 billion (which would place it somewhere in the middle of the FTSE-350) would have a total executive wage bill of the same size as Greenwich Council, which spends approaching £1 billion a year. But the listed company has to compete in the economy for its business. If it fails, it doesn't make a profit, the share price falls, the investors lose out, the directors get sacked. If our council fails, they just put up our council tax for the following year. This graph demonstrates just how much councils nationwide have failed.
Listed company directors are responsible for setting their strategy and for explaining it to shareholders. If the strategy fails, the company may be bought out by a more successful company. Our council just does what it's told to by central government. Even worse, it is entirely dependent on central handouts for its ongoing funding. These handouts tend to be politically motivated.
These staff simply aren't equivalent to listed company directors. They're little more than glorified administrators, doing what central government tells them. Their record speaks for itself... they're really not very good at their jobs. Unfortunately there's absolutely nothing we can do about it. With a public company, directors must stand for renomination by shareholder vote every year. We don't get that right with the council's directors.
Hmm - so don't pay peanuts; still get monkeys.
I wonder how this comes about and when it started or whether it was ever so.
Are they merely inept - or knowingly so?
I throw this out to the wind. I suspect I already know the answer.
I would like to say that i have just discovered this site, and what a brilliant idea. Rather than give the council or other self interested 'action groups/ societies an exclusive voice, it provides a platform for everyone to share ideas as to how we all want greenwich to be. I would like to draw everyones attention to a matter concerning the millenium celebrations and preparsations as they were in 1999/2000. The site of my attention is the area just outside Greenwich BR statio, the junction of Greenwich South street, and the High road. There was at this site, a triangle or old 'village green', which had probabley been there since the building of the Queen Elizabeth ? almhouses in the early 19th century, and the row of mid georgian houses, (now shops), on South street. This green was wiped out by the council in the preparation for the 2000 celebrations to provide traffic control which they did by tarmaccing the entire site and planting a series of traffic signals. As it turned out , the surge of traffic on the day did not materialise , and the entire operation proved entirely surplus to requirements. At the time, the council said thst they would re-instate the green, but so far nothing. Any enquireies I have made are just greeted with the ususal fob off, ie, 'the person you need to speak to', 'there are no plan'... etc. I hav raised this matter with the Greenwich society, of which I am a member, but have not even had the courtesy of a reply. Does anyone out there have any idea about this. I would be very grateful to know, as I seems that the planners are determined to turn this end of Greenwich into a faceless urban centre.
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