Daily Express: Town hall gravy train

LEADER COLUMN

DURING the past decade we have seen the birth of a new social phenomenon – the town hall fatcat.

Figures released by the Taxpayers' Alliance in the latest instalment of its excellent campaign to hold local authorities to account for overspending make for shocking reading.

There has been a pay explosion in municipal Britain, with the number of council officials on salaries above £50,000 increasing ninefold.

Pay for these senior pen-pushers is equivalent to nearly 10 per cent of overall council tax revenue. Then there are all those gold-plated pensions to consider.

No wonder council tax has doubled in 10 years, up from £646 to £1,268 for a typical Band D property. And no wonder that council taxpayers such as Walter Staniforth have had enough. "The council tax is supposed to be paying for services but it has nothing to do with services.

They're taking money away from my pension to pay for their retirement, " notes the great-grandfather.

He has hit the nail on the head. These days local authorities contain vast numbers of people who don't deliver core services but spend their time dreaming up ludicrous Left-wing initiatives.

If they were all sacked tomorrow is there a person in the land who would miss them?

Comments

[Michael Hurley]

You comment:If they were all sacked tomorrow is there a person who would miss them? Well,I certainly would not as the whole of Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council is nothing but waste and inefficiency.
Why don`t you start an online poll asking people to vote yes or no to your question and I feel sure that if millions voted they would all vote NO!

[Not a council employee !]

Great idea. Let's sack all head teachers and senior police officers. Nobody would miss them.

[Mark Wallace]

Anonymous,
The crucial thing here is that we are not talking about sacking head teachers or senior police officers. For a start, senior police officers do not appear in any of these figures. Where possible we have also excluded senior teachers, too, but some councils deliberately obscure the figures.

The simple question here is how did councils get by ten years ago on 11% of the senior and middle managers they have now? Do all of the extra staff do jobs essential to service delivery? If so, why are services getting worse?