Council Spending Uncovered 4: The Town Hall Rich List 2008

• FULL LIST OF THE 818 COUNCIL EMPLOYEES EARNING OVER £100,000 PUBLISHED
• INDIVIDUAL DETAILS OF NAMES, JOBS AND FULL REMUNERATION PACKAGES FOR SENIOR OFFICIALS AT HUNDREDS OF COUNCILS

Download the full report (PDF, 1.3MB)

The TaxPayers' Alliance presents the second annual Town Hall Rich List, which reveals details of the 818 local authority employees who earn over £100,000 a year from the taxpayer. As well as providing individual data for officials in hundreds of councils across the country, the report reveals:

• 6 people in town halls earn more than £200,000 a year, while 88 earn more than £150,000. 14 earn more than the Prime Minister (£188,849) whilst a staggering 132 earn more than a Cabinet Minister (£137,579).
• The average remuneration received by those on the list is £120,938 - over £2,300 a week.
• Those who appear in both this year's Rich List and last year's enjoyed an average pay rise of 4.6% - more than double the Government's target for public sector wage inflation. The number of people featured on the list has risen from 645 last year to 818 this year - a rise of 27%, showing a boom in high salary executives.
• The top ten earners in local Government and a comprehensive list of 818 other high-earning executives listed by local authority.

Unlike companies in the private sector, and even many other public sector bodies, local authorities do not make executive remuneration details publicly available so TPA researchers compiled the Rich List using Freedom of Information requests to every local authority in the country. A small minority of councils used a series of highly questionable excuses not to release the information - the report also features a "Top Five Ludicrous Excuses" table to name and shame those withholding important information.

Matthew Elliott, Chief Executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said:

“Taxpayers have a right to know how much senior town hall officials are being paid because only then can we judge whether they deserve their remuneration. Too often, council executives are rewarded handsomely even when they fail. Families and pensioners are struggling with the demands of yet another council tax rise, and councils owe it to them to cut back on executive pay hikes.”

Ben Farrugia, Policy Analyst at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said:

“Some local government executives still feel that what they’re paid is not the taxpayer’s business. But with council tax bills now tipping many families over the edge, it is more important than ever that councils are open and transparent about their costs. Council employees must be accountable to the local residents who pay them.”

Comments

[BERNARD MOORE]

It would be interesting if you looked into the top salaries of non government organisations that are fully funded via local authorities, and you will see that for substantialy less responsibility they are not far behind those on this list.

Start with the remaining Connexions companies.

[BERNARD MOORE]

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.

[Kevin Logan]

Here we go again, Local Authority bashing. If the public want quality services then they are going to have to pay for them, either through central taxation or local taxation (Council Tax). If you want top people directing and improving services you have to pay top salaries or else lose these people to private companies. How about comparing salaries with company directors?

[Paul Jacklin]

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!

[Richard Borrie]

If you don't like HBOS you always have the choice to bank somewhere else. If you think your local authority executives are paid too much there is nothing you can do about it.

I am quite happy to pay for quality services - but the best way to ensure quality is free market competition. Local authorities are service monopolies and have no incentive to provide value for money - that is why your council tax bill goes up above the rate of inflation every year.

[elizabeth Midford]

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.

[Paul Hill]

Considering that most Councils have provided the information requested, why don't the TPA open appeal cases with the Information Commissioner's Office to force the rest to do so as it's clear they will have no defence against refusing? i.e. by citing the others as references of availability and affordability of providing the same information at their peers.

[Peter Farley]

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!!!

[George Shanks]

Instead of relying on the FOI legislation to get this information, is it not about time that Councils, and all other public sector bodies, had to produce this information annually by law. We keep hearing about Open Government. Now's the time to put that slogan into action. No more secrecy. Keep up the good work.

[taxpayer #12,346,817]

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.

[Michael Davis]

A Councillor has defended his Chief Executive's salary with the argument that the Council's 'turnover' justifies the salary. This old chestnut! Council spend is not the same as business turnover. True turnover is total sales won in open competition in the market place. Council tax is merely total spend divided by the number of taxpayers, and taxpayers have no choice but to pay or go to prison. Some business!

[Bob Davis]

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.

[Tom Scott]

It is worthless to compare local authority executives with the private sector. All private sector executives have to fight to win their business, their companies do not have government grants and the right to send an inflation busting bill through everyone's door. Local authorities only have to do the easy bit - providing the services - they don't have to find the business. Their executives should be renumerated accordingly. Their is no excuse for private sector levels of pay for only half the job.

[Trevor Welburn]

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.

[Chris Braithwaite]

Firstly, well done the TPA for shining a light into a particularly murky area.
Secondly, the Councils failing or refusing to resond are a disgrace. Every Company Director has to, legally, disclose their remuneration yet tax funded officials think they are exempt.
Thirdly, let's not equate high pay to high performance or justify these salaries on competitive grounds. Most of these Council Officials couldn't move to the private sector because they would be unemployable there.
Lastly, has anyone else noticed a strange correlation? The higher the Chief Exec's salary the higher number of underlings earning £100k+ Take a look at Herts., Northants., Leeds and Manchester.
Snouts in troughs.

[susan herring]

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?

[allan pond]

well done. the whingeing from L.A. aparatchiks is only to be expected and shows they are worried by your excellent attempt to throw some light on the murkey world of the public salariat. Is there any common party thread to those councils that have refused to resp0nd, or are they all shades of the lib/lab/conspiracy against the tax-payer ? I note that newcastle on tynme council has refused to respond. they are run by the liberals who once upon a time claimed to believe in open government-fat chance ! keep up the excellent work.

[Ian Brown]

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!

[lesliebeswick]

I have just heard Mr.K.Thornber, leader of Hampshire County Council defending his pay on BBC Radio Solent. He likened his job to business directors of companies whose turnover is over a £160 million per annum to justify his salary. I really cannot understand just how he can liken his position to business directors, as private business directors are responsible for the turnover & profits of their individual companies, unlike the County Councils, whose income is solely derived from the taxpayer, who has no choice in the amount of money he/she pays for the services given by Councils etc. Should Councils be run on the same basis as a private company, selling their services, they would be bankrupt within a very short space of time, therefore in my opinion, Councils do not earn the income they receive from the taxpayer in the same way as a private business would.

[namu]

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.

[Bigskip]

How about something radical, why don't we judge/pay these 'top people' by what efficiences and savings they make on behalf of their cash strapped ratepayers. All they ever do is bleat from one year to the next about not enough cash. Public bodies are well known for ensuring they blow all their budgets (no matter how small or large), so they can justify an increase year in year out. Do what we non-public funded employees have no choice in doing, budget with less year in year out.

[Simon, Kent]

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.

[namu]

Bigskip said: "Like everyone in the public sector they think they are doing the world a favour just by turning up for work."

What a moronic comment, Bigskip. Just because you don't like paying their wages doesn't mean you should insult the vast majority of public sector workers who aren't overpaid and who are just as likely to put in a fair days work as their private sector counterparts. The council workers and teachers I know are just as dedicated to their work as I was in the private sector.

[John Bull]

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!

[Steve Robson]

Are people who support the taxpayers alliance really as stupid as they appear to be. Council Tax goes up because of ever increasing demands particularly from an ageing population and increasing standards in areas like care, combined with reducing grants from central government. If Council's didn't make the 3% efficiency savings per annum that are required of them (compared to the average annual private sector productivity increase of 2%), Council tax would go up faster or old and disabled people would end up receiving no care or other services would not be provided. To achieve this requires reasonable salaries; not the £20million plus per annum received by people like the head of Barclays, but £100K or so does not seem unreasonable in comparison to salaries in the private sector, which are actually much higher than you people seem to think.

Without decent Managers to deliver savings and effective services, you really will see increases in tax and/or failure. If you're lucky, we'll end up back with the cities a low tax economy delivered in Victorian times; workhouses, cholera and public squalor.

The reality is also not that public sector Managers wouldn't survive in the private sector (Rod Aldridge seems to have done okay), but that those few private sector managers who are prepared to slum it on public sector pay rarely last five minutes. It seems that for most of them dealing with complex politics, a demanding electorate, customers they cannot choose and late evening Committee meetings every week prove too much. Get real!

And could the taxpayers alliance please publish their own salaries. As they appear to have decided that all local authority managers are "failures", Mr Elliott will presumably resign if he fails in his campaign to reduce taxes.

[greg]

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

[Steve Robson]

The details are published in the Accounts, though without names. Judging by the number of mistakes in the information they publish (eg - confusing Hertfordshire and Herefordshire) I suspect the taxpayers alliance researchers aren't quite up to the job of understanding Accounts, public or private sector. I will admit that the TA are good at propaganda and campaigning, but if we had to rely on them for something requiring accuracy, then we'd all be in trouble! If Mr Elliott drove for National Express, you'd presumably end up in Hereford when you got on the bus for Watford.

[Care Provider]

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.

[Bigskip]

I would like to reply to Namu - Bigskip did not say "Like everyone in the public sector they think they are doing the world a favour just by turning up for work." I think you are referring to someone else's comment.

[Simon Degerre]

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.

[Patrick Cunningham]

I have sent a copy of this to my Council Leader, Bradford Council. However, I have not had a response yet.

[susan seaman]

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.

[Bill Foster]

Perhaps it is time to totally rethink local authority taxation. A local sales tax would force councils to compete against their neighbouring authorities. Tax excessively and they will go out of business.