What a relief for us all.
Isn’t it lucky that Bristol City Council employed a new Chief Executive and gave them an inflation busting 30% pay rise just last year?
It’s even luckier that this Chief Exec then spent the last year dishing out similar inflation busting pay rises to her ‘strategic leadership’ team who were already earning six figure salaries.
And we can only cheer and praise the lord that they’ve handed similar pay rises to the next tier of officers down.
Plus what a joy it is that our “frugal”, “no frills” Chief Exec also spent £122,000 on her personal office space so she can pretend she’s working in the West Wing.
And all this before they all noticed they had a £30m ‘black hole’ in the finances and need to save £20m a year through staff cuts.
This means about 800 plus lower paid staff (about 5% of the workforce) will have to be made redundant over the next three years then.
It’s an especially nice touch that the council’s £140k a year Deputy Chief Exec – that copper from Sheffield who doesn’t know where Easton is – thought it’d be a good idea to announce these staff cuts from the front page of the Evening Cancer on Thursday without bothering to tell his staff or trade unions first.
What a nice chap. Isn’t the greedy bastard due a pay rise?
Why do council executives need six figure salaries anyway? Surely this is not performance related or the city would be in a far better state than it is. Oh silly me, maybe it’s so they can plough it back into the local economy through restaurants, entertainment and wot not!
There’s absolutely no evidence that paying 6-figure salaries improves government performance. Here in Bristol Heather Tomlinson and woeful Gurney proved that.
And it’s arguable the new lot are worse! This Deputy Chief Exec, Jon House, is way out of his depth. He’s not a local government manager with a expertise in marketing. He’s a thick copper.
Over the last month he’s launched a “Summer in the City’ advertising campaign with a grammatical error – “Its proper Bristol” apparently – and his website promoting communication jobs at the council had to be pulled (at what cost?) because it was written in pure nonsense:
http://www.jamesbarlow.co.uk/council-wltm-journalist-gsoh-ns
This man is not up to the job. He needs to go. Now.
Sorry to say you are probably wasting your time with this posting – I know first hand that our Chief Executive does not see herself as accountable.
An attitude that flows down to her flunkies.