Fancy that! Bristol City Council is predictably sitting on its hands doing nowt to support their own bin men asking for less than twenty quid a week extra in their pay packets to help feed their families during a recession.
Idle Lib Dem leader, Barbara “Call me Ma’am” Janke, even went on BBC radio this morning to explain she hasn’t even bothered to get properly briefed about the strike and was doing nothing whatsoever about it.
Instead she’s bravely leaving everything for her officers to sort out. Presumably on the basis there’s nothing in it for any of her rich friends so why bother?
What an outstanding leader.
But meanwhile the council have managed to find plenty of spare cash for yet another inflation-busting pay rise for yet another senior officer who has done nothing for the city.
It seems the council’s Human Resources Committee agreed, in secret obviously, on Friday that a post – the grammatically challenged, ‘Service Director Transport’ – deserves what they call a “market supplement” – or a whopping pay rise to you and me – “in order to secure the appointment of the best person for the job”.
Since the decision was conveniently taken in secret, we don’t know how much this “market supplement” is, but rest assured it will be somewhere between £10-20k a year over and above the £80-100k a year the post already pays.
This idea that we, the council taxpayer, should pay alleged private sector “market” rates for an underachieving, unsackable career bureaucrat is patently absurd and is yet another example of the council’s senior management team fleecing the council taxpayer and looting the public purse with the total acquiescence of the city’s politicians.
Why are our politicians only too happy to give all-party support to these puzzling and unnecessary pay rises while turning their backs on the low-paid?
Especially when the simple fact is that this transport bureaucrat will make very little difference to anything. There’s two things that need to happen in the city as far as transport is concerned: (1) The First Bus monopoly needs to be challenged and dismantled and (2) we need to attract huge sums of investment.
These are not management problems. They are political problems that quite simply will not be solved by paying a manager any amount of money. They will be solved by decent politicians. Something this city patently lacks.
This latest pointless management job, we also learn, will be recruited using specialist (ie. expensive) CONsultant headhunting firms, who also seem to have been the prime movers behind the demand for this “market supplement” after they apparently failed to headhunt anyone suitable at the standard (already excessive) pay rate.
But rest assured they got a fat fee for failing anyway and no doubt will receive another increased one for this latest recruitment scam.
We’re being ripped off blind.
What we need is complete breakdowns of all council spending and salaries, line by line, online. They do it some American states, why not here. Thus removing the hiding places where the chislers squirrel the money.
“These are not management problems. They are political problems that quite simply will not be solved by paying a manager any amount of money. They will be solved by decent politicians. Something this city patently lacks.”
Nail square on the head there, BB.
Funny how the recession isn’t apparently re-adjusting the executive expectations downward, innit?
“Under thatcher, Tebbit & Lord Young, the only way to make the poor work harder is to pay them less, but the only way to make the rich work harder is to pay them more.”
Rodney Bickerstaff, back in the day.
What does a Service Director Transport do? Out here in North Somerset, I’ve been told that the transport service companies (including the lovely FirstBus) can do pretty much whatever they like – including blatently ignoring their timetables and tailgating competing companies along identical routes – and there’s not a damn thing councils can do about it.
Nulabour have put out a leaflet in Easton on the subject – no that it tells us what they would do!
Can you get us a copy?
I couldn’t agree more.
Why even have a ‘Service Director Transport’ in Bristol?
It’s almost as laughable as Bolivia having a Navy.
Whilst we’re on the subject, it has gone remarkably quiet on the transport front in our fair city. It looks like the good Dr Rogers is doing the sensible thing – keeping his head down and not saying a word.
I just can’t believe that we’ve had 12 years of Labour and Bristol’s public transport has actually got worse. I had such high hopes back in 1997……….(sigh)
“… such high hopes back in 1997……….(sigh)”
Don’t get fooled again?