The Bristol Blogger

News begins to filter through about the arrangements for recruiting the council’s new mega-bucks chief executive . . .

And it appears that the remaining chief officer crew – selflessly led by hopeless-case finance chief Carew “spread sheets are for wimps” Reynell – have been very busy putting together their own self-serving and typically farcical recruitment process proposal for councillors on the Human Resources Committee to rubber stamp next Thursday.

The main lesson, it seems, these senior officers have taken from the whole Gurney non-achievement fiasco – where a dodgy old Tory bureaucrat with a dubious track record was parachuted in from the shires on a wage of £150k to “transform” the city council – is that we didn’t pay him enough money!

So their new proposal seems to be to parachute yet another dodgy old Tory bureaucrat with a dubious track record in from the shires to “transform” the city council and pay them a wage of £180k a year instead!

Brilliant. It worked so well last time, we’ll do it all again but spend even more money!

Then of course – despite an apparently large, multi-million pound, state-of-the-art human resources department – there’s absolutely nobody currently employed at the council capable of organising the recruitment process necessary to obtain this new £180k a year joke figure.

Instead the senior officers have already gone ahead – without bothering to consult anybody elected – and employed a company of corporate ‘headhunters’ – Rockpools – on a retainer of £70k to run their new recruitment process for them.

These huge and largely pointless recruitment costs, combined with the proposed increase in wages for the new chief exec, are currently being calculated as costing us, the taxpayer, over £36k EXTRA a year!!!

However you can expect costs to rise considerably further than this when the tier of officers below this new Chief Exec – including Reynell and the chief officer crew who have devised this absurd scheme – start demanding pay rises to maintain a fair “pay differential” with their new boss.

How long, then, will we have to wait before we see across-the-board 20% pay rises for the rest of Bristol’s senior management team?

This bollocks is of course happening while ordinary council workers are being offered a pay cut in real terms this year and many other low-paid council workers find their shift allowances and overtime payments being ruthlessly cut. All of this courtesy of the very same Human Resources Committee that’s going to dish out these fat cat executive no-strings pay packages to people with substantial track records of stupidity, incompetence and failure.

Meanwhile the ultra expensive head-hunters, Rockpool, have already been beavering away working on a job description for our new Chief Exec. It’s full of all the usual meaningless local government waffle, buzz words and jargon that’s not really worth the effort of boring people here with. This new boss will:

Proactively support the Leader and Cabinet in the formulation of customer focussed and deliverable objectives, values and strategic policies

Provide inspiring leadership to the City Council, promoting a customer-focused, high performance and accountable culture

Ensure the City Council’s capacity and in particular its structure is ‘fit for purpose’

Blah, fucking, blah, fucking blah, blah, blah.

However the one thing not required by Rockpools of this new bureaucrat is any local knowledge whatsoever. Which kind of gives the game away about what they’re really after and why they’re prepared to pay so much money.

The reality is it’s all about getting some self-interested bastard of an identikit bureaucrat to run an indentikit authority working to an identikit central government diktat to produce an identikit city.
And let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to run dual carriageways through neighbourhoods you’ve never heard of and don’t care about; it’s a lot easier to turn a blind eye to failing schools when you don’t where they are; it’s a lot easier to run-down services for people you’ve never met nor are ever likely to meet; it’s a lot easier to build on “low quality green space” you’ve never been to; it’s a lot easier to shrug your shoulders at a public transport system you’ve never used and will never have to use; it’s a lot easier to take a zero tolerance attitude to people you’ll never meet and it’s a lot easier to demolish buildings and history when you are ignorant of it all anyway.

The pair of councillors from the council’s Human Resources Committee who’ll be personally responsible for agreeing to this nonsense on Thursday are the supposed firebrand trade unionists John Bees and Steve Comer.

So sit back, take it easy and watch this pair of gormless cunts unquestioningly hand over £180k a year to some undeserving bullshit artist while their own supposed rank and file trade unionist comrades at the council continue to get right-royally shafted.

As for the rest of us . . . Well we have no say at all.