25 January - The Purpose Generally is to confuse and deceive
There was a meeting of the General Purposes Committee of Bexley council last night
which was graced by five councillors and two members of the public, me included.
It should have been six but councillor Betts was said to have suffered a
puncture en-route. Of a tyre one must hope rather
than something more painful.
The meeting was a notable first which I have been expecting for some time, it
was all over quicker than my bus journey from Belvedere and was adequately
chaired by councillor Geraldene Lucia-Hennis who had dragged herself away from
The Charlotte public house in Crayford.
Only two councillors spoke at all, the ubiquitous Alan Deadman who must be
rushed off his feet almost single handedly representing the Labour opposition.
We really do need some more Labour people on the council to balance the
workload. Poor Alan had not even found the time to shave.
Also
not looking his best was councillor Colin Campbell who had perhaps tussled with a rush hour motorway
and the A274 from Tenterden.
With hair on end it was easy to see why his next family business is going
to be a barber’s shop.
Colin spoke with pride about Bexley being the only London borough that was going to
phase in the introduction of Council Tax to those on benefits. A considerate Tory who
knocks you to the ground with kid gloves. It’s better than the other sort.
John Peters, the Deputy Director of Finance provided a couple of figures. He
was anticipating collecting 98·1% of the Council Tax due in the coming year but
admitted the large number of changes to the system made it no more
than his very best guess. More interesting was his warning about the number of
appeals in the pipeline. The total business rates due each year in Bexley is £174 million
but the appeals if all successful and paid out at once, backdated and with
interest added, would cost £143 million. It’s just as well the appeals office
operates inefficiently at a snail’s pace and is years behind with its work.
Donna Sexton who works for Nick Hollier
in Human Resources rather feebly put forward her fantasy that the ratio between the
Chief Executive’s monstrous bullion raid and the lowest earnings in the council had improved from 10:1 to 9:1.
As no one’s pay has changed this year and the lowest pay package is unlikely to be
above £25,000 a year you would be right to smell a rat. The clever fiddle to achieve a nice result was
explained last year.
Basically they average the pay of the lower paid staff and compare
that with those on gold plated salaries. If the ratio has got better but pay
rates haven’t changed there can be only one reason. They have sacked more
workers than bosses. Councillor Deadman was the only man to spot this was a
fiddle and the only one to have his disapproval put on the record yesterday.
A year ago Bexley council said this…
The Council will publish information relating to remuneration
of senior executives in accordance with the [2011 Localism] Act. In addition it
will publish information on salaries for employees with salaries over £58,200 in
accordance with the Code of Recommended Practice for Local Authorities on Data
Transparency. This information will be published by name unless individuals
refuse consent. Officers falling within the scope of the £58,200 salary scale
will be encouraged to give consent for their names to be published for the
purposes of openness and transparency.
…but they didn’t do it. Ms. Sexton said so last night and now they are
downgrading the promise to this…
Readers who don’t wish to pursue the details of the council’s fiddled figures
should stop here. Nick Dowling who is better with things financial than I am has
delved a little further into the Accounts.
The pay ratio is a totally made up number based on the salary of notional full time
equivalent posts across 27 salary bands and those whose grade has been established
using nationally agreed schemes – whatever the second part of that means. So
part time workers are counted as full time employees for the basis of this particular
exercise in pointlessness. It is an exercise designed to keep the ratio as low as possible.
These made up salaries are then put in order from lowest to highest and the
middle one selected - the council laughingly claims - so this can be held up to
be the median salary package at Bexley.
This undoubtedly hypothetical number is then divided into the salary of Will Tuckley to
give us the meaningless ratio of 1:9. All to make the council’s pay package multiple in
some way clearer to the residents of the Borough.
It reveals nothing and is totally fatuous of the council to claim otherwise!
Why not be honest and quote the salary of the lowest paid permanent
member of staff and divide that amount by Will Tuckley’s salary package
and then residents would have a meaningful pay multiple from the lowest paid
in the organisation to the highest. Instead Bexley Council proffers
a feeble double crossing fudge.
The number of staff earning more than £50k. has fallen from 81 to 80 in the past year,
however the council is adamant, and repeated it last night, that the pay ratio, [supposedly]
demonstrating the relationship between the highest paid and the median salary package,
is reduced to 1:9. (1:10 last year.) They are at pains to assure us it has nothing to do with
increases in pay but caused by changes in staff numbers. Council code for redundancies.
The staff numbers at the top have barely changed, (81 to 80) but Page 66 of the accounts shows
that 143 staff were made redundant or agreed to leave - at the cost of a mere £2 million
or so – clearly almost all of these were in the middle or lower salary scale range.
As we have established that more middle or lower paid employees have
gone from the council staff list than at the higher end it has the effect of moving
any middle value in the ordered list of notional salaries toward the higher
amounts and thereby reducing the meaningless pay ratio.
The fact that the pay ratio can reduce whilst the council admits it has done
nothing to change pay is a damning indictment of the value of this pathetic
figure. Is it not fascinating what you can do with made up numbers?
The foregoing is slightly shortened version of Nick’s submission. His sources were
Key requirements of Localism Act and
2011/12 Accounts - page 63 in particular. I would disagree with
Nick that it is an “exercise in pointlessness”. The whole point is to deceive
the electorate and if only the bloggers they wanted to have arrested would shut
up they might get away with it totally. And “why not be honest” is a question
everyone must have asked of Bexley council at one time or another.