20 May (Part 2) - AVarice again
My
report on Will Tuckley getting a nice £8,000 bonus for being at the AV
Referendum count was short on detail; so here’s a bit more obtained from
official records for Bexley’s AV referendum.
• 1 Returning Officer - £8,174
• 122 Presiding Officers - £29,738
• 244 Poll Clerks - £35,075
• 12 Supervising Officers - £2,925
• Travel & Subsistence - £14,175
• Training - £23,625
• Accommodation - £60,750
• Equipment - £1,220
• Equipment Transport - £6,100
• Printing ballot papers - £6,883
• Postal voting costs - £62,947
• Polling card cost - £67,038
• Counting costs - £26,326
• Other miscellaneous costs - £14,326
Those Lib Dems certainly cost us a lot of money didn’t they? £359,303 in
total. The pay for ‘junior’ members of the team does not seem excessive, though
if four members of my family who always participate in elections are anything to
go by, they will be council employees who have taken a day’s leave, but why does
a man on a near quarter of a million package need paying to do his job as
Returning Officer? Do you think he took a day’s leave, it’s not as though he is
short of it? Who else do you know who gets more than six weeks paid leave in a
year?
And another thing… If you are being paid to do a day’s work at a reasonable rate
of pay (the Officers and Clerks) why are you able to claim your subsistence and
travel costs?