If
you were on a salary package in the region of £240,000 a year (source :
The
Taxpayers’ Alliance Rich List) you might expect to have to work hard, shoulder
a lot of responsibility and put in the odd hour here and there without expecting to get paid overtime for it.
But much of Bexley council’s services are contracted out; refuse collection,
street cleaning, parking services, tax collection, road design, all out to
private contractors. So what is left to do? Decide the best way to manage the
council’s money, no, UBS Global Asset Management (UK) Ltd looks after that.
What about having to be the borough’s electoral Returning Officer? That’s a nice
little job reading out the results after an army of counters does the real work.
That’ll fill in a few hours to justify the fat-cattery. Think again.
A little bird whispered to me Chief Executive Will Tuckley will get a nice £8,000 cheque for his
afternoon’s work. Maybe that isn’t exactly right because I tried to find out the going
rate from government websites and they weren’t particularly clear about it. However it seems the
approved fee for this week’s AV Referendum is £2,500 per parliamentary constituency and Bexley has three; so that
works out about right. One interesting thing the Electoral Commission says about
the payment is that Returning Officers don’t have to claim it. I don’t
think I will bother with a Freedom of Information request to find out if Tuckley
is going to because the council’s website admits he always has done in the past. £8,624
for the last European election for example. Looks like my informant was right.
For the record the Bexley AV vote was 14,929 : Yes and 48,630 : No. There were
94 spoiled or otherwise rejected votes.