28 January (Part 3) - Localism. They are having a laugh
Eric
Pickles the Local Government minister is always coming out with headline
grabbing ideas but in reality they are little more than sound bites - without the
bite. He always provides a get out clause for corrupt councils to exploit. His
‘over £500 expenditure’ rules are so loose that it is barely worth looking at
Bexley’s list. His suggestion that residents should be able to take cameras to
council meetings has been widely adopted but councils with a history of
secrecy and criminality can ignore it with impunity. His latest wheeze for identifying
earners over £58,200 and keeping the ratio between highest and lowest
earners in check is full of get out clauses too. Bexley council has been busy
seeing how to exploit them.
Their report starts out by saying all the right things. “Councillors are
required to take a greater role in determining pay, ensuring that decisions are
taken by those who are directly accountable to local people” which is a bit of a
farce given that it was a council officer who threw out (almost certainly under
instruction from the council leader) the 2,219 signature ‘salaries’ petition
before councillors had a chance to consider it. It waffles on in similar vein;
“Communities [should] have access to the information they need to determine
whether remuneration, particularly senior remuneration, is appropriate and
commensurate with responsibility.” Please stop giggling, it is not funny. On
their own admission, the salary figures on Bexley’s website are wrong. Did the
council not say the petition examples (taken from the website) were inaccurate? Maybe
they want to have their cake and eat it. Maybe they were lying.
Given Eric Pickles’ wish to see transparency on salaries I had expected to see a
simple comparison of what the Chief Executive earns and what the least rewarded
employee earns but that is not what Bexley is going to give us. Their report is
entirely free of pound signs. It tells us that Bexley has “a single salary scale
consisting of 27 grades” which seems to be an awful lot and it tells us that the
ratio between top and bottom salaries is 10:1. And if you think that looks implausibly
low you would be right. It is not the ratio between Will Tuckley’s two hundred odd
thousand and his chauffeur’s pay cheque, it is the ratio of the average senior officer
pay (everyone down to Deputy Director level) against the average (technically the
median) of everyone else. To simply compare top with bottom would be far too simple, far
too easy to understand, far too revealing of their fat-cattery.
This way it’s impossible to visualise what the true situation is - and Pickles has sanctioned it!
Having neatly wriggled away from publishing anything useful about their lowest
and highest earners how is Bexley council going to avoid providing details for
those earning more than £58,200 as Eric says they should? Easy. It’s not
compulsory. Officers can opt out of all that. Eric Pickles. Fat Minister for Fat Cats.