Express Mortgages Express Loans Bingo Lose Weight Franchising Dating Shopping Book Shop Find Spare Parts Cut Your Bills Wine Shop Legal Store FlatShare Cruises

HAVE YOUR SAY

SHOULD TOWN HALL FAT CATS GET A BIG PAY CUT?

Eric Pickles believes a good chief exec can turn a failing council around

Friday March 28,2008

Comment Speech Bubble Have your say(19)

COUNCILS are squandering millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on bloated salaries for an army of town hall bureaucrats, it emerged yesterday.

More than 800 local officials now enjoy salaries and perks worth over £100,000 a year. That represents a 27 per cent increase over the previous year’s figure.

The extent of the gravy-train was revealed as it was confirmed yesterday that average council tax rises will be an inflation-busting four per cent this year.

The six best-paid town hall commissars earn annual packages worth more than £200,000 a year, an astonishing report makes clear. Altogether 14 chief executives earn more than the Prime Minister’s annual salary of £188,000.

Do the salaries of town hall fat cats represent the service in your borough?

Are you outraged by their salaries or do you feel they earn their money?

HAVE YOUR SAY NOW!

SHOULD TOWN HALL FAT CATS GET A BIG PAY CUT?

07.04.08, 10:18pm

Judjing by the picture it seems he was trianed by
prescot, eat as much as you can before the money runs out. Looking at some of the adverts
in the papers £100, 000 plus room for improvement, no qualifications needed, why are these jobs not offered to the pensioners that can't pay the council tax, save them a JAIL
SENTANCE.Let these over bloated councilers
look the old and frail in the eyes.These positions are not advertised for you or me but have already been taken by a relitive or a friend of a friend.Let the councils sort out there own rubish
your time is 315 pound an hour. Let the get thier welly's on, in stead of sitting in a computerised
office with plush carpets tell them to get ST...ED.

• Posted by: mrnewsreader • Report Comment

FAT CATS

06.04.08, 1:08am

I keep hearing same exuse ,to pay the the fat cats huge unjustified sallaries, because thats the only way to attract the right sort of people for the job, sorry wrong, it attracts the wrong sort of people for the job,as they only do it for the money not as a calling, the opposite exuse for paying nurses the lowest wage they can get away with is, they should be doing the job for the calling, {their concience in other words} not for what they can get out of it, anyone aggree with me? PLEASE WRITE.

• Posted by: Nickynoo • Report Comment

FAT CATS

04.04.08, 3:30pm

These fat cats have squandered millions. In Bristol we have been waiting for a light rail system for the past 35 years and still nothing has been done. It doesn't matter who is voted in they all speak with the same tongue, give me a good wage and goodbye. In Munich they put in a underground rail system about 30 years ago and everytime a new town springs up around Munich they are made to install the railway first. What is wrong with our people.

• Posted by: Tip • Report Comment

OHHHHH YESSSSSSSS

01.04.08, 8:43pm

And the after that MPs .... MSPs ..... and anybody else in the public sector who has their nose in the trough...... and believe me there are plenty of them

• Posted by: torres • Report Comment

WHY SINGLE OUT "TOWN HALL FAT CATS"?

30.03.08, 10:51pm

"All town hall fat cats should have a pay cut, but put that to your elected councillors and what they say is they have got to pay these salaries to attract the right people for the job."

This attitude is inevitable, as it is promoted by the New Labour/Tory/Lib Dem consensus to justify their refusal to make private sector millionaires pay fair levels of tax or show any degree of pay restraint.

(For the record, I work for a local council. To call my salary "bloated" would be as ridiculous as calling my pension "gold plated". For the past three years I have had a below-inflation pay rise - i.e. a pay cut - and the Government is proposing to tie us down to another three years of pay cuts.)

• Posted by: AngryOfTuebrook • Report Comment

SNOUTS IN THE TROUGH

30.03.08, 4:22pm

Last year the government announced a £900 increase I support for councils, which may sound a lot but it represents an increase over the previous year of just 1%. At the same time it was made clear that for 2008 rises in council tax were expected to be ‘substantially below 5%.’ Despite the apparently tough language, this was nevertheless tantamount to an invitation to set this year’s increases above the level of official inflation one again and an average rise of 3.9% for 2008 has been the result.

The real scandal however has been that back in 1991 the then Chancellor, Norman Lamont announced that one of the priorities of lifting VAT from 15% to 17.5% in that year was specifically to ease the burden on council taxpayers. Under Gordon Brown’s stewardship of the economy as Chancellor though these funds have been diverted elsewhere, despite huge increases in general taxation and government debt since 1997. This is the real story of the breach of trust where this deeply discredited tax is concerned; senior staff sinking their snouts into the trough is merely adding insult to injury.

• Posted by: figurewizard • Report Comment