Thursday 10 December 2009

Directors Share the Pain

In a blow to the usual assumptions that it is only workers on the lower rungs of the ladder who find themselves expendable when times are hard, the 'Post' is reporting that NCC is planning on cutting the number of Corporate Directors from five to four and the number of Directors from 28 to 21.

The Adult Services Department is to be merged with Communities and Culture with Corporate Director Sallyanne Johnson due to take voluntary redundancy. Johnson is the person who thought it was a good idea to place the Welfare Rights service under the control of Lisa Black and her Housing Benefit cronies which in my book makes her a complete shit-for-brains. Not only did that cause me an awful lot of grief personally but it really is the dumbest idea in the history of the public sector. Welfare Rights services spend a considerable amount of time challenging Housing Benefit decisions so need to be kept at arms' length to avoid conflict of interest. This blindingly obvious fact escaped Johnson. A numpty like that won't be missed.

No word as yet as to which Directors are for the chop but please, please Santa make one of them Geoff Hibbert because he's a cunt.

5 comments:

Gordon Brown's Moral Compass Swinger said...

You're wrong in your assessment of Geoff Hibbert.......cunts serve a purpose.

Niles said...

Goodness. I wonder if this might have been what ACOS was doing in secret all those months.

Andy said...

Do ACOS think that Geoff Hibbert is a cunt as well then?

Anonymous said...

I feel like I'm missing out a bit here becasue I don't know who Geoff Hibbert is but he's obviously pretty popular.

What always amazes me in these cost cutting exercises is that all of sudden - apparently - councillors find any number of highly paid directors that they can quite happily manage without. This raises the question of why they have them in the first place and why they didn't get rid of them before. They could then have given us a reduction in council tax or employed some more social workers or bin men.

Andy said...

Hibbert's another of the untouchables, or at least I presume he is bearing in mind his apparent ability to keep a job whilst exhibiting no discernible talent and a tendency to slag anybody and everybody off who isn't him or one of his pet projects. I once heard his style described as 'medallion man management' which seemed to hit the spot quite nicely.

Interestingly he used to be Director of Housing but moved to something called 'workplace strategy' which as far as I could tell involved finding a new office for NCC workers. Now they've settled on Loxley House I presume his work has been done so maybe he will be one of the Director's posts to go.

Strangely, his Director of Workplace Strategy' post was kept within Adult Services whereas it was a cross-cutting role more appropriate to Chief Execs. It did lead me to wonder whether Sallyanne Johnson was one of his protectors and now she's definitely off might be another indicator that his time is up.

Hope so, people like him and Lisa Black are demonstrative of everything that's wrong with the officer side of NCC.