Oh, THAT much, possibly...

Some interesting info come through from the 'What do they Know?' site about top NCC bods' pay packets.

Apparently, each year the full Council annual meeting must be provided with a statement of salaries of the Chief Exec and the Corporate Directors, as well as those of any officer receiving more than 65% of the Chief Exec's salary.

So, here is the most recent one. As you can see, JoTo gets £165k and the five Corporate Directors each get £144, 653 per annum. No other figures are given.

This implies therefore that no other NCC officers receive more than 65% of JoTo's salary i.e. £107,250 pa. That's quite a gap between the Corporate Directors' salaries and the next tier down.

So, nobody gets a salary in the range £107,250 - £144,653 then eh? Looking again at the 2008/9 Statement of Accounts i.e. the year previous to that which the above salaries relate to, we find five people in the £140,000 - £149,999 remuneration band which is consistent with the Corporate Directors' salaries above, three people in the £110,000 - £119,999 band and one in the £120,000 - £129,999 band. Where have these four gone?

It seems unlikely that the posts have completely disappeared, nor is there room for them to have moved into higher bands. It's possible that they are representative of severance payments, the table in the SoA does appear to include Michael Frater's.

The other possible explanation is that some posts were left off the list sent to the full Council Annual Meeting. That seems unlikely really.

With more clarity on the senior salaries issue, we also seem to get more mud.

HOW MUCH?

Somebody gave me a wee nudgette about the 2008/9 Statement of Accounts now being up on the NCC website. I'm sure there's lots of buried treasure in there and once I've stocked up on 'will to live' pills I might have a proper rifle through and see what's what.

In the meantime however, can I suggest that you leaf through to page 56 where you will find a breakdown of senior staff salaries in bands.

As context let me remind you that councillors are currently considering a secret review of senior salaries and of course that they not long ago decided that several hundred redundancies were needed to help balance the books (sorry, "support vulnerable people").

So, what's in the box?

Well, the lowest band in the table is for posts with salaries of between £50,000 and £59,999 and we can see that the number of staff within this range has shot up by over 21% between 2007/8 and 2008/9 from 133 to 161. Bear in mind here that the highest nationally negotiated pay scale was £41,204 in 2008/9.

It gets worse (or better, depending on your point of view). The number of senior officers receiving between £80,000 and £89,999 has risen from 12 to 21 and those 'earning' between £140,000 to £149,999 has gone up from 3 to 5.

But here's the big one. In 2007/8 there was one officer in the £190,000 to £199,999 pay band but in 2008/9 this band was empty.

However, a new pay band has been added to the table for the single employee who received somewhere between £240,000 and £249,999 *pause for sharp intake of breath*...

I wonder who it can be? Initial suspicions naturally point to the Chief Executive, Jane Todd but it can't be her because when she was appointed in December 2008 she made a big song and dance about only accepting £165k pa instead of the advertised £185k. And it also appears that she was actually on secondment for most of the year concerned and that apparently isn't included.

Presume it must be Michael Frater's payoff, either that or it was Beryl the cleaner's lucky day...

Management Issues

For the second meeting in a row, the Appointments and Conditions of Service Committee is considering a review of senior salary levels at NCC.

So what can I tell you about their thoughts? Bugger all, pretty much. It's all going on behind closed doors, as decided under Section 100A(4) of the Local Government Act 1972. This provision allows councils to vote to consider an item of business without the public being present if it involves 'exempt information'.

Exempt Information is defined by Schedule 12A of the Act and includes any labour relations matter and this will of course include senior posts. However, there is a proviso in most cases which requires a public interest consideration and discussions should only be kept private if the public interest of doing so outweighs any public interest of it being public.

Interestingly, at the 7 July meeting, the committee was also discussing a report about discretionary compensation which, from context appears to concern the payment of higher than statutory severence payments. However, again I don't know for sure as it's all exempt so the minutes only contain the barest bones of what was discussed. But apparently it was option (d) that won them over...

There appears to be some wider interest in such matters. The Beeb recently reported that the Audit Commission is about to look into the issue of big pay-offs to council Chief Execs, in particular ater a fallout with the political leadership. They don't actually mention Jon Collins and Michael Frater but I reckon that, bearing in mind JoCo's, ah, 'temperament', NCC should be watching this one very carefully, it stands to save us £100ks in the long run.

So, back to my original point. If NCC is conducting a review of senior salaries can they really justify doing it in private? After all, they quite happily disclosed Jane Todd's temporary salary before she got the permanent job. Senior managers accept that there is an element of public scrutiny of how much they get paid. So is this a 'public interest' question or a 'political embarrassment' question? Not that NCC seems to see any difference between the two.

In other news, which doesn't reflect too well on NCC's senior management, the 'Post' is reporting on the last staff survey at NCC. There's a summary here, it doesn't make pretty reading.