Saturday 30 May 2009

The People Need Modernising - At Great Cost

From Lincolnshire: Dramatic rise in council bosses on more than £50K.

This is the bit that gets me (and I've yet to get the info on the Council's staff list):
The amount of officials at Lincolnshire County Council earning salaries of more than £50,000 has surged since 2004 by more than 250 per cent, while those earning over £100,000 has also jumped.
That is from the website and is just a precis of the article, which came out on Thursday and makes the figures clearer:
Figures released by the county council show that in 2004 nobody earned £100,000 and just 56 people were on more than £50,000.
By 2008, eight people were on salaries of £100,000 and 145 were earning in excess of £50,000.'
Forget about that the argument that these figures are not 'sky-high' (they are, especially in Lincolnshire) and just consider the speed with which this increase has happened.

And dispense, too, with that old argument that you need to pay this kind of money to attract the best people. When I look around at both the private and public sectors what I see is too many people being paid too much for a doing a bad job or being average at best.

And to cap it all, the last para in the article is a quote from the 'assistant director of people and modernisation' - Christ above, what is that? And surely it means there's another chief above her, the proper director? Both of them, no doubt, on excellent salaries. Bags of paperwork, I bet, and targets and meetings and reports, and buggerall to show for it.

The other question is, did the council dream this load of bullshit up by themselves or are they reacting to regulations imposed by the EU? These days that's often the case.

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