| Topic: | The real management story | |
| Posted by: | Phil Taylor | |
| Date/Time: | 18/03/11 12:02:00 |
| Cllr Mahfouz, Your £5.5 million figure for management cuts is not one that appears in the budget papers, at least not the ones made public online. The budget papers show that £2.455 million will be saved on management costs next year. That said this number mainly relates to very low level team leaders, assistants, etc. Very little attempt has been made to curtail senior management costs next year. The budget sees very senior management numbers unchanged next year, the top 21 who cost us £2.9 million per annum. At the Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting on 2nd December where we looked at the budget I challenged the council’s chief executive as to why we were seeing immediate 50% cuts in some frontline services whilst management costs were largely unchanged. He explained that only 7 out of 77 service heads (the layer that sits underneath the top 21 referred to above) had so far been put at risk as a result of the current proposals. So that is a 9% cut in service heads. The budget has seen immediate 50% cuts in many frontline services but has left the senior management at the council largely unscathed. The time to make big changes in the senior management team was May 7th last year the day after the election. Labour has let us down badly. |