Friday 6 December 2013

An expensive and grudging climbdown

The Executive Board of Carmarthenshire County Council has finally backed down in its dispute over the payment of employer pension contributions to the Chief Executive. Minutes of the meeting (here) state:

"Whilst the Board was not prepared, at this stage, to accept that the principle of the policy, aimed at encouraging recruitment and retention of senior officers, was intrinsically unlawful it did accept that there may have been shortcomings in the procedures by which it had been adopted. The Board, not wishing to incur further unnecessary expenditure in this matter, therefore

UNANIMOUSLY RESOLVED

    4.1. without conceding that it is intrinsically unlawful, that the pay supplement policy be withdrawn on procedural grounds."
The matter will now be handed over to one of the Assistant Chief Executives to sort out.

What we don't know is whther the chief executive will now repay the pension contributions, but it is racing certainty that he will not be expected to cough up the untold thousands in legal and other bills which this has cost the council's taxpayers.

What will happen over the disputed libel indemnities awarded to Mr James remains to be seen. 



5 comments:

Anonymous said...

What has HMRC got to say about this, I wonder????

Heads certainly need to roll!!


Anonymous said...

They tell us that they have to offer financial packages such as this, to recruit and retain talented people.

Who says thaey are talented?

Mnay local authority employees could tell you about the waste of money that routinely occurs with the unnecessary duplication of work, or pointless work processes to keep sycophants employed.

What is needed are front line staff who are visible to the public. Those who actually provide a service and not the army of back room bean counters and statisticians who are there to provide pointless information, to boost the image of the corporate management.

Emlyn Uwch Cych said...

@Anon 22.43

How can I apply to be a sycophant, please? I hear the pay is good, but maybe I don't qualify as a Welsh speaker.

Anonymous said...

"without conceding that it is intrinsically unlawful" means it may be unlawful and thus it needs to be resolved. If it isn't, it will happen again elsewhere once our backs are turned. The Auditor and the public need a decision and an acceptance by the council of their wrong-doing if that is the case.

Many councillors are mere time-serving, compliant vote fodder. Some officers it would appear exploit this to line their own pockets. They are slippery and acquisitive demagogues who abhor over-site and criticism and will not hesitate to silence it through the courts if anyone gets too near the truth.

While they scheme to raise their salaries from the high to the obscene, our roads remain potholed and services decline. Shame on them. I spit on their bloated pension pots...

A friend of mine who used to work for the Audit Commission investigating local authority finances said that the further west she went, the worse the councils got. How right she was.

Anonymous said...

Is this just a reflection of the underfunded Dyfed Pension Plan that the rest of us CCC employees rely on to keep us in old age? If the bosses don't want to subscribe, what does it say about our pensions?
Is it really so worthless that we won't attract the best candidates unless we exempt them from our own pension plan?
What is the truth about how and why this was done?