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Chief executive Moira Gibb, whose £185,000 salary can be boosted by a bonus |
Peeping through the audit window – it’s a sight for sore council taxpayers
A recession, but top 25 bosses still pocketing fat bonuses • Nearly £100k in payouts for errors • Thousands shelled out on their own parking fines
SECRET details of spending at the Town Hall on everything from parking fines incurred by the council’s own staff to meaty bonuses for high-earners have been uncovered by a New Journal investigation.
Using the little known powers of the 1998 Audit Commission Act, we have accessed a series of previously confidential documents which show how the council has handled its finances during 12 months of economic turbulence.
They show that despite the tough times, the council has been able to find money to reward its top earners with incentives and to pay out for scores of parking fines slapped on their own vehicles.
Documents seen by the New Journal show:
* Highly-paid senior staff have together been treated to more than £170,000 in incentives.
* Camden has spent nearly £2million on severance payments in order to sack people.
* Council staff racked up £15,000 in parking tickets while on work business – effectively £300 a week spent.
*£80,000 was spent on hiring an interim manager who ran the rule over changes in the parking department for little more than six months.
* Compensation pay-outs to members of the public who have suffered as a result of council errors total nearly £100,000.
The details of financial matters are normally locked away in the accounts department but once a year Camden Council is obliged to let people inspect the paperwork during a month-long window.
This requirement under the Audit Commission Act is rarely used by the public, however, and even many of the council’s own officers are unaware of how the “audit window” works.
Other requests for information are still being prepared for the New Journal but the initial figures have already stoked a political debate – especially over the thorny issue of staff bonuses.
The Town Hall was yesterday (Wednesday) defending the use of bonuses to staff, some of whom already take home six figure salaries, insisting that the policy has been in place for several years. The top earner is Moira Gibb, the chief executive.
Critics say that the bonus system, set up during healthier economic times, is hardly appropriate in the current climate.
Officials were yesterday (Wednesday) insisting that bonuses to public servants were fair in the context of running a large London authority.
Nevertheless, the sharp contrast of pay and income at the Town Hall is open for all to see.
Chief officers earning anything up to £199,000 before any bonus is paid can on any day share a lift at the council’s headquarters with a contract cleaner whose pay does not even hit £7.45 an hour, that’s the Mayor of London’s suggested minimum pay for people working in London.
Labour councillor Theo Blackwell said: “The council now seem utterly confused on pay policy. They accept that higher wages are useful to attract the best, if they are referring to the leader and the chief executive, but in the same breath claim no link between pay and high performance for the lowest paid.”
Cllr Blackwell is now working on an investigation into poorly-paid council staff. He has challenged the leaders of the administration to set a minimum wage for contractors, but was told at one scrutiny panel meeting that policy would not be “made on the hoof”.
Moira Gibb’s predecessor Steve Bundred, now head of the Audit Commission, wrote an article for The Observer last month in which he suggested that council workers should accept pay freezes.
A gloomy outlook of hard times ahead has been hammered home to staff with regular reminders that budgets may be cut in the near future.
Politicians from all sides have warned of “difficult decisions” for whichever party wins overall power at next year’s boroughwide elections – but yesterday (Wednesday) there was no sign of the bonus system being dismantled.
Liberal Democrat councillor Ralph Scott – the council’s treasurer – said he had not been briefed on who got what under the bonus scheme.
“Clearly in the tough economics, everything needs more scrutiny and we need to be careful with resources but this is one of the ways we reward staff for good performance,” he said. Cllr Scott said it was not a case of paying out bonuses while youth projects and other worthy causes were starved of funding.
He added: “I don’t have the details in front of me but obviously it is done on a case by case basis. It is a way of giving encouragement to staff.”
Conservative leader Councillor Andrew Marshall said that the council would have to “keep an eye” on high salaries and bonus payments if the recession worsened.
But he added: “These payments are built into the salaries so that there is some performance-related element to what they are paid. I think that’s right. Staff are rewarded for the valuable work they do.”
Bonuses £175k to keep the elite officers sweet
A BONUS system operating at the Town Hall is reserved only for the highest earners and has been retained despite Camden’s diminishing resources in the recession, the figures released to the New Journal show.
The breakdown reveals that £174,760 was paid out on top of basic pay last year with many of the performance-related incentives handed out to staff already on six figure salaries.
Among those who qualify for the extra money are chief executive Moira Gibb, whose salary is roughly £185,000 a year, and department directors who can take home £150,000 under the council’s pay scheme.
In total, 25 bonus payments were made to staff in the last year.
The New Journal understands that as part of the bonus system senior management sits down and agrees a series of targets that they need to hit in order to qualify for the extra money.
A council spokeswoman said yesterday (Wednesday) that those who received the bonuses had large responsibilities and therefore deserved to be given extra money.
“Camden demands a lot of its chief officers and we need to attract and retain the best talent in local government,” she said.
“Having an element of pay at risk – for example, if a chief officer under performs no bonus would be paid – helps to ensure we have high performance.”
There are no plans to halt the bonus scheme despite the current downturn.
The spokeswoman added: “The average bonus is normally around 5 per cent of salary to ensure the scheme is measured and appropriate.”
Compensation Housing department leads the field
NEARLY £100,000 has been paid out by the council to members of the public in compensation cases, the audit reports show.
These are payments made when the council is found to have made a mistake so bad that it has had an adverse effect on someone’s life.
The money can cover compensation for problems such as from injuries suffered due to falling over uneven pavements or wrongly billed charges to leaseholders living in ex-council flats.
People affected usually go through the Town Hall’s complaints procedure or can take the council to court.
Figures released to the New Journal confirmed £97, 226 was paid out in the last year.
The most costly department was the housing department which was forced to hand over £64,233.
The children’s, schools and families department paid up £19,410, while the culture and environment department spent just £1,285.
Around £10,000 in payments were ordered in cases decided by the Local Ombudsman
Parking manager He came, he went and he cost around £3,500 per week
COUNCIL chiefs spent £86,432 on bringing in a parking manager who worked for the Town Hall for little more than six months and left amid claims that he had made “errors of judgment”.
Records show that the council handed monthly payments to an agency in order to recruit John Meyer as interim parking manager last year.
“This represents the cost of employing a specialist member of staff at this level of seniority through a recruitment agency, ” a council spokeswoman said.
A typical payment each month was around £14,000 (about £3,500 a week) covering the agency’s fees.
Mr Meyer was brought in to overhaul the parking department amid internal concern at the council that Camden was collecting less money than it expected from parking tickets.
Mr Meyer left the council in December despite expectations that he would stay at least until the summer.
He directed queries about his departure to the Town Hall’s press office. When the New Journal contacted that office, a spokeswoman said in a statement: “During his time with Camden, John has played an important role in the council’s review of the service to make parking more transparent and fair. There were, however, some errors of judgment on his part that we believe were not compatible with the head of service role or the public profile of the post. No further action is necessary.”
Parking fines Robbing £15k off Peter to pay Paul
COUNCIL officials have racked up nearly £15,000 in parking fines over the past year from breaking their own rules of the road.
The breakdown released to the New Journal shows that drivers working for Camden regularly pick up tickets because they do not always observe parking restrictions.
The penalties, which collectively add up to £14,845, are paid for by each department and the Town Hall was eager to play down the astonishing figure by insisting there is no cost to the taxpayer.
Money is pushed from one department to another to ensure the tickets are paid, but it means the only incentive for staff to keep within the rules is that their bosses will have less money to spend in other areas.
Members of the public who fall foul of the same rules do not have the same luxury and the council has been accused in the past of hypocrisy when it comes to its own vehicles.
The revelation of the council’s own cavalier attitude to the rules came just as parking chiefs announced that 20 per cent less tickets were issued in Camden last year.
That suggests that the public are making more of an effort to obey the rules even if council staff are not.
The Town Hall is now investigating the findings after reporters presented officials with the cold hard figures of a spreadsheet detailing all of the council’s parking penalties.
“Camden Council is looking into this matter,” a spokeswoman said.
Severance pay £2m –the price of saying goodbye to 104 staff
THE TOWN Hall has spent almost £2million on getting rid of people, the figures show.
Severance pay has been given to 104 people who have been forced to leave the council workforce because their jobs were phased out in cutbacks.
Council officials admitted the figure was high because so many long-serving members of staff had lost their jobs and therefore were entitled to bigger sums.
Labour finance spokesman Councillor Theo Blackwell said that reserve savings had been saved up to pay off staff.
“We need greater transparency to see what the benefits are here,” he said.
In total, £1,985,863 was spent – an average of around £20,000 for every worker who lost a job.
The council will not reveal who got what, providing the New Journal only with the total figure. It has shed hundreds of staff since the Liberal Democrat and Conservative coalition was formed in 2006.
A council spokeswoman
said: “In order to make improvements and save money the council sometimes has to make change that result in job losses. Sometimes posts that are deleted are vacant but when people are affected by this they are entitled to redundancy payments. The average payment represents the fact that Camden has many long-serving staff.”
Our parks Rich grazing pastures for a cash cow?
OFFICIALS last night (Wednesday) insisted that the borough’s parks were not being exploited to rake in extra cash.
The Town Hall said that £42,000 collected for renting out sections of its of parks had not troubled the public and were mainly for “community events”.
A ledger of receipts shown to the New Journal show that money has been raised from the temporary hiring out of Argyle Square and Russell Square Gardens. More than half of the income from parks came from Euston Square Gardens.
The council was warned last year that an idea to allow private operators to sponsor parks and open spaces would be unpopular and the suggestion has not been discussed since.
The council’s press office said that there were no incidents in the past year of whole parks being closed off to the public because of private hire. |
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