A rural district council’s decision to award five of the country’s top ten bonuses for council workers to a group of five senior staff whose exit payments totalled about £1m has been defended.
After the Taxpayers Alliance published its 2023 Town Hall Rich List, former deputy leader of Hambleton District Council, Councillor Peter Wilkinson, said the collective £86,421 bonus paid to officers had reflected their contractual entitlement.
The table giving figures for the 2021-22 financial year shows Hambleton’s chief executive received the country’s second highest council officer bonus – £26,535, whose £132,676 salary was found to be the highest for a second tier council officer in North Yorkshire.
The table come a year after the district council again defended paying its chief executive and four senior officers a total of nearly £90,000 in performance-related pay in 2020-2021.
Amid controversial claims senior officers might find it difficult to secure jobs after Hambleton was abolished in March, the outgoing authority voted to hand four of its directors a total of £770,000 in exit payments as well as a £225,000 exit payment to its chief executive Justin Ives.
In November, the authority’s leader said claims by infuriated union bosses that likened the move to a “boy’s club” were unfounded.
However, ahead of Hambleton being abolished, South Derbyshire District Council announced Dr Ives would start as its chief executive on a salary of about £131,000 from May 2.
In addition, it is believed by continuing to employ all the senior management from the districts the new unitary authority has already racked up about £3.5m of annual savings.
While Hambleton council partly justified the level of exit payments to its senior officers by citing future job prospects uncertainty, it is believed North Yorkshire Council is considering redundancy for a total of three senior officers from all the district and borough councils, and only at some point in the future.
Coun Wilkinson, who also oversaw Hambleton’s finances, said the bonus paid to officers had reflected their contractual entitlement.
He said targets set each of the directors had been assessed under key performance indicators which showed they had all achieved “outstanding service to our community”.
The Romanby division member said schemes the directors oversaw had included the construction and launch of a new crematorium and the delivery of the Treadmills development on the former Northallerton prison site as well as bringing in £20m of grants and projects over a five-year period.
Coun Wilkinson said while councillors had reviewed the chief executive’s performance, the chief executive had reviewed the performance of senior officers.
He added: “We always believed in rewarding for the successful delivery of services and projects. We were successful and paid accordingly.”
North Yorkshire Council’s finance boss Councillor Gareth Dadd said the authority did not pay bonuses to senior management and that each had “an open and transparent salary as agreed by full council” for each senior post.
Regarding Hambleton’s pay arrangements, Coun Dadd, said: “It’s not something I personally would be advocating.
“I don’t like the market place we are in, but we are in a market place and I don’t think there’s any justification for paying somebody a bonus for fulfilling a role which they are handsomely recompensed for.”
Opposition leader at North Yorkshire Council, Councillor Bryn Griffiths said he would not wish to see Hambleton’s bonus system for officers replicated at the unitary authority and taxpayers money spent by Hambleton on bonuses could have been spent on urgent projects, such as replacing dangerous cobbles.
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