The public should be able to find out easily how much council bosses are paid, Local Government Minister Lesley Griffiths has said.
A recent report by the Wales Audit Office (WAO) found chief executive pay varied from council to council and ranged from £105,000 to £195,000.
Mrs Griffiths told BBC Wales’ Sunday Politics Show: “It’s up to local authorities to have those pay policy statements. It’s absolutely right that they have them. That the public can access them and see how the decisions are being taken.
“They are autonomous employers, local authorities. They set their salaries, they set their pay policies statements and it is right that they do that.
“But because of the concerns that were raised with me… I think it’s right that local authorities can demonstrate how those decisions have been made and that the public have easy access to it – and that’s really important that they are able to see those pay policy statements very easily.”
Caerphilly County Borough Council’s chief executive and deputy chief executive have been charged last month following a police investigation into unlawful pay rises.
Anthony O’Sullivan and Nigel Barnett face charges of misconduct in a public office and are due to appear before Bristol Magistrates’ Court next month.
Even the lower of the quoted figures, £105,000 per annum, is too much for a council administrator. It is high time more realistic salary levels were introduced.
Anything north of £60k is difficult to justify and that's pushing it. £50k seems a reasonable amount.
The reason pay of senior local government officers has risen so perversely and so disproportionately over recent years is simply because local elected Councillors, who hold the statutory role of governance of all matters in their authority, deliberately and purposefully handed the role of setting the pay of senior officers to, senior officers.
This incestuous position was bound to result in dishonest, devious, and self centered senior officers awarding themselves rise after rise year on year, to such an extent that we now get Chief Executives in Wales taking more money from the public purse, individually, than does the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, now, that by any measure is `disproportionate`. The only way to get back to realistic pay levels, which reflect the personal attributes of the incumbent, is to seize back the responsibility for setting the salaries of such individuals by the Local Councillors.
If any local Councillor wants to argue with the above view perhaps they would like to comment on these pages, particularly if they want to suggest they still have control of senior officers pay, in Caerphilly council, that would then pose the question of how the recent pay hike situation and the current criminal prosecutions arose in the first place?, particularly when all we have heard from any local Councillors on that issue was and is " nothing to do with me guv`".
Trefor, Hell will freeze before any councillor will disagree. As you correctly point out there is a little bit of a salary mismatch when an administrator in Caerffili council is paid, and actually believes he deserves, a salary greater than that paid to the Prime Minister of Britain.
Time to 'man up' as our American cousins might say and reduce council salaries to reasonable levels. It is not sustainable, nor desirable, to pay public servants at a level way above their worth. As an aside the EU could also take a look at the salaries paid to its bloated staff, though I hope that we may soon may not belong to that particular club.
Philip Smith says the Assembly should have taken action; I don't trust them either. The solution to this is public pressure, the public are the ones who pay these grossly inflated salaries. We all need to make it clear to our councillors that we have had enough.
In fairness I belive that most borough councillors are as dismayed by this situation as the rest of us. The key to this, and I make no apology for repeating it, is the scrapping of the pay structure for senior officers which was passed last year. Until this is done there will not be a solution to this problem.