These are the faces of some of Birmingham city council’s best paid employees.  Jonathon Chew (Assistant Chief Exec), Jacqui Kennedy (Director of Neighbourhoods) and Dawn Baxendale the present Chief Exec.

It was revealed in The Times this week that Birmingham has 28 employees earning more than £100,000 a year, and a significant number who are on more than the Prime Minister.

The Taxpayers Alliance found that more than 600 council workers across the country are on such sums, with the highest paid Chief Exec in the country on £595,077! They have compiled a Town Hall Rich List, and Birmingham sits in 4th place! The Alliance says,

“…the town hall rich list also showcases the executives who have overseen failing departments or received bumper pay-offs after poor performance in the job.”

Thats a fitting description of many of those paid off by Labour-run Birmingham city council. Jacqui Kennedy, one of those on the gross (in every sense of the word) salaries earns in excess of £100,000 a year and will be remembered for her sterling efforts in wasting £6 million of taxpayers money during the bin strike in 2017, whilst Dawn Baxendale was at the same trick again this year, wasting a similar amount on another war on council workers, waged in tandem with the local Labour party who are ideologically hell bent on displaying their anti-worker credentials to the banks, tories and corporate media in the hope they can win the next general election (despite betraying Brexit)!

 

John O’Connell, chief executive of the Taxpayers Alliance, said: “The average council tax bill has gone up by more than £900 over the last 20 years and spending has gone through the roof.

“Disappointingly, many local authorities are now responding to financial reality through further tax rises and reducing services rather than scaling back top pay.

“There are talented people in the public sector who are trying to deliver more for less but the sheer scale of these packages raise serious questions about efficiency and priorities.”

The Local Government Association said: “Senior pay is always decided by democratically elected councillors in an open and transparent way.”

Fall out amongst thieves

Having privatised all that they can get their hands on (nearly), Birmingham city council has been trying to charge private contractors Amey (who they appointed to maintain the roads) the best part of £50 million for a few road bollards.

Neil Jonston reported “The city council has been accused of holding “its own road network hostage” after apparently charging Amey, a highways company, £58,000 a day for a delay in repairing two sets of bollards designed to prevent drivers from swerving around speed bumps.

The council said that the contractor had put road users in danger by taking months to carry out the repairs on a quiet residential street. Amey has not been paid by the council since 2017, when officials withheld monthly payments for work after issuing fines running into millions for delays in repairing bollards, lamp posts and potholes.

The bill for the delay on the bollards in a parking strip on Westwood Road, Witton, has reached £48.5 million according to Amey, after the contractor took a year to carry out the first repair and seven months to fix the second set. The initial penalty was £250 but because the council said the repair should be treated as a category one defect, meaning it was an emergency and posed danger, it doubled every hour.

The council is also said to have billed Amey £12 million for a pothole and £14 million for adding cable ties to three lamp posts, which the council called unnecessary “cosmetics”.”

Only under capitalism could such madness prevail and yet we are led to believe by all the main political voices that such idiocy drives the economy, creates growth and is the sign of a functioning, competitive society. Such drivel could only fool the deaf, dumb, blind and wilfully ignorant.

Only a planned economy, a socialist system, can get rid of the burden upon the poor of such ludicrous and wasteful excesses as inflated salaries for failing bureaucrats and multi million pound potholes.

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