No controls over a huge waste of public money

Published: 18 March 2011

• Westminster City Council spends over £50million a year on back-office services, pays two senior officers more than the Prime Minister and employs another 25 staff on salaries of more than £100,000 a year.

Such high salaries are simply not appropriate at a time of massive cuts in services. At the budget meeting Labour councillors proposed that council staff earning over £100,000 a year should have their pay reduced by five to 10 per cent. Council staff earning more than £150,000 a year should take a 10 per cent pay cut while those on more than £100,000 a year should have a 5 per cent cut. This would save nearly £180,000 a year. This is exactly what Eric Pickles says councils should do. But Westminster Conservatives refused to support this sensible cut.

We would not spend over £3million a year on the council’s press and publicity department. We would scrap the Westminster Reporter and save over £200,000 a year.

We would stop paying nearly £250,000 for senior staff’s private health care. Private health care might be nice to have for some people but Westminster residents cannot afford it.

We would save £2million a year by axing the “Transformation” department. 

Does anyone know what they do?  

Why do we need a “head of transformation and project management” who is paid £128,448 a year?

The council spends over £10.5million a year on temporary staff.

We would preserve the jobs of those hard-to-find specialist temporary staff serving children and adults but we would save at least £7.5million a year by reviewing the rest.

Recently we revealed that the council has paid nearly £4million for 12 temporary staff. 

The most expensive, a temporary project manager has cost £852,600 for 1,421 days’ work. 

There does not seem to be anything very temporary about someone who has worked for the council for over 1,400 working days – over five years!

The highest paid, a temporary “head of regeneration and partnerships”, costs the council £745 a day and has cost £453,446 for the 608 working days that person has worked for the council. 

Again, this temporary member of staff has been with the council for over two years. This is truly the finances of the madhouse.

Westminster residents are entitled to know how such decisions are taken and by whom. 

There is no control, no scrutiny and no one is prepared to take any responsibility for this huge waste of public money. Labour councillors would not tolerate such waste. We would take decisive action and save council taxpayers millions of pounds.

Surely, before we take away vital services to those in need the council should look at every single pound it spends to see if that spending is really necessary. This has certainly not been done by the Conservatives. 

CLLR PAUL DIMOLDENBERG
Labour Group Leader