It's always a delight to be present at the question and answer session tagged onto
Mayor, Stuart Drummond's Annual State of the Borough Address. Without the protection
of the normal seven days notice required for questions
submitted at council meetings, one is never quite sure
what anarchal words will come out of Mr Drummond's
mouth. This leads to an atmosphere of tense expectation
not unlike that experienced by Formula One spectators
and so, like those spectators, we too sat there patiently
and waited for the car crash. We weren't to be
disappointed.
Inevitably, several of the questions centred on Mr
Drummond's second job as Police Authority Chairman and
just how he expects to do this without affecting his Mayoral
role. I would say that this is the £64,000 question that
many would like answering but the additional £28,000 he
earns from the Police Authority now puts him in the
£92,000 a year bracket.
With so many people out of work in Hartlepool and a
depressingly large number forced to get by on minimum wage salaries, I think it's fair to
assume that, in return for his £64,000 allowance, most people would expect Mr
Drummond to at least put in a full week's work as Hartlepool's elected Mayor. However,
when asked if he considered his mayoral role to be either a full-time or part-time job the
answer he provided wasn't at all clear.
On the one hand, he claimed the role to be a 24/7 task but in the next breath, he pointed
out that his statutory obligations as Mayor only required him to do three things: hold an
annual debate; attend the Remembrance Service and the council's Civic Church Service.
This, he claimed, only amounted to an average
of three hours a week leaving him plenty of
free time for other things and implying that any
other duties performed as Mayor were a
freebie donated by him out of the goodness of
his heart. The real shock of this revelation was
the discovery that he had actually bothered to
check what his minimum obligation was in
order to legitimately pick up his pay check.
The suggestion that, in the circumstances,
perhaps he should forego part of his Mayoral
allowance, pro-rata, in order to help the
council's present dire financial situation
received equally short shrift.
The idea of someone splitting their time
between two organisations and also splitting
the salary costs is not new within HBC. Only recently, the idea of sharing the Head of HR
with Darlington BC and splitting the salary costs had been put forward as one way to
save money. However, I'm afraid it's a case of 'do as I say; not as I do'. Unlike the idea to
split the HR Manager's salary costs with Darlington, there would be no similar splitting of
costs between HBC and the Police Authority.
"Would you?" he snapped at the questioner, making it clear that he ‘had no intention' of
foregoing any part of his allowance and intended to pick up both allowances in full.
Mr Drummond had held the debate at the Sixth Form College supposedly to encourage
students to get involved in local politics. It was perhaps fortunate that most of the thirty or
so students that attended had left before the Question and Answer session started.
Otherwise, they may have concluded that local politics was all about screwing the
system for all you can get and to hell with what other people think.
An Important Lesson
for Students