10% Bonus For Doing Your Job . . and just £170,000 if You Don’t Last week, I took my car into the local tyre fitters and asked them to replace the two front tyres. The lad who did the work seemed nice enough and I assume that for his efforts he is paid the going rate for the job that he does. I assume the method of payment is a simple one which transfers his wage into a bank account each week or each month. Now if my friend the tyre fitter was paid on the same lines as the seven directors of the local North Tees and Hartlepool Hospital Trust then things would be quite different. Yes he would receive his money regularly into his bank account; in fact he would receive the same amount as he would have done otherwise; the difference is that if after a fixed length of time, none of the tyres that he had fitted had fallen off, including mine, then he would then receive an extra 10% bonus for doing his job successfully. Directors at the trust receive their salary in full whether or not they achieve their targets but then receive an extra 10% if they do. In all, seven executives at the trust are paid between £110,000 and £135,000 while the Chief Executive, Alan Foster, is paid somewhere between £170,000 and £175,000. The trust, which, at least for the moment,  runs both the University Hospital of Hartlepool and North Tees Hospital, claims the bonus package is aimed at ensuring that salary and rates of pay are attractive, competitive and in line with trusts of a similar size and complexity. They would also appear to be designed to ensure that failure is no reason not to be paid an enormous salary. Nurse and support staff received a 2.2% pay increase last year which presumably means they made little or no contribution to the claimed improvement in the Trust’s services. Funny old world. Smoke and Mirrors A Press Release on August 20th by Alistair Rae, the Manager of the Council’s £4m Public Relations Department, has finally announced the appointment of the Council’s two new ‘Super-Directors’. As part of the Council’s Business Transformation Plan, the number of Directors is being reduced from four to two which, allegedly, will save the Council £2m a year (Alistair Rae) or £8m a year (Chief Executive, Paul Walker), depending on which paragraph of the press release you believe. The Press Release was reproduced faithfully, as usual, by the Hartlepool Mail, which failed to mention, as did the Press Release, that the two newly appointed Directors were to receive a 30% pay increase as a result putting them both in the £130,000 per year salary bracket. The £30,000 extra each will receive is the same amount currently under consideration to be withdrawn from Greatham Community Centre Youth Club which gives us a clear indication of where the Administration sees its priorities. In fact, everything has worked out just dandy for the four Directors as the two other Directors, Adrienne Simcock and Peter Scott considered that ‘from a personal perspective, this was the right time for them to retire’, and did not apply for the new jobs. The ‘right time’ indeed, as by astonishing coincidence, both were within a few years of retirement which meant that they were able to add redundancy and severance monies to their retirement plans. The Administration will not release details of their now, very substantial retirement packages to the public but then we have been here before. Just over four years ago, Chief Executive Paul Walker implemented a similar re-organisation of Directors reducing the number from five to four and similarly, this proved to be ‘from a personal perspective, the right time to retire’, for Jeremy Fitt, the then Director of Education. Mr Fitt was reported to have left the Council with a £400,000 retirement package. The ‘up-front’ costs of the Business Transformation Programme, which include redundancy packages, have been given as £3.3m Chief Executive Paul Walker, who recently demanded, but by all accounts was refused, an additional ‘retention payment’ to deter him from taking his organisational skills elsewhere, is now expected to receive a substantial pay increase in order to maintain his salary differential over the two newly appointed, Directors and we have received unsubstantiated reports that this will now put the Chief Executive on £186,000 per year. This will make him one of the highest Chief Executives in the country and marginally ahead of Prime Minister, Gordon Brown who currently receives £185,000. Dave Stubbs, who has been appointed Director of Regeneration and Neighbourhoods, has previously overseen the nine year delay in the construction of the town’s Transport Interchange which has led to a £600,000 increase in costs for a cut-down version of the original plans and the seven year negotiations with Marina Developers, Mandale, to take over the maintenance of the roads and pavements on the Marina which has led to a £550,000 bill having to be picked up by the taxpayer. This gives us some idea of how performance management works at the civic Centre. Mr Stubbs is currently 60 and is already able to take retirement whenever he chooses although he will now, presumably, wait until Mr Walker’s next re-organisation before doing so. What Price A Chief Constable? Cleveland Police have defended handing out pay bonuses amounting to tens of thousands of pounds to its Chief Constable. Sean Price was paid an annual £50,000-a-year retention package, plus a honorarium of £24,000 in the last financial year. The Chief Constable originally joined the force in 2002 on a salary of £105,000 but his payment package then also included a £32,000 car, private medical insurance and the payment of £4,000 a year private school fees. Since 2006, Price has been paid an extra £50,000 per year’ ‘retention package’ allegedly to prevent him being poached by another police authority. In the latest move, the Chief Constable is to be an additional ‘honorarium’ payment of £24,000 per year taking his total salary package to over £200,000. Last year, Mr Price claimed £14,000 in expenses; the highest claim made by any Chief Constable in England and Wales. For 2009 - 10, Cleveland Police increased the police precept by 4.95%; one of the highest increases in England and Wales. Now if all of this is starting to make you a little uneasy then perhaps this would be a good time to ask our three local Councillors who sit on Cleveland Police Authority for their opinion. Did, for example, they approve of the £24,000 ‘honorarium’ payment and in fact - did they vote for it? But there’s a problem. It seems none of our three Councillors; Caroline Barker, Victor Tumilty or Steve Wallace were at the original meeting consisting of the Chairs of the various meetings which decided on the matter. However, they were there at the meeting of the full Police Authority which ratified the decision unanimously. Listening to Cllr Steve Wallace’s support for the decision at the full council meeting of 30th July was a revelation. According to Cllr Wallace, the current Chief Constable is the best thing since sliced bread who has apparently almost reached deity status within the Police Authority. Not only has he single- handedly reduced crime rates by 17% (although he still doesn’t know where the wrought iron fence panels from the Central Estate are) he has turned Cleveland Police around from a very low rating of 43rd out of 43 national police forces. Again, according to Cllr Wallace, that 43rd rating followed a period under the previous Chief Constable Meanwhile, the Labour Chairman of the Police Authority, Dave McLuckie has defended the payments in order to retain Mr Price’s services "I want to make it absolutely clear that we follow the rules in regard to the pensionable salaries paid to all our officers, including the chief constable." mmm . . . ‘we followed the rules’ . . . now, where have I heard that before? all aboard the gravy train contacts       site map       write for us