Labour forces through pay rises for favoured half dozen

Six top members of ‘cash-strapped’ Sefton Council have had their earnings boosted to over £100,000 a year each thanks to Bootle Labour Party bosses.

The Council is now busy recruiting two new highly-paid director positions.

Recent appointee Chief Executive Dwayne Johnson (above right) now earns between £140,000 to £145,000.per year, another ‘executive director’ earns somewhere between £120,000  and £125,000, and two others bring in salaries between £100,000 and £115,000.

New executive director posts for ‘adult social care and health’ and ‘children’s social care and education’ are to be formed with a salary of £116,742 for each role. Prior to being made Chief Executive, Dwayne Johnson covered both adult and children services.

The pay rises have been pushed through by the Bootle-dominate Sefton Labour ‘Cabinet’ in a council which has claimed to have to find cuts of £233 million since 2010 and which is once again planning to raise Council Tax significantly this year.

An unnamed employee of the council, who does not want to be named, said he just had to speak out about these wage hikes for the top cat directors, as the council has suffered both cuts to services and redundancies.

Commenting on the feather-bedding of the top bosses by Labour, he said:

“I feel compelled to speak out about this outrageous restructuring which is seeing six officers take home pay nearly four times more than the national average and at a time when there are cuts to services, redundancies and pay.”

“Then you have the new chief executive himself earning even more than his bloated team.”

“Labour councillors needs to get in the real world. Sefton is not the size of Manchester or Liverpool.  Why do we need such a large executive team being awarded such ridiculous amounts of money?”

In the vote at Bootle Town Hall, Liberal Democrat councillors voted against the pay rises for the ‘chosen few’. Conservative and Labour Councillors supported the top cat pay hikes.

Sefton Council’s senior management team will now be:

Chief Executive
Executive Director Without Portfolio Projects
Executive Director Adults Social Care and Health
Executive Director Children’s Social Care and Education
Executive Director Corporate Resources & Customer Services
Executive Director People
Executive Director Place

A council spokesperson said that Sefton hopes the two new roles will help create “stronger reporting lines” and “allow the chief executive to adopt an appropriate concentration on strategic issues”.