Last Sunday Kathy Pollard and Caroline Page published an attack on Hill in the Mail on Sunday:
Look at us here in Suffolk. Last year, nearly half of our workers earned £17,000 or less.Hill has long been a favourite target of Private Eye and is emerging as the tabloid press's poster girl for overpaid council officials.
Yet they are represented by a few people who think nothing of spending £122,000 on ‘consultancy’, £500,000 on gagging orders for ex-employees, £750,000 to set up friendship groups in a county where friendship groups proliferate for free – and where the chief executive is paid £70,000 more than the Prime Minister.
There may be an element of unfairness in this, but you have to admit that, as quoted by the Mail on Sunday yesterday, she dug a very deep hole for herself when replying in a newsletter for council staff:
People who are successful at work should be held up as role models to help our young people in Suffolk aspire to success. But it seems that some would prefer to engage in the politics of envy.
I would like to see waste of money in LAs being turned round as a deduction from senior officers' salaries, right up to the Chief Exec. Latest near me is to designate, without any consultation with residents or Councillors, a so-called "quiet residential street" as a cycle route when it is variously a race track and a cut through, has (because of parked vehicles)an available carriageway width of just a tiny bit more than the width of a pickup truck based on a Transit chassis, has blind corners at top and bottom round which drivers speed as if they are in the Grand Prix, and extremely poor lighting. As one cyclist said to me, the last thing that a cyclist wants is a surprise when you cannot get out of the way.
ReplyDeleteAnd these are the people who are closing Belstead House at Ipswich, a delightful an popular adult residential college and conference centre in a historic building.
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