Your local council’s snouts are deep in the trough of your money

I imagine your local council is having to make cuts – closing libraries and sports facilities, reducing care for the elderly, less frequent rubbish collections and that sort of thing. Well they have to, don’t they? After all, their budgets are being reduced.

But, in spite of their supposedly tight budgets, there seems to be one area where your local councils can spend, spend, spend – their own salaries.

During the Brown boom from 1997 to 2007, the number of people working for local councils being paid over £50,000 a year shot up by a factor of around ten from 3,300 to over 33,000. But in the economy as a whole, it only went up by a factor of three. Brown, as we now know, was hosing our money into the pockets of ever-increasing numbers of useless, pointless, over-paid, over-pensioned bureaucrats while claiming that his financial-incontinence was ‘investing’ for Britain’s future.

Now, you might think that this massive increase in the numbers of bureaucrats and their salaries would have slowed down or even stopped after the 2007/8 financial crash and ensuing recession. If so, you are sadly rather naive. The recession seems to have left Britain’s bureaucrats untouched. In fact, like Britain’s bankers, our bureaucrats have had a rather good recession, especially in our local councils.

In 2007, just before the financial collapse and the recession, there were in the region of 600 people in local councils being paid £100,000 a year or more, 64 on £150,000 a year or more, 5 on £200,000 a year or above and none earning anything near £250,000. Yet by 2013, after years of supposed ‘we’re all in this together’ austerity, there were a more impressive 2,181 on £100,000 or more, 542 on £150,000 a year or more and 34 on £250,000 a year or above (click to see more clearly)

Over the same period, the average remuneration package of the ten highest-paid council executives jumped from about £203,000 a year to above £270,000 a year – a rise of 33 per cent during one of the worst recessions in British history.

So, don’t believe your council’s lies about budget cuts. While your local council slashes services claiming a lack of money, they must be falling off their chairs in laughter as they shove ever more of our money into their own bulging bank accounts.

In your local council, it’s snouts in the trough of our money.